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Governments have a hard time making people wear a mask that can save their lives and the one of their families. I can't imagine forcing them to stop eating meat being a solution.

And if you stop eating meat yourself there is absolutely no guarantee that it has any impact at all. If enough people do it they may marginally decrease the demand for meat and lower its price but for this price some people will start eating more meat and the net result is null.

> And if you stop eating meat yourself there is absolutely no guarantee that it has any impact at all. If enough people do it they may marginally decrease the demand for meat and lower its price but for this price some people will start eating more meat and the net result is null.

Can you back this up? It defies logic to me that giving up meat, increasing the market for non-meat products and setting an example to others around to follow doesn't reduce animal farming. Not the best source but:

https://uk.veganuary.com/blog/one-person-going-vegan-wont-ma...

> We can see tangible changes in the farming industry specifically because people are going vegan. In the UK in 2016, sales of fresh meat fell by £328 million, fresh milk by £54 million and cheese by £73 million just in one year! Since then red meat sales have continued to fall. And the UK with its more than half a million vegans is not alone.

> In the US, sales of meat have been declining for a decade, plant-based milk sales are worth $4.2 billion, and thinktank RethinkX predicts that both the beef and dairy industries will be defunct by 2030.

> In Canada, meat consumption has been described as being 'in a decades-long slump' with 38 per cent of Canadians now saying they have reduced their meat consumption.

> In Australia, which is the third-fastest growing vegan market in the world behind China and the United Arab Emirates, sales of dairy are in decline as young people turn their backs on cheese and cows’ milk. Now, 2.5 million Australians are either fully or almost vegetarian. And in Germany, 10 per cent of people are already meatless.

Oh Common, the point is just that any individual reducing their meat intake, will reduce total meat consumption less than the amount that individual consumed.

That's hard to argue against.

One counter argument would be that his/her analysis doesn't take into account any other effects of reducing consumption, such as one's friends and family also reducing consumption as direct consequence.

I don't have any data to back this up but it is possible in theory. If you want a pointer, you can start here : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_elasticity_of_demand

The idea is that if someone able to afford a cow 1000$ does not buy it, then it will be sold to someone willing to to buy it 999$ and who could not afford it before. To have a real impact on the market and the incentives to raise cattle, you'd need a real lot of people to become vegan.

The link you shared is very weak on evidence (there are none) and a decrease in sales can be caused by a lot of factors.

I don't disagree that consumption of meat is reducing, and increasing in other areas, but:

> thinktank RethinkX predicts that both the beef and dairy industries will be defunct by 2030

is hilariously absurd! No way.

Re: Canada

The prime beef ranching lands in Canada have not been forests at least within the last several hundred years, likely longer. Mid- and southern Alberta is largely grass plains

Can't they simply tax the hell out of meat by how much it damages the environment? E.g. beef is taxed very, very high, chicken lower, etc?

It didn't seem to have the desired effects when they taxed the hell out of smoking. While it did discourage smoking, now its yet another tax on the lower class

They "can" do whatever they want but if they do too many things that are universally unpopular the politicians will find themselves out of a job, possibly also with a hole in their head depending on how the specific government handles transfer of power.

They don't have to stop eating meat. It's already good if they eat less. Americans eat nearly 100kg of meat per year per person. That's 30% more than the average EU citizen and twice what the average Chinese or Japanese eats.

There are various ways of making meat more expensive that are relatively easy to sell to the voters. For example requiring higher standards for animal welfare.

> Governments have a hard time making people wear a mask that can save their lives and the one of their families.

That seems like quite an exaggeration for a virus with a survival rate of 99.95% for those under 70 https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.05.13.20101253v...

What ratio of death does justify simple public action?

(You've dismissed doing something easy to reduce the number of people impacted by a disease that you believe kills 1 in 2000 infected by it)

Come visit the forests in Western Kansas where they had to clear-cut thousands of acres for the dairy farms and cattle feedlots. (sarcasm as there's probably an average of less than 100 trees per square mile here).

Dairy farm street view:

https://www.google.com/maps/@39.4449329,-100.8322638,3a,75y,...

