Do be careful with that, whilst I agree that we need to drastically reduce our meat consumption, getting rid of all meat consumption with out some kind of super advancement in other fields will be far worse for the environment. In some place plant based food is more sustainable, in other animal based is.
We should eat a lot less meat, particularly red meat, which is extremely wasteful and destructive to the environment compared to other sources of food.
After seeing that Rolling Stone article on Smithfield Farms, I've cut back on my meat consumption.
The 'typical USA' diet of lots of meat for all three meals of the day doesn't seem sustainable to me. If we all cut back at least some, that will greatly reduce the environmental impact.
We're already doing that. Not gonna lie, we love meat, but understand it isn't the best choice for the planet, so far we've reduced our meat consumption about 50%.
I disagree. All of our effort should go towards all (relatively) easily attainable reductions of emissions in parallel. Substituting consuming meat with consuming plants is such a thing for me, so I readily do it.
Isn't animal product a lot worse for the environment than plant-based food? Long term the world has to move towards consuming less animal product, not more.
I am fully aware of this. But instead of going vegan or vegetarian we could put our meat consumption back to a sensible level, where we don't overdo it and raise and slaughter more animals that we can actually eat.
I'm not against being a vegan or vegetarian, but I am against these kind of moves.
There are million other problems that need fixing first and have a bigger impact on carbon emissions then eating meat.
Reducing overall meat consumption would be great in a lot of ways, but lab-grown meats are a luxury product for the next few decades and will basically fall off the map if there's any kind of extreme or prolonged global crisis, which will happen sooner or later.
I spent years being vegan and vegetarian and still eat many meals that way, but the idea of purging ranching and meat consumption from the world is technologist hubris and the start to someone's dystopian novel. I mean, maybe it'll happen responsibly some day, but if you're grounded in reality and history, it's a 500 year transition, not a 5 year one.
Yeah. If we just reduced our meat consumption by somewhere between 50 and 75% we could feed the remainder off those sources and probably decrease the environmental impact of food production on net, except for cow's methane production.
I don't eat meat, and I encourage friends and family to avoid it. Livestock production is surprisingly bad for the environment. Cows are particularly bad, consuming somewhere around 25 times more calories and 4 times more protein from feed than they yield in beef.
Absolute vegetarianism is not necessary, either. Even incrementally eliminating meat in some meals will help.
Eating less meat won't do anything, it's a fruitless endeavor that only makes vegetarians/vegans feel morally superior. Everyone in the US could stop eating meat, and it would only reduce emissions by a couple percentage points.
Maybe reducing meat consumption is a good middle ground? Red meat especially seems to have known health risks but even ignoring that the inhumane raising of animals for mass automated slaughter necessitated by huge meat consumption is very much worth addressing as is the climate impact.
I really cannot wait to see lab grown meat or plant based meat become credible alternatives - I am not holding my breath but I am moderately optimistic for a breakthrough.
Except for the fact that meat consumption is a major resoirce drain on the planet as a whole. Just think about the amount of land, energy, water, medicine and time it takes to produce one kilogram of meat and contrast this with alternative protein sources such as vegatables and you will find that just by reducing ones meat consumption you can cut a big part of your impact on the planet.
I wish we could collectively accept that meat consumption is a huge ecological and environmental problem our planet is facing and simply transition to a more sustainable, vegetarian diet.
Reducing the effect that industrial meat production has on the environment is great and it's something we as humans do, improve the negative effects of our behavior when instead it would have far greater effect to change our behavior instead.
Something like 70% of farming is growing crops to feed animals which we then eat. Meat is an incredibly inefficient way to turn sunlight and water into calories. If we all switched away from meat and ate mostly plants instead we’d have more than enough without needing such intensive farming methods. More seriously than that though, current methods are actively destructive to the soil - the longer we farm so intensively the less viable farmland we will have. Does that sound sustainable?
reply