Meat is not necessary. Plenty of lifelong vegans healthy enough to disagree on that. However it's pretty well documented that a diet with an amount of meat is healthier than straight veganism, though in much lower amounts than we generally consume. Animal husbandry is also likely an important part of sustainable large scale agriculture, but again not in a way that remotely resembles modern mass scale cattle 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.
From an environmental perspective, we actually do need to eat meat, just not the cow. Humans can't eat the only plants which can grow in marginal land areas, whereas goats and other hardy livestock can and then themselves be eaten by humans.
So the optimal diet to feed the world sustainably, currently, includes animal protein. Pure vegan is a luxury choice under that model.
I find the historical dietary evidence pretty convincing that eating meat regular or even daily is, in fact, healthy.
Ancient writers even documented that societies where meat was a major dietary component were healthier and lived longer - Herodotus’s “long lived Ethiopians”, to name one of the countless examples.
What we need to end is massive, industrialized farming, not meat consumption. It’s bad for the environment whether you’re growing vegetables or animals and it creates a fragile system subject to severe, devastating supply shocks and also externalities like this.
Historically humans lived with very little to no meat for most of human history. Most humans also were malnourished/underfed as are most wild animals most of the time. Many humans also lived vegan all their lives by choicr (see e.g. Indian religipns). So I'm not sure your argument holds that modern agriculture is required for a healthy ot ay leats sustainable vegan diet.
That said, you are also right that obviously we don't have the capacity to live with the diet of our predecessor species. Famously early mammals (or possibly predecessors) were able to generate their own vitamins C, but this capacity is lost in modern humans and many other species as vitamin C was usually very well available. Just like we lost the fur on most of our bodies, evolution tends to drop things no longer essential for survival.
So we are dependent on our environment not just for general input but also for certain specific nutrients that we simply cannot produce on our own. But I don't think we can derive from this an argument for eating meat - as you flag, we do have modern agriculture, let's use it for the best, not junk food and often vile and inhumane treatment of animals.
Alternatively, we eat as much meat and figure out how to reduce emissions in other ways. Meat production is part of the equation but its focus in these discussions seems largely agenda-based than anything else. It's a convenient scapegoat.
> according to the (disputed) literature suggesting meat is necessary for a balanced diet.
Meat being necessary hinges on veganism being a legitimate replacement. Is veganism legitimate as a full-on replacement? No, it's not. At least not yet. If or when it does become that, then yeah, meat won't be necessary. Right now it's mostly a viable option for relatively healthy adults with a lot of money to spend.
Well, some meat production is obviously a sustainable part of agriculture. There will always be some areas where the soil is too poor for anything but grazing and you'll always have some waste that you can feed to chicken, pigs, and ruminants. But these sustainable levels of animal husbandry are so far removed from the industrialized meat production that we're currently doing that they might as well be zero. Recall that just a generation or two ago meat was something you ate once a week if you lived in a fairly developed country. Today Americans eat more than a 100kg of meat per year.
I’m utterly unconvinced that meat eating is inherently bad for the environment. The initial studies decrying meat production were fatally flawed and had to be withdrawn.
Better animal husbandry is needed, but not mass scale conversion away from meat.
The agricultural revolution - settling, understanding the seasons, plant selection and breeding - are much more important factors to where humans are today and the rise of civilisation and modern population scales than animal husbandry. That was part of the story but I've not seen any researcher arguing that domestication of the cow was more important than grains.
But anyway there is no doubt animal meat is nutritious. The question is not xis it nutritious" or "was it important for humanity in the past," the question is where we go from here. Even if you can make a cogent argument that it was essential to humanity's rise that doesn't provide an argument (or vegans might say a justification) that we still need animal meat in 2050. Arguably constant warfare and burning coal was what drove technological prowess in Europe to bring us a long way to today's world, but would you argue we still need those? Slavery was essential to the rise of America, does that make it right to continue? Colonialism made Britain rich and rose many Brits out of poverty, does that mean Britain should continue exploiting India? Domestic violence and marriage of underage girls was a common and essential feature of human societies every where, does that justify continuing them these today?
Arguments based on past practice hold no moral or scientific sway over our future.
Farms grow crops that you can't eat, to feed to animals that you can.
Name the protein and fat sources that will replace meat. Tofu? We already grow soy for animal feed as a cash crop and it's pesticide and fertilizer intensive, and if people eat it directly instead of as an animal feed additive its production will grow at the expense of forests and soil health.
Nuts? I'm all for perennial woody agriculture, but the calorie/acre ratio is not great, and they are labour intensive for picking, netting, processing. I say this as a person who has an orchard of my own with hazelnuts and chestnuts in it.
The reality is that should meat be gone, we'd have to replace it with other foods, grown on a mass scale on agricultural lands. Animals can graze on products (grass, hay, soy, dent corn) that are marginal or useless for human consumption, and turn it into high protein, high fat calorie rich food.
There are populations that eat primarily vegetarian, but mostly they are also heavy on the dairy. But the moment you bring dairy into the equation you're also bringing in non-productive male calves -- in other words, veal. Similar story for eggs.
