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Comment by mssundaram | Hacker News Reader

I'm tired of this laziness. I don't care about vegan cheese - I am vegan because it's better for me, the planet, and animals. Boohoo if I can't find some cheese that tastes exactly like cultured milk from a suffering animal.

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Unfortunately, the number of cheese eaters who'll be swayed by this sort of argument and who aren't already ethically vegan is probably close to zero.

I've been vegan half my life and my recollection of cheese has mostly been replaced by the plant based alternatives. But I still think they've come light years from what we had back in '08.

I think a key to being able to enjoy plant based facsimiles is to not judge it based it on how closely it approximates the dish, but rather how good it is on its own as a cousin.

Be careful thinking just going vegan is better for the planet.

"The vegan diet is widely regarded to be better for the planet than those that include animal products, but not all plant-based foodstuffs have a small environmental footprint."

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20200211-why-the-vegan-di...

From your link, asparagus "the largest environmental footprint of any of the 56 vegetables they looked at, including its land use and water use", with 5.3kg of CO2 per kg of Asparagus. According to [0], "The average footprint of beef, excluding methane, is 36 kilograms of CO2eq per kilogram" - so even the worst vegetable imported from the farthest part of the world is 10x better per kg than beef.

Also, I think that article you've shared is pretty clear that going vegan is better, it's just not 0 cost to the planet.

[0] https://ourworldindata.org/carbon-footprint-food-methane [1] https://ourworldindata.org/food-choice-vs-eating-local

They get 5.3 kg CO2eq for asparagus because they are looking at asparagus air shipped from Peru. Of course that's terrible. Don't buy fruits and vegetables shipped via air.

If you buy locally grown asparagus -- where I live, that means around four weeks every year -- it's fine.

Stuff that gets put on a boat is in-between; no idea if that's viable for asparagus, it never occured to me to buy it out of season.

The links I shared have a chart breaking down the co2 cost by land usage, transport, feeding and even the worst vegetables transported the farthest have an order of magnitude less of an impact than local beef.

...conveniently ignoring that beef is 10x as calorically dense as asparagus.

Who the hell eats asparagus for its caloric density? You get plenty of calories from the hollandaise sauce and the potatoes. Given our sedentary lifestyle, low caloric density seems like an advantage, if anything.

We were comparing carbon input to food output, gram for gram. Caloric/nutrient density is completely relevant.

You've thrown that basis out the window by adding additional foods and reframing the argument.

And yet you have merely restated that caloric density is relevant, not explained why it would be. (Nutrient density wasn't your original point.) Asparagus is not grown or eaten for it's calories.

Sweet potato is ~30% the calorie density of beef, and causes 0.01kg co2 per kg according to [0]. I didn't ignore the calorie density,I used the worst case comparison from the article the parent shared, and compared it against the worst case of meat.

[0] https://cigrjournal.org/index.php/Ejounral/article/view/3461

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