Less meat is nearly always better than sustainable meat
ourworldindata.org
ourworldindata.org
We are still in the situation that even though specific uses of resources might look wasteful, nobody has trouble coming up with good uses for more resources, even in the world's richest places. Building housing. Fighting disease. Transportation. Less resources means taking those things away from the level they're at right now.
Some Australian outback cattle stations may cover millions of hectares, but you're not going to be able to grow anything else out there: too hot and little water and unlike cattle you can't move your pea farm to where the water is.
I would agree that land-clearing (cutting down forests) to raise cattle is unacceptable, as are the use of feed-lots, but I would disagree that we need to eat less meat, and I would personally never give up my grass-fed organic beef.
If we don't raise cows on land that could sustain crops or use that land to produce animal feed, that would necessarily mean there will be less meat to eat. We would in fact need to reduce our meat consumption to account for this. Surely you can see you're contradicting yourself by saying we don't neede to eat less meat but also shouldn't use feed-lots?
There are projects to develop and market seaweed-based feed to reduce burping:
https://www.csiro.au/en/research/animals/livestock/futurefee...
Grass-fed cattle in Northern Australian mostly eat native grasses as they are more hardy given the environment: Queensland Bluegrass and Mitchell Grass for example.
Yes, feedlots do allow for raising cattle faster and more consistently, but are problematic for runoff.
https://futurebeef.com.au/resources/beef-cattle-feedlot/
https://www.qld.gov.au/environment/agriculture/sustainable-f...
They're also responsible for ranchers killing predators and the cows themselves out competing for the scarce resources.
Cows are invasive to Australia. They do a lot of damage that folks choose to ignore. They are not the same as native ungulates and there's tons of research proving that.
There's a growing movement in the US to get cattle off of public lands. These are lands that you just described. Why do people want them off the land? Because it's very obvious they hurt the ecosystem.
Meat is a status symbol food. We're told from a very early age that beef is what kings and successful people eat. Rich people even have different vernacular for their status symbol food. Grass fed beef is just beef with a higher environmental cost. It's literally "my status symbol is better than your status symbol. Me more successful cuz I eat grass fed beef."
The simple fact is we likely can't feed 8 billion people sustainably even with the most efficient processes.
There's zero chance we can sustainably feed 8 billion people with our current level of beef consumption. Beef is at least 20x more resources intensive. It's crazy inefficient. Being proud of eating beef is like being proud of burning tires in your back yard or something.
Meat is not a status symbol food. Culturally/historically eating roasted meat was a family event: The Sunday lamb roast, the roasted pig or bison in an earth oven in Polynesian/Maori/Native American cultures for example. The only status may be the quality of the cut where you're eating Wagyu rather than ground beef.
There are no native ungulates in Australia. There are also no predators except wild dogs (also introduced) and there's a 3000+km fence to keep them out of grazing areas.
All cattle, sheep, goats and pigs in Australia must be tagged with an EID/RFID tag or device. We track where they were bred, raised, sold and eventually killed. There's no cattle just roaming around wherever.
We have kangaroos which are regularly culled because of the lack of predators and they compete with cattle and sheep for the grass, and most people don't want to eat kangaroo. (National symbol and also because it has a strong flavour)
There are also feral pigs, camels and other introduced pest species like rabbits that we try to eradicate.
Feral pigs in particular damage tree roots, destroy water sources and irrigation and are a vector for exotics disease such as African swine fever, Japanese Encephalitis, lumpy skin disease, foot & mouth and all sorts of parasites.
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...
I don't think anyone needs to eat animal products to be at optimum health, I've just never seen it.
Also, the idea veganism is extreme is wild. Eating plants and fruit vs. paying someone to essentially torture animals that you'd keep as pets and love in a different context... that is extreme.
> I don't think anyone needs to eat animal products to be at optimum health
might not be the most accurate position to hold.
Give this a second thought: humans don't synthesise B12 either.
Yes, that's technically correct.
> Animals cumulate it from eating food grown in soil.
No.
Animals provide a hospitable environment (gut) for said bacteria to exist and synthesize. So while technically the animal's cells are not the ones directly synthesizing B12, the bacteria and animal gut are working in harmony to do so.
These facts are tangential to my point. The commenter I responded to said that people don't need to eat animal products to live at optimal health, which is laughable, and this is an incredibly clear example of why. A quick google search will illuminate the dangers of B12 deficiency.
And one more thing to consider, if humans coevolved with the animals they eat, how can we be so certain that simply supplementing a few vitamins found in animal products is a sufficient replacement? We hardly understand human metabolism at its most basic level, it's quite a stretch to think that we've cracked the code on the "essential" nutrients we would have received from consuming animals.
That is still technically incorrect and is refuted by observing healthy old vegans that consume supplements from cultivated-bacteria only for decades.
