People eat more meat than they need. Most people would be healthier if they consumed less of it or none and substituted vegetables/beans/nuts for those calories while still getting proper amounts of protein from non-meat sources.
Reducing meat consumption reduces a bunch of other consumption of resources letting people get their calories more efficiently.
> Meat is considered one of the prime factors contributing to the current biodiversity loss crisis.
> the livestock sector is a major stressor on many ecosystems and on the planet as a whole. Globally it is one of the largest sources of greenhouse gases (GHG) and one of the leading causal factors in the loss of biodiversity, and in developed and emerging countries it is perhaps the leading source of water pollution.
> farmers would reduce their land use of feed crops; currently representing about 75% of US land use, and would reduce the use of fertilizer due to the lower land areas and crop yields needed. A transition to a more plant based diet is also projected to improve health, which can lead to reductions in healthcare GHG emissions, currently standing at 8% of US emissions [1]
What's not to understand? Stop eating meat. We don't need lab-grown meat. We don't need meat substitutes.
Arguments that meat take an excessive amount of resources are disingenuous because those resources cannot simply be translated to other uses, examples being that the water use example many tout uses rainwater would fall anyways, that livestock will eventually urinate meaning it isn't actually lost, and land used for livestock is mostly non arable land and therefore cant be used for producing crops anyways. Also there is a relationship between livestock, agriculture and human society where they all are able to use resources that each other cant, or provide benefit to each other. For example a huge amount of agriculture fertilizer comes from manure, and a huge amount of livestock feed comes from agricultural waste. Without livestock we now have to get fertilizer elsewhere, and all the byproducts that would become animal feed becomes waste.
In the grand scheme of things livestock produce an insignificant amount of ghg and that if all Americans stopped consuming beef, it would reduce the nations ghg emissions by ~2.5%, whereas transportation, power generation and construction contribute to the overwhelming amount of emissions (~80%).
If you want to look at reducing emissions from food, it is much easier to look at food waste, where ~40% of food in the US is wasted, and of that roughly 80% is produce like fruits, vegetables, tubers etc, meaning that even if there was a transformation to a purely vegan population, food waste would probably increase.
I don't disagree. But the "need" for so much meat is a myth. The level of. First World meat consumption is bad for the planet, and bad for those who consume it.
Health, ethic, eco and moral downsides. Yet we're sooo blinded and confused.
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.
I think you are framing the problem incorrectly. I think that is this only about sheding some light to this problem, and beeing the intelligent humans that we are, take action. We are consuming much more meat than we need, as soon as you notice that, you can act and reduce some of you meat intake by replacing it with some good source of plant protein. When was the last time you had chickpeas, for example? Or any good source of legume protein?
I think there are more people eating meat than people who
# Own and drive an SUV everywhere
# Flying for work every month
Think how much factory farmed meat is consumed. We kill and process ~80B animals per year.
For most folks meat is more affordable than buying an SUV or flying every month.
Getting people to heavily reduce or cut out meat & dairy and move to a more plant based diet will have a greater impact in reducing environmental impact.
This is based on an Oxford Uni study and also recommended by the IPCC. I’ll add sources later.
But it’s not an either or.
We need to do both and more.
It’s a tough challenge and we should have started yesterday.
Interesting times ahead… I wonder what the world will be like in 30 years.
2) “In addition to climate mitigation gains, a transition towards more plant-based consumption and reduced consumption of animal-based foods, particularly from ruminant animals, could reduce pressure on forests and land used for feed, support the preservation of biodiversity and planetary health, and contribute to preventing forms of malnutrition (i.e. undernutrition, micronutrient deficiency, and obesity) in developing countries. Other co-benefits include lowering the risk of cardiovascular disease, type 2 diabetes, and reducing mortality from diet-related non-communicable diseases.”
3) “Imbalanced diets, such as diets low in fruits and vegetables, and high in red and processed meat, are responsible for the greatest health burden globally and in most regions. At the same time the food system is also responsible for more than a quarter of all greenhouse gas emissions, and therefore a major driver of climate change.”
