Is going vegan actually helping battle climate change?

While I agree with you about the complexity of the issue, it doesn't seem fair to compare local meat to imported plants. What about local meat vs local plants? Local plants vs imported meat? Imported meat vs imported plants? By cherry-picking a single one of these combinations, you can make either side look favorable.

The article does say less beef, more local fruit and veg.

Also agriculture in Spain/Italy is not based on slavery.

This is why we need carbon taxes. Instead of having to do hours of research for each item you buy, the environmental impact would be baked into the price.

It would be interesting to see more transparency in the data about the carbon footprint of what we eat. My personal feeling is that plant-based food from across the world has a smaller carbon footprint than local beef, but I haven't seen any data. You may be right. In either case, eating more local food and more plant based food are both good trends.

I want to break down your comment a bit here =)

"A lot of the commonly sold 'vegan' alternatives from the hipster food section in our super markets are produced by big corps and shipped around the world."

You're making a few conjectures here: (1) vegan food is produced by big corps (2) vegan food is "shipped around the world."

On (1): which big corps are you referring to? which vegan food? Have you noticed any broccoli or kale propaganda from these companies? Or maybe some vegan sausage commercials, or oat milk radio ads or.... any vegan food propaganda/ads? Isn't this the characteristic marketing approach for these companies?

On (2) Most vegan meat alternatives are soy based, so it's not as if these products use some rare ingredients that have to be grown in Peru. Side note: 70%-80% of the soy we grow is actually eaten by animals [1] [2],

"I love to waste time in meat areas to find the single most ecological variation I can buy" It's cool that you eat local meat, but regardless of where it comes from, animals have to eat food in order for you to eat them, so this is inherently a less efficient process than just eating the food directly (plus local animals still need to be transported to a slaughterhouse, disemboweled, etc). As for grass fed beef, they are an immensely inefficient use of land and still produce plenty of methane [3].

[1] https://www.usda.gov/sites/default/files/documents/coexisten... [2] https://globalforestatlas.yale.edu/amazon/land-use/soy [3] http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/10/grass-fed-cows-won-t-...

If meat eating is bad for the environment then people should be aware of it. It's patronizing to try and woo people into veganism or something else with "cool" stuff, whatever that is.