Meat accounts for nearly 60% of all greenhouse gases from food production
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
We do this at home by making lots of hearty soups, having salad with each meal and having good cheeses, nuts and lots of fruits on hand.
It's the same with a low-meat diet since so many restaurants don't offer food without meat - you end up not eating out as much or selecting healthier items.
[0] https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/82-003-x/2008001/article...
However your statistics there have way too many confounding factors to attribute anything substantial to the native diet. Infant mortality rates historically and remain (comparatively) very high. Alcoholism is rampant among Canadian indigenous people. Even among peoples who have similar diets such as e.g. Metis, Inuit and First Nations peoples, life expectancy is significantly different (this is before even getting into a comparison with other meat-eating cultures in the world).
There is virtually no signal here to determine the healthiness of an Inuit-style diet either way.
I went hardcore keto and only eat meat + cheese and I've lost a ton of weight and lowered my BP etc. That is way healthier than what I was before so I'm not sure the argument cutting down on meat is healthy.
Edit: I'm not arguing either way - I just don't buy into this whole meat is bad for you argument.
My spouse is vegan and super healthy. Yet some of her blood-works are borderline. As far as we can tell it's because she's vegan. It's the stats themselves that are biased against veganism. I think that if the studies were corrected meat eating would look MUCH worse than it does now.
Your issue was probably your weight (causing high BP), more than meat and cheese being an optimal diet. I would be cautious about the longtime harm to your cardiovascular system due to lack of fiber and triglycerides.
Humans evolved to prepare meat in very specific ways: WE COOK IT (like 95% of the time unless you’re some kind of lunatic) We’re not like ANY other animal and trying to say ‘oh we eat meat AND plants so we’re omnivores and therefore we are intended to consume animals’ is ridiculous.
We originally ate animals because it provided tons of calories in primitive times. It gave us an edge and we got ahead. At this day in age there is absolutely no scientific justification for consuming animals (unless you have some kind of tragic health condition). Can you lose weight and lower your BP in the short term? Sure. But please keep this up for 10+ years and we’ll see how the body sustains itself.
Given the state of nutrition science, I would also say there is no scientific justification for not consuming animals.
Given historical precedent, eating cooked meat seems to have effectively taken fat (a very long digestive track) apes with small brains and turned them into bigger brained highly capable humans.
The Mediterranean diet, which is as of yet the most studied in nutrition, advocates for little red meat, moderate poultry and fish, more legumes and vegetables etc.
A large portion of the population have been vegetarian for a long time. How is something alive and well and growing be unrealistic
Seaweed per day per cow := 0.085kg
Seaweed per year per cow := 31.025kg
Seaweed per year for cow population := 31,025,000,000kgs
Global seaweed production := 6,350,293,180kgs
So, we'd need to increase seaweed production by 5 times. We would then need to distribute this from the largest producers (China, Japan, Korea) the countries that consume the most (Europe, US). This isn't a problem that can be solved by mandated changes in a matter of years, and I have no idea what the CO2 output would be for this sort of production and shipping.
None of this needs to be binary this or that though. We can limit or eliminate our intake of meat products through personal choice AND engineer solutions to minimize environmental harm. We can do both and it does not have to be unanimous.
Also, there absolutely is a very real cultural shift happening right now that is embracing flexitarian/vegetarian/vegan diets.
I also don't have data on this, but I think there has been a much bigger rise in performative veganism than actual veganism. For example many popular twitch streamers say they are vegan, and then the next week viewers point out they are eating a cheeseburger on stream and they'll say "well I'm not today obviously".
There are millions (billions?) of people that don’t eat cows, it is not unrealistic for people to stop eating them, culture changes very quickly
You can skip the seaweed and just give the active ingredient.
> it is not unrealistic for people to stop eating them
It's unrealistic to force them unless necessary.
Beef industry in some places is subsidized, demand can easily be curbed by removing subsidies or taxing. That isn't even on the table yet.
When you start your response from a place that is unreasonable, nobody is going to give you the time of day. Telling people to just stop eating beef is both unreasonable and just flat out not going to happen in at least several generations with many steps in between - if it ever happens.
