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.
Animals require much more feed in than you get usable meat out. Meat production increases the amount of plants you need to farm so even though plant agriculture is bad for the environment generally the best way to actually reduce it is to eat less meat.
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 The initial studies decrying meat production were fatally flawed and had to be withdrawn.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.
As I understand, there are places where you can just put cows and they feed themselves off the land. But there is also a tremendous amount of deforestation happening because those lands are then used to grow food for cows that are in other locations.
I find it amazing how well avoiding eating meat aligns good things:
- less animal suffering
- less pollution of air, water, and land
- less waste (inefficient way to get calories)
- better health (assuming you substitute meat with vegetables and not highly-processed food)
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 think most people acknowledge that just by existing they’re causing harm. If you cut meat and diary out of your diet, you’re vastly reducing that harm. This isn’t just taking into consideration the cows, it’s also the vast quantities of crops that are grown to feed livestock. The largest study done on farm use was done by Oxford University a couple of years back and they found that “80 percent of the planet’s total farmland is used to rear livestock.” It continues with “freeing up land mass the size of Australia, China, the EU, and the U.S. – combined. This would lead to immensely fewer greenhouse gas emissions. It would also lessen the amount of wild land lost to agriculture, which is one of the leading causes of mass wildlife species extinction.”
So for me, it ends at the meat and diary have a huge negative impact on the environment and I’ll do my best to reduce my share by avoiding meat and diary.
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.
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.
>But unless I'm mistaken I think you're implying that by removing beef production, you'd have to substitute it with additional vegetable or grain production.
There are a lot of non-simple factors involved for example dairy and meat account for a majority of most people's protein intake, this would mean substitution for increased protein nutrition from plants (limited mostly to soybeans).
>Where I think the pro-vegetarian argument would actually be that by decreasing meat production, you actually recover more vegetable/grain farm capacity since it's much more efficient for people to eat their veggies directly.
This statement is mostly true for using vegetable/grain production land whose produce is used for cattle feed-lots right? What about cattle that get the larger % of their food from grazing?
Also there is a significant difference between human quality/desired food and animal feed. For example a lot more corn is used in animal feed than in human consumption - this is especially effective because maize is a c4 plant and until genetics gets there will continue to completely dominate other cultivatable plants in terms of yield.
p.s. I'm not saying that meat production in the US is ecologically friendly - it definitely is not - feedlot greenhouse gas production is almost entirely unregulated, they cause massive damage to local watersheds etc - but it's possible to do terrible damage to the environment with vegetable growth as well; I'm just arguing for a more or less objective view of the situation (and I don't think meat is evil is the correct answer).
I’d like to argue for eating healthy and sustainably produced animal protein.
Commercial meat is really bad for the environment, but you don’t have to eat that.
Animals are evolved to make the most of vegetables that humans can’t eat. There are sustainable sources that we can use to eat beef, pork, chicken, lamb, etc.
I try and do my best by eating local sources that I know are well produced. I don’t hunt, but would one day like to.
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...
You can plant something else in those fields that aren't feeding cows anymore.
Otherwise, there isn't enough grasslands to feed all the cattle that we're raising out there. And the calorie consumed by cows to calories consumed by humans ratio is somewhere like 7 to 1. If we didn't eat meat, we'd have a lot more food available on our hands, not to mention the drastically reduced methane production that threatens our climate as much as all transportation sources put together.
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.
WTF, most animals that are farmed are fed agricultural produce - crops that are cultivated. It's simple math that it's inefficient to grow crops -> feed the animals -> eat the animals. There's efficiency loss at every step. Are you seriously claiming that eating meat is better than being vegetarian?
Funny you should say that, it's one of the core reasons many vegans and environmentalists advocate for avoiding meat altogether, as it disproportionately contributes to environmental impact. Turns out growing plants to feed to animals, and then growing those animals to feed to humans is less efficient than growing plants to feed to humans.
I've just watched this and assuming it's unbiased which it seems to be, it makes a number of very compelling arguments to go vegetarian/vegan. Not least the huge water, grain and land requirements and the resultant methane emissions of eating meat which are globally unsustainable:
http://cowspiracy.vhx.tv/
Absolute vegetarianism is not necessary, either. Even incrementally eliminating meat in some meals will help.
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