I don't understand why you're mixing a health claim that you failed to prove with an environmental claim that I agree with. If your point is that using arable land to grow cattle or cattle feed is a waste, then I agree with you. If your point is that we should stop eating meat for health reasons, then I wasn't convinced by what you showed me, and disagree with you. If your point is that we should stop eating meat for moral reasons (as in animal rights), then I disagree with you. If your point is that we should stop eating all meat for environmental reasons, then I disagree with you, as not all meat has the same impact, and I think we should avoid blanket statements like that, especially when they are mostly based on what happens in the USA and not around the world. If your point is that we should stop eating meat that has the most ecological impact, like American or Brazilian beef, then I agree. If your point is not any of those things, then I failed to understand it.
That's an interesting point. Some people might really need to supplement their diets with certain animal products, though as far as I know, a vegetarian diet or a diet that includes very little meat consumption is more than enough for most people in terms of health requirements.
Yet that's not really the case, we eat a lot of meat. And red meat as well which really is not necessary in our diets. I believe trying to argue from a naturalist perspective is rather dishonest in that it's by no means the real reason why people consume meat. People consume meat the way they do because it's a cultural expectation as well as a highly pleasurable act for most.
So really, to me, the dilemma has much more to do with how much pleasure are we willing to give up as a society and I really don't think that goes very far. I mean, this debate has also ramifications when it comes to the climate; how much are we willing to give up in comfort and pleasure to curtail the ecological disaster we are causing? The answer: not much really.
In my opinion these are really failings of our political systems, so in other words, the system that's supposed to help us make decisions for our society as a whole. I'm pretty sure most people would agree that maybe in a reasonable amount of time we'd like to see changes to our diets, it's an interesting discussion to have and there could be long term plans to achieve it that could be very much realistic... but our political system simply does not allow the for the discussion to be had in the first place.
All I'm saying is that if we're all eating so much to the point of killing ourselves surely we can eat a bit less of meat if it reduces pollution/water use/viral infections.
It's not like eating meat multiple time a day or even every day was a pre requisite for human life. I don't remember last time I ate meat and I'm fitter than 90% of people I meet in my day to day life
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.
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.
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.
If we hardly know what good nutrition is for humans, how can we assume that meat is some ancillary part of our diet?
This dogmatic view to end meat consumption is a horrible mistake, as it’s predicated on us understanding the human body in its entirety. There’s really no studies that investigate with causality a human diet. It would be unethical/expensive to properly study causality. We have epidemiological studies that find correlation, which has been wrong many times (red meat causes cancer, saturated fats are bad, etc). Epidemiology is meant to point towards a correlation for us to separately study causality, instead of these statistics game of conflating the two via attempting to remove confounding variables.
Further, you’re assuming all land that’s currently used for livestock had no prior use. Much of the land was formally used for crops (until the soil was depleted from poor farming practices, injected with nitrogen/fertilizers, then essentially decimated) if the topsoil was nutrient dense.
Deforestation is needed for crops as well, it’s not exclusively done for animal agriculture. Removing all meat sources would still require some amount of land to fill in the caloric gap. You can’t just subtract all livestock land and say you can plant trees, and thus a net gain.
Glad to see this happen. When people talk about vegetarianism, it's almost always about the moral aspect of killing animals, and rarely about the huge impact the meat industry has on our environment.
People often dismiss vegetarianism because they like meat too much, stating that they can't go without that delicious steak once a week. The fun part about reducing your meat consumption in consideration of the environment is that you don't have to cut it entirely, it's just a matter of adjusting your everyday habits.
People eat more meat than they need. Most people would be healthier if they consumed less of it or none and substituted vegetables/beans/nuts for those calories while still getting proper amounts of protein from non-meat sources.
Reducing meat consumption reduces a bunch of other consumption of resources letting people get their calories more efficiently.
> Meat is considered one of the prime factors contributing to the current biodiversity loss crisis.
> the livestock sector is a major stressor on many ecosystems and on the planet as a whole. Globally it is one of the largest sources of greenhouse gases (GHG) and one of the leading causal factors in the loss of biodiversity, and in developed and emerging countries it is perhaps the leading source of water pollution.
> farmers would reduce their land use of feed crops; currently representing about 75% of US land use, and would reduce the use of fertilizer due to the lower land areas and crop yields needed. A transition to a more plant based diet is also projected to improve health, which can lead to reductions in healthcare GHG emissions, currently standing at 8% of US emissions [1]
What's not to understand? Stop eating meat. We don't need lab-grown meat. We don't need meat substitutes.
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_impact_of_meat_p...
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