Those bacteria also develop in some animals digestive system as you already know, and eating those animals has been for a long time our main source of b12. The other (minor but non trivial) one has been non-washed fruits and plants human consumed during millennia, and that’s still how grazing animals ingest a bit everyday. The non grazing animals are widely supplemented with cultivated-b12. We’re producing around 80T/year for that which isn’t much we animals only need around 10mg/year. I'm not discussing the "non-natural" qualification of supplementation, just the fact it's today a very white practice to live an healthy (human or non human animal) life by ingesting only bacteria sourced B12.
> we've cracked the code on the "essential" nutrients
Yes we did, and the last of that nutrient has precisely been vitamin b12 which led to two Nobel prizes : https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23183296/
What makes you so confident that this is the "last"?
Supplementing b-12 is easy. Getting it from natural vegan sources isn't hard.
It's wild the things people choose to believe about veganism or dieting in general.
You're either making wild assumptions or you've read some real sketchy stuff about dieting. Either way what you said isn't true and you seem to be repeating Joe Rogan type stuff about vegan diets.
Huh?
> Supplementing b-12 is easy. Getting it from natural vegan sources isn't hard.
Citation needed.
I've been vegan for years. This stuff aint hard. The way people talk about vegan diets is wild. Vegan b-12 is easy to get, lol. Next you're going to claim that it's impossible to eat enough protein on a vegan diet, lol.
The way you speak about diets and vegan stuff smells very heavily of "bro beef pseudoscience" that's popular in the Joe Rogain type circles. I wouldn't be surprised if you claim the carnivore diet is the peak human diet. That's what I mean. You're repeating things that are not difficult to prove wrong with an air of superiority. It comes off as very "I know stuff you do not" which is very prevalent in the Joe Rogain circles.
Do comments on HN count as "evidence" to you?
> You're repeating things that are not difficult to prove wrong with an air of superiority.
I guess we're cut from the same cloth then.
Please drop the ad hominems, they do not serve to strengthen your argument. I have no idea what Joe Rogan circles talk about, eat beef at most 1x per month, and despise those who would reduce every discussion to culture war.
I'm asking a simple question, for my education. Can you provide a citation or any information about natural vegan B-12 sources? I haven't found anything, except that all vegan organizations recommend supplementing vegan diets with industrially synthesized B-12.
For those of us who are particularly frightened by fallacies of nature, have no fear: we already do this with a ton of nutrients and have for a long time. Iodine being the most obvious example. But almost every piece of food you can buy is going to be enriched in some way, even things like soda!
I’m not arguing to go back in time, or shaming our ancestors.
I’m saying that in modern times, there is no reason to consume animals, and the B12 from eating dead animals is most often via supplementation anyway.
So it’s just giving a supplement to an animal and then killing and eating the animal when you could just take the same supplement.
I’ve been vegan 25+ years, am in the top 1% of physical health, have a biological age of 32 (I’m 44), regularly compete as an athlete in national level competitions, can hike hundreds of Km in the mountains at a single clip; and rarely ever get sick.
Ask lifelong vegetarians if they crave for meat, they don’t, and often are repulsed by the taste. source: multiple vegetarian I know that switch while being teenagers. We’re 1/1 on anecdotal sourcing I guess (not sarcastic)
Anyways, it's just saying. I am criticizing your comment - is it surprising that someone who managed to remain a lifelong vegan doesn't crave meat? What exactly does this demonstrate? What about people who couldn't pull off veganism?
2. > someone who managed to remain a lifelong vegan doesn't crave meat
I see how my phrasing was ambiguous : my totally subjective experience is that there’s a tendency to crave if try to stop eating/doing something you had for a good while (until ~20?). Some old vegans do crave for meat but learned how to handle that feeling. The ones that stoped early and don’t have as much deep memories association with meat, will usually don’t feel the same.
We observe the same with tobacco (nicotine isn’t a really strong drug, the hard part is psychological), cheese for the French and chicken in South Africa.
Habits are stronger that most people think. Ask any psychiatrist/psychotherapist.
You would need exogenous supplementation for parity.
I work in the western US where we have a lot of desert grassland where cattle graze. We've seen a huge uptick in invasive grasses and wildfires as a result.
Cows also consume what limited resources are available. Water, calories, etc.
Ranchers also want to exterminate several predator species that do a ton of good for the ecosystem. Wolves, bears, coyotes, etc. Look at yellowstone for a clear example.
I remember at a talk a few years ago a researcher estimated that cows are responsible for at least 30 animal extinctions in the western US. Things like reptiles, birds, etc. There are several listed species right now that list cows/ranching as their main threat.
So this marginal land still suffers and putting cows on it winds up hurting us in the long run. The land is always healthier without cows on it. They are invasive.
I agree that some land is too marginal for any kind of farming. You can graze stock on land that's going to be heavily degraded by their presence, and this is bad. You can also graze stock on land where trying to grow crops would cause damage, and this can be a better alternative.
No carbon is not everything.
