>One-quarter of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions result from food and agriculture. What are the main contributors to food’s emissions?
of that just over half is dedicated to meat production so circa 12.5% of GHG emissions. compare than to the 70% of GHG emmisions down to fossil fuel.
Disclaimer: I am not saying you cant make an impact only that changing your car to electric, riding a bike, WFH etc. will have a vastly bigger impact. hell if you want a gold star, do both!
I’ve managed to cut down on meat and dairy but I cannot give it up, I have a kebab place on my street, if I went full vegan I would have to find a way to ignore that incredibly enticing smell, I’m a weak man 😔
There is literally no downside to reducing your meat intake. Also, I said reduce, *NOT* completely stopping.
Every other form of personal action you can take usually has downsides (e.g. more expensive, less efficient, less practical).
Eating less meat is cheaper and healthier and does not change anything about anyones day to day lifestyle.
> The vegan (Zaria Gorvett)
> I’m in my kitchen, basking in the glow of complacent superiority. I’ve been asked to take part in a sustainability experiment – and I have a sneaking suspicion that the results are going to make me look really good.
Why do people not like vegans? It’s a complete and utter mystery!…
The one big issue I have with climate science when it comes to diets is the lack of definition.
They have done it here as well, a foods carbon impact is based on ‘per 100g’ or ‘per 100kcal’. Well a diet isnt constructed like that, a proper analysis would compare nutrient content not just protein content, or total calories.
A diet is made up of iron, and zinc, Vitamins A-K, iodine, calcium, etc, etc. The macro nutrients are made up of proteins, and fats, and carbohydrates, the protein again seperated into amino-acids, and the fats into very specific ones we need or do not need.
You cannot take a diet which has a hundred variables, look at 2 (protein and calories) and decide you have figured it out. Perhaps looking at it in more detail will come to the exact same conclusion, or perhaps it won’t, but you have to actually look. Our climate impact is appauling, and frankly, so is our health. It’s imperative to get this right, but currently we are half arseing it based on the outcome we want not based on what the data actually says.
Interestingly the only paper i’ve seen so far that looked into it in more depth was [this](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7008122/#!po=1.31579) one, and it actually came to the opposite conclusion (please note, it’s one paper, on one diet, in one place, and only looking at amino-acids so by no means conclusive).
That’s leaving aside the actual discussion of health as a vegan or vegetarian which is has studies all over the place, and some organisations promoting, and others denouncing it.
They do seem to be using emissions states from America who raise their beef very differently (intensive feed lots raised on a lot of soya and corn rather than largely grass fed on marginal land in the UK) in this article. Does anyone know how much difference this makes in overall emissions, if any?
I don’t know what’s got some people so riled up about publishing the fact that there is less carbon produced in the lifecycle of getting vegan / veggie foods to your door than meat. It’s, on average, a fact, so accept that a meat diet is worse for the environment and either move on or try to do something about it by reducing your meat intake.
Trying to go meat free once a week has the same effect as one in every 7 people going veggie (aka ~10 million in the UK) and it’s not even that hard of a choice to make.
For me this has always been the biggest reason to go veg, along with alleviating food shortages.
That said, no way am I going vegan lol, F getting stomach aches daily.
The easiest and biggest way to reduce your green house gas emissions is to stop using a car, everything else is just trying to shift the blame
Absolutely great – I stopped eating beef 5 years ago and switched from dairy milk to oat/almond and I’ve felt better physically and not missed beef/milk one jot. Plus you can be vaguely smug about doing the tiniest of things that is better for the environment.
Humans shouldn’t eat the amount of meat that we do. Although I do Frickin love chicken and I still have fried chicken once a week and a roast chicken every Sunday. Maybe sausages once every few months as well. And I love eggs.
But it’s not super hard to change and generally a good thing to do.
This being said: it’s not just about individuals; we need to stop using all fossil fuels yesterday and reduce reliance on private automobiles, too.
I’ve cut down my meat consumption by about 80%. Not for ethical reasons but purely because the quality of meat sold in the supermarkets has been so poor these last few years. Who wants bacon pumped full of water or gristly, veiny steak?