The only reason beef is so popular is because it's available. It's pretty inefficient in terms of energy input to calorie output and produces even more carbon as a byproduct of it's production. Carbon-cost wise, it should be seen as a luxury.
I also really don't think it would be an issue health-wise and diverting the market to other forms of food wouldn't really put too much strain on people's ability to provide enough food, calories- and protein-wise
You don't think cultures eating meat and integrating meat into their traditions has anything to do with it?
It's difficult to separate the chicken and the egg here because farming meat was super cheap, accessible and beneficial (nutritionally, environmentally and financially) for a lot longer than the last 100 years.
It's "good" to transition to a meatless diet for the sake of the environment. The world is going to have to massively change in order to do that, and the cultures and traditions of a lot of people are going to be casualties along the way. Please don't be so dismissive of that.
> was super cheap, accessible and beneficial (nutritionally, environmentally and financially) for a lot longer than the last 100 years.
Interesting sidenote, I recently heard someone talk about how cattle was an extra good form of livestock because it "converted" an inaccessible form of energy (grass, which humans can't eat) that would otherwise be sitting there useless, into a useable form. With (most) modern farming, this is no longer the case.
Note that I never argued for a meatless diet, or even a beef-less one, and I don't think going to that extreme would be necessary or even the best outcome. And I recognize that doing so would mean many many generations of cultural shift and concerted effort. Just that beef farming in its current form should be considered more of a luxury in terms of cost to the environment than it currently is
Wait, what? Beef is popular because it tastes good. You don’t pay $50+ for a chicken breast, salmon filet, or pork chop. People consume beef because it tastes good. It’s “available” because people like it. If deer or bison sold for more than the price per lbs of beef, the cattle industry would collapse and be replaced overnight. But it doesn't, because people don't like the taste as much.
And yes, taste is subjective and the numbers make it pretty obvious that the majority of the population subjectively prefers beef.
Also, bison absolutely cost more per pound than beef. Beef sells because it's cheap, not because it's expensive.
Virtually every meaningful part of our lives is a luxury.
Your profile mentions you are a musician and artist: many many people in the world would consider your choices as unnecessary luxuries. In some parts of the world you would be deprived of your choices for the good of others. Surely we could even find people that would judge your art and music as a negative worth to the world.
A world where we only work for the minimum needs necessary to survive (food, shelter, etcetera) would not be worth aspiring for.
Note that I never argued for the abolition of cattle production, just that it's carbon-cost is not considered a much as it should be (as is the case with most things, I think)
I also never argued against luxury goods or only working for the most efficient means of survival. Luxury is fine, but I think everyone in modern society is going to have to give up at least some amount of the comforts of modern society.
Oh, I strongly agree.
However the majority of the greenhouse gas contribution from meat is methane, which decomposes over many decades. So in the long term, not eating meat is expected to only decrease your carbon footprint by 2% to 4%[1][2].
But meat is expensive, and I suspect that whatever you substitute instead of purchasing meat would generate CO2, so my guess is the impact would be much closer to 0%.
Personally I use money as my proxy for calculating carbon footprint. So your long term footprint is highly correlated and mostly dependent upon your income and the economy you belong to, almost regardless of your actions.
Unless you are doing direct action to capture carbon, not having children, killing people, or reducing your economy’s usage of CO2, then action at an individual level makes very little difference IMHO. Not to say we shouldn’t try!
Edit: also note the 60% headline figure is of 35% agricultural emissions, so actually about 20% of personal emissions. And presumably that is very strongly dependant on the country you in (buying meat from).
[1] https://www.stuff.co.nz/business/green-business/125675673/pa...
Problem is the milk price is connected to the meat price. Which makes half the supermarket more expensive through milk products. Maybe there is a technological solution to abort the bulls like we do for chickens nowadays and give the cows hormons for milk production.
I'm not arguing it's not a benefit, but I am arguing that it's hard.
I play with my sliders all the time; I'm just not willing to slide so far in one direction that I give up my heritage.
I challenge you to evaluate your own life choices with an equally critical lens.
Thank you for the polite discourse.
To completely zero? Probably not. Dropping it by (say) >50%? Much easier.
Meat, especially in large quantities and from large animals, used to be a lot rarer before refrigeration was invented. There's no reason why it couldn't be dialled down culturally.
