Abstinence from meat seems like an extreme step if all you are concerned about is environmental damage. Just eating meat at a "normal" frequency of two or three times a week would be enough to mitigate much of the impact. True organic agriculture is not possible without meat production as a side effect, and this can only be replaced by nonrenewable synthetic fertilizers.
or if you're not up for going cold turkey, just drastically reduce your intake. If you eat meat only once a week rather than every day, this already reduces your footprint massively.
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.
Preaching abstinence has never worked. It didn't work for sex and it is not going to work for meat-eating. The right question/attitude is how can we have an abundance of meat while protecting the environment? One possible solution is lab-grown meat and if that doesn't work then we need to invent some other solution that produces abundance with minimal cost to the environment.
I mean, there are, but what's even more important than going vegan bc that's not feasible for everybody right now, is to reduce total meat consumption as much as possible, rather than these token "1 day a week without meat" it ought to be the other way around, 1 or 2 days a week with meat, other days eating tasty well cooked and seasoned food, lentils different types of beans, rice, soups, maybe add these small cubes of "chicken flavorant" in there too which are made with left overs of poultry production and don't directly contribute that much to the agro industry
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.
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.
Going full vegan may not be necessary, but we do need to drastically reduce our consumption of meat. I know a lot of people who eat meat twice per week, for example. That seems like something that could work for everybody.
And if we eat less meat, we can more easily afford to get the meat we do eat from these kind of organic pastures.
The only reasons to find ways to end consumption of natural meat are 1. to increase efficiency and 2. ethical concerns relating raising animals in confinement to slaughter and eat them.
The effects on the planet can be completely eliminated with massive expansion of nuclear and/or space-based electricity generation to power vertical farms that a) don't displace natural habitats and b) capture and recycle livestock's methane emissions along with other waste products.
"Eat less meat" is not a good solution since industrialized monocrop agriculture has tons of problems on its own like topsoil erosion and air/water pollution. The problem doesn't lie in any one single food, but in commercial food production in general, be it livestock or agricultural. If you want to help against that, the best option would be to support sustainably raised meat and vegetables from local farms by going to farmers markets or eating out at farm-to-table restaurants. If possible, plant your own vegetables, raise your own chickens or hunt. Avoid buying from the big food producers, like Kraft, Tyson, PepsiCo or ConAgra
Can you elaborate on the environmental impact? I've heard so many vegans say this but I've never seen a proper explanation of it. How can eating meat have a negative environmental impact when humans are natural omnivores?
It seems to me like people are confusing eating meat with our modern agricultural processes. And if that's the case then the solution should be to improve said processes, not to stop eating meat.
> “New research indicates that avoiding meat is one of the biggest things an individual can do to reduce their personal environmental impact,” said McKelvey in the memo
I cannot imagine that scales - you cannot extrapolate from micro to macro here. No animals = no food for 7 billion people.[1] Definitely no vegetarian food without animals.
Do vegetarians not know how grains and legumes are grown? How fertilizer and soil amendments are made?
It would be incredibly destructive to the soil to use no animal products to grow 'vegetarian' food. Definitely impossible at scale, you'd just be strip mining the soil. On smaller scale farms the ideal is to give crop land a break by turning it into pasture for 1-2 years. A great way to "mulch" the crop leftovers (you don't eat the whole part of the corn plant, etc) is to use them as forage (cornstalk grazing).
Seems really odd to shun the "meat" aspect when we really are "using every part of the buffalo." And a big part of our animal use is making food for sanctimonious vegetarians.
[1] about half of the earth land surface is better suited to livestock farming than legumes/grains/other row crops. You know what grows well in cold, rocky New England soil? Pork, chicken, sheep, etc.
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%.
Not eating meat is one of the major things a person can do to reduce their carbon footprint, so I would imagine more people giving up meat would be very helpful collectively.
Growing large amount of edible plants, feeding those to animals for months or years, and then eating the resulting meat is in itself pretty inefficient. A lot of water, energy, and, in extension, carbon emissions could be saved by just not eating (so much) meat. Humans are perfectly capable of living from an entirely vegan or at least vegetarian diet and it is much better for the environment and the climate: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/jul/20/vegan-di...
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