What we need to be doing -- along with reducing meat consumption some -- is coming up with more ecological ways to raise meats, and diversifying our meat products. Raising insects as feed stock for chickens, for example. Increasing perennial woody agriculture instead of cash crops, with small scale grazing of meat and dairy animals inbetween rows.
Cutting animals out entirely actually leads to a nutrient deficiency. The classic pre-green revolution family farm forms a kind of nutritive circle with manure, grazing, and rooting being an important part of soil health and maintenance. That didn't scale out in the last 100 years, but it's a model we need to look at.
Meat is by far the production that require land. 1 cow requires 2.5 acres of land, if my memory is right.
If we cut meat consumption, then we have plenty of space available. We should eat much less meat in all cases, that's one of the few points that meta-analyses of effect of diet on health have pointed out.
We really need one piece of red meat like beef per week to get the vitamin B12. And no more than one meal with meat every other day.
Or we can have the same amount per week but with half portion everyday - for example if the dish requires meat for its taste.
With much fewer cows, we can then let them roam freely in forests, which they prefer by far. Grass without shade is good for golf, not for cows.
In the US, most cows don't even have grass ; they walk all day in their own shit, parked in overpopulated enclosure, and fed with soja.
That's so disgusting that cattle breeders went to court - and won - to forbid any photo of their enclosures.
I'm not a vegan, not even a vegetarian and I consider humans to be omnivorous by nature. But I want to eat the meat of happy cows, happy pigs and happy chicken.
Without hormones, without antibiotics, without GMOs feed. That means a more expensive meat but it tastes so much better, really.
Chicken are super tasty when raised in natural conditions. Pork is unbelievably better.
Sustainable agriculture, even at a very small scale, always combines plants and animals.
Absolutely, and that's why I said vegetarian rather than vegan. Working animals for eggs, milk, wool, etc are a good idea. That's still not supporting an omnivorous diet though.
Eating meat is better for the environment in the long run.
If human population drops to zero due to climate change (which meat consumption contributes to), then the environment will be left alone and do great on its own! It wont even take more than 1-2 millennia for recovery, which is nothing in geological terms!
Compared to that eating vegan is just a feel-good half-measure.
one interesting argument that i read was that without meat and dairy production we would not have enough natural fertilizer and we would have to resort to chemical fertilizers instead. i haven't been able to verify this, but if true then organic vegan food production may not be possible without livestock. (unless we change how human waste is being collected)
And yes, I'm pretty much aware of current industrial farming processes and what that does to the environment, but maybe you're missing the forest from the trees, as in maybe it's industrial farming that we should get rid of. Plants and animals are basically engines storing and converting the sun's energy into nutrients and natural ecosystems are very much sustainable. Add fossil fuels in the equation, like what the industrial age did and you get the current clusterfuck. Our grandparents seemed to have no problem in raising their own livestock with sustainable practices. Surely we can do better than them, since we live in the information age and all that.
And for people worried about efficiency, cost and over-population, we are wasting about one third of the food we produce right now. And we spend much less of our income and time on acquiring food. There is room for taking a step back in terms of throughput and maybe focus on quality rather than quantity. Which might be a good idea given that even though the calories in our food is at an all times high, for the first time in history we're seeing overweight children suffering from malnutrition.
The real problem I'm having with your argument, as it's what vegans usually say, is that if you want cheap, you can't beat a combination of corn and soy grown through an industrial process, as these are the most efficient farmed plants we have. Whereas many fruits are very inefficient, consume a lot of water and are not sustainable at scale. Just saying, if you want efficiency, start eating corn.
- antibiotic resistance (increases in deaths due to more resistant strains of bacteria)
- pollution of air, soil and water
- poor utilization of resources: water, nitrogen and food
- breeding reactors for pandemics: thousands of animals kept very close together with people cleaning and moving waste within that area enhances pathogen evolutionary jumps
- major contributor to climate change
- yes, obligatory: animal cruelty
In short, if we want to survive and not extinct ourselves because of a desire for $0.99 hamburgers, we're gonna have to go vegan whether we like it or not (it sucks, but I for one already made the change). It might be disappointing to many people, but it's a necessary shift in lifestyle standards, just as keeping fossil fuels in the ground.
Without meaning to suggest that there's no much better ways to raise animals for meat, it's still a fundamental truth that the land area needed to support animals is much higher than crops. If we were to only eat meat from animals that were raised in a biodiversity sustainable fashion, we'd all have to eat far less meat (which I totally support as a flexitarian).
The world is not going to go vegan. Humans eat meat. No greenhouse argument will ever change this. This is worthwhile research, as is cultured meat and other options. Evolving the tech of raising and cultivating animal protein to eat is important work.
Eating lots of soy is not a requirement of a diet without red meat.
Cattle can eat grass, but most of them in North America eat very little grass. They eat a lot of grain that is intensively farmed. That feed farming has a significant impact on the environment through regular agriculture practices. By growing food for humans instead, the impact would be reduced simply because not as much crop is needed.
Red meat does have a good nutrition profile, but a balanced vegetable focused diet does too. People underestimate how much protein and fat can be had from plants. I'm not sure why you think people won't do this if they stop eating red meat. Why isn't that realistic?
I speak as someone who absolutely loves meat and thought much like you do recently. Life without, or with much less meat is fine. I've come to realize I largely eat it out of convenience and comfort.
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