Reminder: the perfect is the enemy of the good. Getting people more over to pork and poultry would be a pretty good win:
* https://css.umich.edu/factsheets/carbon-footprint-factsheet
I am trying to make a point that "eat less meat, it's like super easy right?" is not about substituting tofu/beyond/impossible meat for beef. There are cultural traditions that cannot be replaced with tofu or vegetables. As a species we'll need to move on from this, but these sorts of things are deeply ingrained in the identity and traditions of many, many people.
For example, removing the consumption of beef brisket, skirt/flank steak, tongue and tripe from the Mexican/Southern US cultures will likely not happen while my generation, or the one after mine, are alive. It will probably happen when folks naturally adopt a more vegetable based diet and eschew those traditions. If somehow we could engineer beef substitutes for these that maintained the same characteristics of how they are cooked and what they tasted like, that would go a long way in getting us there; but we don't have the technology today.
And I don't mean to be over-dramatic, but if you went into any of the many multigenerational households or ranches here specifically in south Texas and told them they could not raise or eat beef anymore - you would be making an extreme and immediate affront to their way of life that many would fight and die to protect.
Frankly, cutting meat consumption in half is usually easy and would already take us a very long way if done universally.
Great, I'm glad that works for you.
> Frankly, cutting meat consumption in half is usually easy and would already take us a very long way if done universally.
That sounds like a good idea, but it's harder to implement than you think, I think.
That said, I'm fully aware that it's easier to avoid meat in some places than in others. Living in the middle of a capital city, good meatless options were everywhere around, but after moving to suburbs of the same city there's not that much meatless stuff that I can order with delivery, for instance. It can also cost more, making it much less available for some social groups (although I hope it's just a matter of time and economy of scale, because in the end there's no reason why would it stay more expensive). Nevertheless, cutting meat intake by around half still doesn't seem that hard, it doesn't even take much effort once you already got to know the alternatives.
Do you think the above are equivalent to what you're asking regarding meat? Why or why not?
What's much more challenging is to make people care about danger enough to be willing to change their personal behavior even in slightest ways.
> Do you think the above are equivalent to what you're asking regarding meat? Why or why not?
Of course it's not equivalent, because this thread is explicitly not about giving up meat consumption.
Conversely, if everyone went vegetarian, that would pose a severe risk to humanity in the form of well documented negative health effects.
Even custom-tailored meat replacement products, like impossible burger (which aren't vegan, by the way), have more calories and are worse for your health than standard beef.
Promoting veganism is like promoting minimalism to the wall street elite. Much better idea to push for better living conditions for livestock, free range, etc. That would positively impact many many more animal lives than the small amount of people who will adopt full veganism.
https://www.wur.nl/en/Research-Results/Research-Institutes/l...
I also remember a comment claiming that the cows don't like it because it makes them noticeably sick.
The land growing grass and corn to feed livestock isn't suddenly going to be abandoned, or even repurposed, and it's that biomass that's the ultimate source of those emissions.
If nothing else, there'll be that many more fields of corn destined for the ethanol refinery.
It's cow burps. That's it.
Land-use in the U.S. for cattle has actually been decreasing for decades. It's only increasing in Brazil because of new access to Asian and European markets.
That grass decomposes whether it's eaten by a cow or not.
And grazing land use has been decreasing, but not land use for producing feed.
That isn't contested. Decomposing grass won't yield those methane emissions, at the very least insofar as it won't decompose at the same rate.
> I also remember a comment claiming that the cows don't like it because it makes them noticeably sick.
Had never read such a thing.
Aprox 45% of global emissions come from:
- Generation of electricity and heat.
- Burning of fossil fuels at factories, mines, etc, to produce energy on site.
https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/global-greenhouse-gas-emiss...
Moreover, we aim at reaching net carbon by 2050. This means that we need to cut on everything. So the question is about how easy it is to reduce such budget and how efficient this cut provides.
In this perspective, zero waste is a bad trade off for climate change (a lot of efforts and only a 100 kg saved per year). Vegetarianism (or better veganism) sounds like the best thing to start with.
Everything is using energy.
