good research!
I'm intrigued by the concept of an all beef diet, sounds too good to be true!
I'm intrigued by the concept of an all beef diet, sounds too good to be true!
https://meatrx.com/category/success-stories/
I’m still new to it but the concept is fascinating. Advocates point out that most plants are inedible while most animals are edible. Also, all of the nutrients required by the human body are present in animals, if you eat their organs. There is a small amount of vitamin c in animal meats, but it turns out you only need large amounts of vitamin c if you are metabolizing mostly carbohydrates. Compare this to the heavy supplementation required on a vegan diet, it seems a lot more likely that our bodies are designed to eat animals. There are massive holes in the studies that connect meat with colon cancer and other diseases — it turns out there isn’t a single randomized, controlled study that looks at that.
Yeah, let's all do that and see how many degrees we can tickle out of this whole climate change thing by 2050.
I disagree. A giant environmental disaster is inherent in man's livestock addiction -- even if you disregard the unsustainable emissions that come with it:
> Livestock takes up nearly 80% of global agricultural land, yet produces less than 20% of the world’s supply of calories […] If everyone were to adopt the average diet of the United States, we would need to convert all of our [global] habitable land to agriculture, and we’d still be 38 percent short.
https://ourworldindata.org/agricultural-land-by-global-diets
First, one of the reasons humans consume beef (as well as certain other kinds of meat) is that cows can convert grass to protein, something humans cannot do. So in savannas, eating animals that convert the grass to protein is one of the ways humans make life work at all.
Second, much of the world's beef supply is not grass fed. It is corn fed.
This gets done in part because it makes the beef fattier and thus makes it more profitable. It also makes it less healthy to eat and much more land intensive and wastes the thing that historically made cows valuable to humans.
In a scenario where we raise products like corn -- that the human body can already use for its protein content -- and feed it to cattle to produce beef, yes, that's hugely, hugely wasteful. It's also problematic that we ship so much beef long distances because of the energy costs involved.
If you work on moving towards grass fed beef and local consumption, you begin to dramatically reduce the resources involved in consuming beef.
Additionally, I am not advocating for the entire world to move to a 100 percent beef diet. That's crazy talk on the face of it.
Most religions advocate for a vegetarian or semi-vegetarian diet. Religion tends to contain historic wisdom concerning what works well for humans based on firsthand observation.
But there is plenty of room for the occasional human "carnivore" as well as for some people continuing to eat beef regularly. We don't need to vilify the consumption of meat in order to pursue environmental goals.
If eating beef helps eliminate health issues in some people, then letting those people eat beef is likely to be less resource intensive than insisting they eat a vegetarian diet and take a boatload of drugs.
This is a problem space I've thought about a whole lot. I have a serious medical condition that I control with diet and lifestyle. I wanted to be vegetarian and I tend to eat less meat most of the time than most Americans, but I also sometimes eat beef for medicinal purposes and I eat bacon somewhat regularly because bacon fat is one of the fats I tolerate well. My body misprocesses fats and there is a somewhat long list of plant oils I actively avoid.
I am supposed to be on thousands of dollars of drugs every month even when I'm not actively sick, just as "maintenance," and more when I'm actually sick. If the dollar value of the drugs I'm supposed to be taking is any measure at all of their environmental impact, then eating some meat is vastly less environmental burden than the drugs I am supposed to be on.
No one but you is saying "We should all just eat like carnivores" and you said it sarcastically. That extremist scenario is nothing anyone is genuinely advocating for.
I am all for making it easier and "cooler" for most Americans to eat less meat on average than they currently do. I am also for letting a small number of weirdos peaceably coexist with the rest of us who choose to eat nothing but meat because they find it beneficial to stubborn health issues that doctors don't know how to fix.
The way you lower our aggregate carbon footprint with regards to diet is you make it easier to find good vegetarian options. I don't eat hamburgers. Finding some source of protein at a fast food joint that isn't a fucking hamburger can be challenging.
Fortunately, affordable and convenient vegetarian options are somewhat easier for me to find than they used to be, such as vegetarian pizza and bean burritos. So my life works better than it used to because it's so much easier than it used to be to find something cheap and readily available wherever I go that isn't a fucking hamburger.
Hamburgers tend to be pretty goddamned disgusting, in part because we typically use the lowest quality beef to make them on the theory that we can just grind it up and turn it into a patty and la la la not listening on that detail of "garbage in, garbage out."
There is a reason why transhumance (moving cattle to high places for the summer to eat mountain grass and grow fat on it) has been practised since before civilization. Ötzi, the famous dead from the Tyrolean glacier, was probably a transhumanc-practicing pastoralist, 4000 years ago.
With some simple math, assuming people could eat 500g of meat a day, each person would eat an entire adult cow every ~3 years. So you would need a population of ~2.5 billion cows every year to support this - and that's assuming that there is no waste, that we could consume the entire weight of an adult cow (including bones), and that 500g of meat per day is enough.
In this case we're not in a position to adjust our biology, so maybe lab-grown meat has more benefit than to sate the ethics of those that would otherwise avoid it on the same grounds.
If there isn't a word or phrase for it, we should make one up.
So if someone comes and recommends an all-meat diet as being healthier for almost everyone than the current plant+meat based diet; and someone else points out that it would be an environmental disaster; and you talk about how local farming can mean that meat eating is not necessarily that bad for the environment - then your argument is only relevant if it is still true when a significant proportion of the population follows this new diet. Hence my extrapolation to ~7B people following said recommendation.
To call a diet sustainable or unsustainable, it only makes sense to talk about its impact IF it caught on for a significant proportion of the population for whom it is recommended. There is no unsustainable diet if we're only thinking of a few people following it. I could recommend an all-Saffron diet and you could call it sustainable if only 10 people have to follow it.
So again, an all-meat diet, even if it were actually healthy , would be an unsustainable recommendation to make for the general population. It may well be a very good recommendation for people with specific conditions, and it could be made sustainable if those people were a tiny minority of the population. For the general population, the only possible diet that doesn't bleed the earth dry is one that is mostly vegetarian, with some amount of meat maybe once a week or even more rarely.
1. Humans routinely make the mistake of thinking that what works for them will work for everyone.
2. The world is full of assholes who give people a really hard time for being the weirdo doing the weird thing, even if it isn't hurting anyone at all, so people want everyone to do it to try to defend against the negative consequences of being the weirdo that people will give hell to for simply being weird.
And yet even vegetarians can't all get on the same page, which is part of why we even have the world vegan to distinguish some subset of extremists from the rest of them. Similarly, there are myriad sects of Christianity because even people who all agree that they believe in Jesus Christ can't get on the same page about a lot of things and Islam is an extreme example of that: Just as Christianity grew out of Judaism yet it seen as distinct from being Jewish, Islam grew out of Christianity.
A man who grew up Muslim told me Jesus Christ is one of the major saints of Islam. It does not entirely eschew the ideas of the Christian Bible, it just believes in and celebrates a more recent prophet, the Prophet Muhammad.
Muhammad ...was an Arab religious, social, and political leader and the founder of Islam. According to Islamic doctrine, he was a prophet, sent to preach and confirm the monotheistic teachings of Adam, Abraham, Moses, Jesus, and other prophets.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muhammad
I have zero fear that all of humanity or even the majority of humanity will start consuming an entirely beef-based diet any time soon. I think it is high time we got over our delusions that all humans everywhere will ever be on the same page at the same time on any given topic and embrace the fact that people eat different, people express spiritual beliefs differently and so forth and it's actually okay and for the best to let some people have their extremist diet without treating them terribly for finding something that works for them and without acting like that needs to become the new norm for everyone else as well.