Some of the meat-free options are absolutely delicious now too. I could live on Quorn Southern Fried Bites.
[Eliminating animal agriculture would reduce the amount of land required for agriculture globally by 76%](https://www.ox.ac.uk/news/2018-06-01-new-estimates-environmental-cost-food) (3.1 billion hectares, or 1.8 Russia’s) according to the findings of the most comprehensive study ever conducted on the relationship between farming/ land use by Oxford University. Largely as a result of the obscene amounts of land used for monocropped soy/ corn which is grown directly as livestock feed.
Oh and before anyone asks the lead author on that paper, Dr Joseph Poore was not a vegan when he started the study, but he sure as hell is now.
It’s funny, I’ve been vegetarian all my life, and am being forced to incorporate red meat into my diet for my health.
Until three years ago, I couldn’t even eat eggs. Now I eat chicken and eggs mainly, sometimes beef or pork. I can’t stand pieces of red meat, so I only eat it minced.
Veganism and vegetarianism is a moral, environmental, and economic imperative. We need to learn to live without the abattoirs if we want any future for the next generations.
When we finally evolved capacity to reason, empathise and innovate, we could have recognised the cruelty we had been inflicting and done away with it. Instead we industrialised it and justified it, and we’re all going to pay.
People in comments saying there are no downsides don’t have IBS 😩
I ate meat of every type and lots of it for 48 years. I became increasingly aware that red, processed mean in particular is a leading cause of heart disease and cancer in middle aged men and that fact, together with all the hormones, preservatives and other rubbish we all know is in it (and milk) made me give up meat six months ago. I still eat eggs, tiny amounts of fish and cheese but I surprised myself by how astonishing easy it was.
4 years vegan and never been better. Highly recommend it, it’s really easy to live cheaply and have good food too. Even reducing is better than nothing, but a lot of people overestimate how tough it is to go vegan and as a result they end up never even trying.
I understand why you’d go vegan or vegetarian but don’t you need the masses to do it to make a difference?
It was tldr but what I scanned it appeared they didn’t consider the outside the box part, they didn’t consider the Deforestation required for the expansion of growing soya and other vegan food ingredients to meet demand, the contribution it has to palm oil crisis, the amount of chemical intensity that is required to grow these inputs and the environmental damage such chemicals have on nearby ecosystems. By comparison a cow just eats grass that has very little chemicals required to produce its food and if the farm/herd is healthy: low requirements of vaccinations or other health related supplements/chemicals. And the whole farm can run carbon zero and zero fossil fuels. Shipping at the moment would never be carbon zero and heavily reliant on fossil fuels.
Is there such a thing as organic soya? I would say it’s nigh on impossible to grow soya organically that produces any significant profit.
All of these ‘sustainable diets’ are artificial bullshit consisting of soy and corn syrup grown on Amazonian land put together in a factory.
The natural diet for twelve thousand years has been some variation of meat, fish, grains, legumes, fruit and dairy. Within the past seventy years people have been becoming increasingly obese, depressed, cancerous and low-T with all these Nu-Diets (high sugar, low meat, vegetarian, not enough iodine and animal fat).
Is it not blatantly fucking obvious that we need to return to a traditional diet? Every vegetarian I know is dependent on supplements, alcohol and nicotine. We have too many mouths to feed, and putting people on awful diets that ruin your life isn’t the solution.
As a particular tweet went, we can have trillions of humans if we grind everyone into a fine powder and store them in silos covering every inch of this earth. When the bloody hell will people realise that we can’t have an unsustainable number of people without drastically reducing the individual’s quality of life with absolute bullshit like this?
22 comments
Reducing animal products – eating fewer of them, or replacing with a plant-based alternative
Focusing on what you eat rather than food miles
Cooking efficiently, and saving ovens for special occasions rather than everyday use
Batch cooking to prepare food using a fraction of the energy
Avoiding food waste, through careful planning and creative cooking
There are climate benefits, consuming dead cows uses orders of magnitude more land, water and energy than eating tofu, lentils, seitan etc.