You will notice the trees in the above view are clustered around the offices.

Feedlot street view:

https://www.google.com/maps/@39.9084198,-100.5339579,3a,75y,...

This is worth pointing out; a lot of the lands used for grazing simply aren't viable for much else, and thus we couldn't really plant anything else there.

I suspect on average, we will eat less meat in the future, but that we won't get rid of meat totally simply because it's the only way to get food from some areas.

> a lot of the lands used for grazing simply aren't viable for much else, and thus we couldn't really plant anything else there.

Perhaps in the some places, but 80% of deforestation of the Amazon rainforest is for cattle ranching. [0]

Here in New Zealand, European settlers managed to clear 27% of all forest in just 10 years [1], replacing it with farming, which is what it's still used for (especially cattle, these days, and obviously they didn't stop clearing forests at 27%, they kept right on going). This is land described by early European explorers as "immense woods, lofty trees and the finest timber" [2]

Also, land doesn’t have to be productive for business. We could take the cows away from land that’s not viable for other farming and just let the land be. (My guess: given sufficient recovery time we might be surprised at what does grow)

[0] https://wwf.panda.org/knowledge_hub/where_we_work/amazon/ama...

[1] https://www.mfe.govt.nz/publications/environmental-reporting....

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deforestation_in_New_Zealand#:...

Perhaps one day we will let those areas re-grow without interference again, but until we're past the expected peak of 12 billion people on this planet about 100 years from now, we're going to need every calorie we can get hold of to prevent mass starvation, considering we're also going straight into a top-soil crisis, depleting groundwater reserves by massive irrigation, and so forth.

But yeah, I was mainly referring to natural grasslands where the original grazers have been replaced by grazing cattle. De-forested land should be re-forested if it can't be used for anything else.

> we're going to need every calorie we can get hold of to prevent mass starvation

Then we should begin transferring animal agricultural lands to plant agricultural lands because plant agriculture produces more calories per acreage.

Kansas is perfect for growing many legumes, grains, and vegetables. Instead it is largely used to grow beef and dairy.

If you look at the above street views posted, you will see that the area surrounding the farm and feedlot are being used for grain. Also, note that those two operations are about 20 miles apart, with no other large cattle operation between the two (you can follow the street view and see for yourself).

The point is that Kansas is used largely for plant agricultural, and actually isn't wall to wall cattle production.

While I fully support the reduction in consumption of animal products, these figures don't paint the whole picture. In Great Britain, no forests have been cut down for raising livestock. The forest were cut down over thousands of years for fuel and for farming crops. The land that could support trees now is still used for growing crops. Animals roam meadows and uplands that are not suitable for growing crops and live on grass and silage. It's sustainable. In the past pigs were raised in individual households and lived on scraps from the kitchen. Unfortunately this had to stop (it's now an illegal practice) due to disease concerns.

> 83% of the global calorie supply for humans comes from plants vs 18% from meat (i.e. meat is very inefficient)

This isn't the correct statistic to make the point you want to make. If anything this would encourage more meat consumption to balance out the calorie intake. The statistic you really want is something like: "For beef it takes 54 calories of fuel to produce 1 calorie of protein." (Yes, this is also incomplete, meat has fat as well, "fuel" is very broad and vegetables use fuel as well etc., but I don't have time to find the proper stats). Essentially cows are not very efficient at turning sunlight into food.

> In Great Britain, no forests have been cut down for raising livestock. The forest were cut down over thousands of years for fuel and for farming crops. The land that could support trees now is still used for growing crops. Animals roam meadows and uplands that are not suitable for growing crops and live on grass and silage.

What percent of animals does this cover though? This is clearly not true for all cases in the UK e.g.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/may/29/revealed...:

"Research by the Guardian and the Bureau of Investigative Journalism has established that the UK is now home to a number of industrial-scale fattening units with herds of up to 3,000 cattle at a time being held in grassless pens for extended periods rather than being grazed or barn-reared."

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/farm-climate...

Either way, this doesn't contradict that deforestation is happening globally to meet global demand for animal meat.