For example who cares about carbon when you can grow all food with same energetic and nutritional value on 3-10 times less area. that means less labor, less machinery, less storage, less fertilizers, less processing....
You can even grow additional plants to act as "fertilizer" for next crop... and still use less land than land needed to feed cows to feed you.
Just how many people are employed in extremely low wage jobs like processing, sorting, butchering poultry. or look up on youtube how involved is to cut beef into final products, people have their bones in their hands crooked from all the work, not even talking about work injuries, they can not work until pension/retirement in that industry. so why not use them in better jobs instead from start, for whole of their career.
Meat markets were suspected with helping the transfer of disease from one type of animal to another species... There is 10s - 100s of MILLIONS of poultry dispatched because of avian flu in europe every year, for last 20 + years. China alone experienced the culling or death of around 225 million pigs due to ASF from 2018-19. foot-and-mouth back in europe this year too, etc, etc.
yes carbon is not everything.
Both cars and meat are huge cultural lighting rods, and focusing on them for climate action has high risk, but focusing on meat as climate action is high risk with very few climate gains.
I'm mostly familiar with California-centric inventories because I want to influence state and local policies.
California State's inventory: https://ww2.arb.ca.gov/ghg-inventory-data
There used to be really great consumption-based maps at this site, but I'm not finding them at the moment. Instead here is a per-city breakdown of estimates: https://coolclimate.berkeley.edu/inventory
One thing that takes a very long time to change is transportation. City planning is pretty ossified. Cars have multi-decade lifespans. So starting the change for transportation is a very very urgent need. Diet is far more flexible, and there are innovations such as specific types of algae added to cows' diets that drastically reduce methane emissions. Changing the diet of cows is a far faster change than replacing every consumer's vehicle with a clean one.
The history of environmental action shows that it's very easy to regulate and bring business in line. It when it comes to consumers, it's far far trickier. Tackling meat, which is a quarter of the emissions of the diet of folks, may need to happen eventually but it will have far less impact than legalizing apartments in dense urban cores and allowing people to live without cars.
https://openknowledge.fao.org/server/api/core/bitstreams/492...
Beef is a status symbol food. The propaganda around it is strong and constant in countries like the US, where we're blasted with Christian-Patriot conquerer messaging constantly. (god gave us the earth and all animals to exploit. As the conquerers it is our right to exploit all things.)
Start looking at all the ways US culture still pushes the over consuming conquerer mentality. We all joke about how capitalism is bad and then we fall for the propaganda to eat more beef. Look at how primed people are and how constant the messaging is. You can't go 5 minutes with beef being thrown at you. Once one starts to look at the constant capitalist advertising and societal propaganda telling us to keep over consuming it becomes really obvious.
A lot of Americans get deeply offended at the mere idea of eating less meat. The propaganda and advertising is strong.
Be a good patriot. Eat more beef to be a strong man. /S
(The sarcasm in this comment is meant to convey how stupid the beef mentality is in countries like the US. Phrasing it in a sarcastic way showcases how obvious it can be )
Animals rights activists often hide this type of information to tie themselves to climate activism.
So right there off the bat, beef CO2 / calorie is 30x higher than the plants they eat (or whatever the multiplier was).
We didn't do any of these for the bison.
I grew up ranching and have read the research on this. They don't graze the same, they don't migrate the same, they don't eat the same plants, they don't have the same predators, etc. infact, we massacred to near extinction several keystone species to make way for cattle.
We also killed all the bison to cause famine in native American populations.
The real facts are: 1) beef is optional. Great during food scarcity, not necessary when food is abundant. 2) beef is extremely inefficient to produce. We're talking 20x+(likely much higher) than plant based proteins. 3) beef is horrendous for the environment. 4) over consumption of beef is the cause of a ton of public health issues. 5) animal cruelty 6) industrial ranching creates diseases or facilitates their spread.
People in the US sometimes focus on global action, but as a US resident it seems completely inappropriate to be telling people who emit far far less carbon that they need to stop eating beef, before people in the US have stopped far far worse activities.
Why does it need to be one or the other? It's definitely true that the US has higher greenhouse gas emissions per person than most other places. Shouldn't we focus on reducing emissions anywhere we can?
I've spoken to lots of Americans who are under the false impression that food miles are the most important factor when it comes to sustainable food, this article makes the case that it's actually meat.
I think it's reasonable to say people should eat less meat (especially in the US) and we should also reduce emissions from transportation and energy.
But for systematic change, and systematic change is what's needed, there are sever political consequences for focusing on hugely unpopular actions that have little effect. Attacks on meat have empowered those who oppose climate action, which is just below 50% of the population in the US. Focusing climate action on meat consumption has been counterproductive, just as doomerism about climate action is used to make people feel helpless and then abandon taking any action at all.
We have very little time to make massive climate strides, and anything that slows down the fastest action in the US, like prioritizing meat consumption and not placing it in the proper context, causes great harm to the cause. Just as focusing of food miles by hapless media has caused great harm for climate action.