Transportation is not included in the 45% (check the link in my previous comment). And AFAIK we also need to transport vegetables, using machines for agriculture, etc.
> Vegetarianism (or better veganism) sounds like the best thing to start with.
Objectively, chicken and pork have much lower emissions than beef.
Also, removing beef consumption would increase consumption of other foods so the emissions reduction wouldn't be as drastic.
Well, since you have a factor between 10x (cereals) and 100x (legumes) in the CO2 emissions between beef and vegetables, yeah it does drastically decrease emissions.
> Objectively, chicken and pork have much lower emissions than beef. Right. However, pork is mostly fed with cereals, inducing a high level of CO2eq/kg + land use + loss of diversity.
I highly recommend watching for more details. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SdrhpThqlCo
[1] https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2019/11/15/how-much...
Also:
> However, a newly converted vegetarian who replaces every 50g of beef she usually eats with 100g of kale would soon be famished.
C'mon. The only world in which the idea of someone doing that is anything but absurd and/or tragic is one of motivated hypotheticals. Replacing your primary source of protein and fat with a pile of leaves is not vegetarian eating; it's disordered eating.
They do it again right at the end, with the well-poisoning phrase, "die-hard leaf-eaters."
Allow me to suggest that, if that's what you think eating vegan is about, you won't last long on the 2/3 vegan diet, either. For goodness sake, at least throw some beans or a potato or something in so you're not spending four days a week being hangry all the time. Maybe even treat yourself to a burrito; at Chipotle the meat and dairy free ones are still something like 1000 calories apiece. And they'll put some leaves in it, if you like, free of charge. Multiple kinds of leaves.
Replacing pork with cheese, on the other hand, doesn't do much.
This study found people in wealthier nations had cost savings from not buying meat. This lead to increased purchases in other goods which in turn balanced out most of the green house gas savings from the meat reduction.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S09218...
But no the planet will always survive. It cares really little about its parasites.
E.g. as the article states “to produce 1kg of wheat, 2.5kg of greenhouse gases are emitted. A single kilo of beef, meanwhile, creates 70kg of emissions”
Which is a much more meaningful way to look at it.
Beef, for example, contains 2x as much protein and mostly fat otherwise, whereas wheat has carbs, which are much faster to digest.
In order to consume as much protein as you would from beef, you have to consume twice as much of it. And since you can't really separate wheat protein from the carbs in household conditions, you're forced to overload on carbohydrates in order to get the same amount of high quality nutrients.
And I'm not even touching on essential amino-acids, some of which are missing entirely in wheat.
Which is why pretty much every single vegetarian has to supplement their meals with dairy or regularly boost with powdered protein. It doesn't matter much for sedentary lifestyles, but trying to be active on a vegetarian/vegan diet is pure hell.
That's literally how you make seitan.
https://backyardhomesteadhq.com/how-to-make-seitan-from-any-...
I’d rather err on the side of under-eating and then experiment with what I need more of than consume too much “just in case” or because it feels good.
Advocating anything else is basically destroying the planet.
The article's really talking more about artificially maintaining the populations of certain domesticated species at levels vastly higher than a natural ecosystem could support without human intervention on an industrial scale.
But they have been replaced with ultra high density industrial scale factory farming and this has resulted in 90million cows ...
Sure that is 50% extra, but on the scale of this sort of issue - is that really a lot? Buffalo is probably nearly 50% bigger in mass and methane production anyway.
Second, it's 90 million cattle crammed into a much, much smaller space than the bison occupied. And, unlike how it worked with the bison, it's largely supported by intensive monocultures that leave little room for native ecosystems or biodiversity. Even the pastures at my friend Dan's small family organic dairy farm are something of a disaster in the biodiversity department, compared to a proper prairie.
Non-meat isn't zero either - massive fossil fuel inputs go into all plant cultivation from farm equipment to fertilizers to pesticides.
Long term, we're going to need lab or plant-based meats, since I doubt we'll ever convince people to give up their cherished food items unless economics makes it incredibly expensive.
Chicken eating worms that eat grass being eaten by humans exhaling CO2 that grass uses to grow is a closed carbon cycle.
Beef belching methane changes the equation a bit, but there's research into ways to decrease that.