We can't just change what we eat but also how the food is produced. Nitrogen fertilizers, based on fossil fuels, can not continue being pumped out and causing havoc. The damage to the ocean, drinking water and the large contribution to global warming is not sustainable at current levels.

We are already at the point where 50% of all lakes in Asia, Europe, North America, and South America are eutrophic with decreased biodiversity and toxicity as a result. In addition the Baltic Sea is fast turning into the dead sea, releasing additional greenhouse gases in the process. Global warming also act as an accelerator in combination with eutrophication.

The best direction that we can current go would be to transition diets towards including a significant amount of seaweed and shellfish. Insect farms are also an alternative with low foot print.

> transition diets towards including a significant amount of seaweed and shellfish. Insect farms are also an alternative with low foot print.

Why not just plants? We're destroying the ocean as well and you don't have to resort to insects for protein.

Because plant based farming is unsustainable, harmful to the climate and contributing to global warming. High yield farming uses a lot of fossil fuels, uses up land and water, pumps tons of herbicides and pesticides into the environment, turns lakes and oceans into massive underwater deserts where neither plants or fish can survive, and creates mono-cultures out of bio diversity. Agriculture has it place but it need to be done sustainable and without nitrogen fertilizers.

Seaweed and shellfish farming has one of the lowest production footprint of all foods, don't need herbicides and pesticides, don't need fresh water, and don't need fertilizers produced by fossil fuels, and do not use up high quality land. The only other kind of farming that beats its efficiency in land and CO2 are insect farms.

Shellfish can also be used to clean polluted water, but for health reasons they then can't then be sold as food. The output can however be used as an organic fertilizer, depending on the amount of toxins they have absorbed and additional cleaning process, so there is some potential for an combination between plant crops and shellfish farms.

If 50% of all land was turned into man-made desert we would notice and get worried. That we have already done this to the worlds lakes shows how insanely harmful modern high yield agriculture is. Add that with the massive decline in global insect populations, with 75% loss in 26 years, and we can't just replace one harmful diet with an other.

We don't need to plant trees nor use any new technology because trees come with their own way of reproduction which comes for free with each growing tree! They will spread exponentially via seeds.

If we just let trees spread themselves around instead of championing venture backed startups to use drones or something equally bizarre to do what nature would do if we just sit back we might be able to channel our guilt or desire to control nature into some other area.

If we hardly know what good nutrition is for humans, how can we assume that meat is some ancillary part of our diet?

This dogmatic view to end meat consumption is a horrible mistake, as it’s predicated on us understanding the human body in its entirety. There’s really no studies that investigate with causality a human diet. It would be unethical/expensive to properly study causality. We have epidemiological studies that find correlation, which has been wrong many times (red meat causes cancer, saturated fats are bad, etc). Epidemiology is meant to point towards a correlation for us to separately study causality, instead of these statistics game of conflating the two via attempting to remove confounding variables.

Further, you’re assuming all land that’s currently used for livestock had no prior use. Much of the land was formally used for crops (until the soil was depleted from poor farming practices, injected with nitrogen/fertilizers, then essentially decimated) if the topsoil was nutrient dense.

Deforestation is needed for crops as well, it’s not exclusively done for animal agriculture. Removing all meat sources would still require some amount of land to fill in the caloric gap. You can’t just subtract all livestock land and say you can plant trees, and thus a net gain.

https://theconversation.com/yes-eating-meat-affects-the-envi...

> It is the position of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics that appropriately planned vegetarian, including vegan, diets are healthful, nutritionally adequate, and may provide health benefits for the prevention and treatment of certain diseases. These diets are appropriate for all stages of the life cycle, including pregnancy, lactation, infancy, childhood, adolescence, older adulthood, and for athletes. Plant-based diets are more environmentally sustainable than diets rich in animal products because they use fewer natural resources and are associated with much less environmental damage.

- Position of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics: Vegetarian Diets

The Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics is the largest group of professional nutritionist in the world. People putting doubt that plant-only diets can be healthy are showing the same level of anti-science that climate change deniers are.

The paper goes on to say that having a plant based diet reduces risks of heart disease, type 2 diabetes, and obesity. A vegan diet is one of the most healthy diets an individual can choose when measured by the health outcomes of people that choose the diet.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27886704/

Sorry but you can't infer 'A vegan diet is one of the most healthy diets an individual can choose when measured by the health outcomes of people that choose the diet' from ' It is the position of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics that appropriately planned vegetarian, including vegan, diets are healthful, nutritionally adequate, and may provide health benefits for the prevention and treatment of certain diseases'.

We don't need big studies. Huge swaths of the world are vegetarian. Few cultures are truly vegan, though.

Take your point on proving causality, but there are interesting selections of populations such as 200K health professionals or SDAs living in LA alongside their neighbors, that go a long way to mitigating confounding variables.

Here is a recent (2018) starting point into large (200k, etc.) studies, with various pooled analysis, meta analysis, RCTs, etc.:

This review summarizes the current evidence base examining the associations of plant-based diets with cardiovascular endpoints, and discusses the potential biological mechanisms underlying their health effects, practical recommendations and applications of this research, and directions for future research.

Healthful plant-based diets should be recommended as an environmentally sustainable dietary option for improved cardiovascular health.

The potentially beneficial role of plant-based diets in cardiovascular health has been increasingly recognized, with a vast and accumulating evidence-base documenting their health effects ...

Most recently, based on a comprehensive review of these studies, the Dietary Guidelines for Americans 2015–2020 included a healthy vegetarian-style dietary pattern in its recommendations of dietary patterns that can be adopted for improved health. In the present review, we will provide an overview of the cardiovascular benefits associated with plant-based diets, while discussing the biological pathways potentially involved, as well as clinical applications and public health implications of these findings.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6089671/

See Table 1 for RCTs and Figure 3 for emerging ‘causality’:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6089671/figure/...

Also read up on Blue Zones, and note the notion in this meta analysis of...

... the ”pro-vegetarian diet score”, defined by Martinez-Gonzalez et al. (6) as a diet which positively weighs plant foods while negatively weighing animal foods. They conceptualized such a diet as “a progressive and gentle approach to vegetarianism… that incorporates a range of progressively increasing proportions of plant-derived foods and concomitant reductions in animal-derived foods”...

... then think about the blue zones and balance/moderation and confounding variables in that light. It’s not a eating rice or olives or fishing and herding goats from a walkable village, versus sitting on couch watching TV and driving cars to the strip mall thing. Americans act American, so you can narrow down the causality to a kind of temperance.

https://www.bluezones.com/exploration/loma-linda-california/

Diet breakdown with “ancillary” meat: 10% dairy, 4% meat, 1% fish:

https://www.bluezones.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/303664_...

If we hardly know what good nutrition is for humans,

This isn't particularly true. We have a very solid idea of our nutritional requirements.

For instance, we eat (approximately) kilograms of food every day and know about lots of things where we need about 1 millionth of a kg per day.

There's long term health outcomes (like obesity) that we hope to influence using nutrition, but it's likely enough that Pepsi and Doritos (and so on) are the problem rather than some subtle thing. Those products are designed to by very palatable, and to not be overly satisfying (the producers have long since achieved market saturation and increasing individual consumption is a valuable avenue for growth).

I'm not sure where you get the idea that we have a very solid idea of our nutritional requirements. Every few years milk is bad, then good again, then bed again. Some can be said about eggs or meat or coffee or many other foods.

We do know on a very, very granular level that we need some nutrients in some quantities to function at all. But we have almost zero clue on how to actually optimize our nutrition. And the biggest reason is that there are no studies actually trying to find this out.

In that framing, I'm arguing that there isn't much optimization to be done.

It's appealing to think that we haven't even started of course, but malnourishment has become an economic disease.

Do you have any basis for arguing that there isn't much optimization to be done? Food is one of the largest foreign influences on our body, next to air and radiation. It's a wholly untested field so it's surprising to me to say the least to think that there isn't much to gain there.