Also there’s the benefit of not participating in and enabling the [Animal Holocaust.](https://www.haaretz.com/opinion/.premium-time-to-admit-there-s-animal-holocaust-1.5361854)
the BIGGEST thing bar none that we can do to combat climate change is removing [fossil fuels](https://ourworldindata.org/emissions-by-sector)…
>One-quarter of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions result from food and agriculture. What are the main contributors to food’s emissions?
of that just over half is dedicated to meat production so circa 12.5% of GHG emissions. compare than to the 70% of GHG emmisions down to fossil fuel.
Disclaimer: I am not saying you cant make an impact only that changing your car to electric, riding a bike, WFH etc. will have a vastly bigger impact. hell if you want a gold star, do both!
I’ve managed to cut down on meat and dairy but I cannot give it up, I have a kebab place on my street, if I went full vegan I would have to find a way to ignore that incredibly enticing smell, I’m a weak man 😔
There is literally no downside to reducing your meat intake. Also, I said reduce, *NOT* completely stopping.
Every other form of personal action you can take usually has downsides (e.g. more expensive, less efficient, less practical).
Eating less meat is cheaper and healthier and does not change anything about anyones day to day lifestyle.
> The vegan (Zaria Gorvett)
> I’m in my kitchen, basking in the glow of complacent superiority. I’ve been asked to take part in a sustainability experiment – and I have a sneaking suspicion that the results are going to make me look really good.
Why do people not like vegans? It’s a complete and utter mystery!…
The one big issue I have with climate science when it comes to diets is the lack of definition.
They have done it here as well, a foods carbon impact is based on ‘per 100g’ or ‘per 100kcal’. Well a diet isnt constructed like that, a proper analysis would compare nutrient content not just protein content, or total calories.
A diet is made up of iron, and zinc, Vitamins A-K, iodine, calcium, etc, etc. The macro nutrients are made up of proteins, and fats, and carbohydrates, the protein again seperated into amino-acids, and the fats into very specific ones we need or do not need.
You cannot take a diet which has a hundred variables, look at 2 (protein and calories) and decide you have figured it out. Perhaps looking at it in more detail will come to the exact same conclusion, or perhaps it won’t, but you have to actually look. Our climate impact is appauling, and frankly, so is our health. It’s imperative to get this right, but currently we are half arseing it based on the outcome we want not based on what the data actually says.
Interestingly the only paper i’ve seen so far that looked into it in more depth was [this](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7008122/#!po=1.31579) one, and it actually came to the opposite conclusion (please note, it’s one paper, on one diet, in one place, and only looking at amino-acids so by no means conclusive).
That’s leaving aside the actual discussion of health as a vegan or vegetarian which is has studies all over the place, and some organisations promoting, and others denouncing it.
They do seem to be using emissions states from America who raise their beef very differently (intensive feed lots raised on a lot of soya and corn rather than largely grass fed on marginal land in the UK) in this article. Does anyone know how much difference this makes in overall emissions, if any?
I don’t know what’s got some people so riled up about publishing the fact that there is less carbon produced in the lifecycle of getting vegan / veggie foods to your door than meat. It’s, on average, a fact, so accept that a meat diet is worse for the environment and either move on or try to do something about it by reducing your meat intake.
Trying to go meat free once a week has the same effect as one in every 7 people going veggie (aka ~10 million in the UK) and it’s not even that hard of a choice to make.
For me this has always been the biggest reason to go veg, along with alleviating food shortages.
That said, no way am I going vegan lol, F getting stomach aches daily.
The easiest and biggest way to reduce your green house gas emissions is to stop using a car, everything else is just trying to shift the blame
Absolutely great – I stopped eating beef 5 years ago and switched from dairy milk to oat/almond and I’ve felt better physically and not missed beef/milk one jot. Plus you can be vaguely smug about doing the tiniest of things that is better for the environment.
Humans shouldn’t eat the amount of meat that we do. Although I do Frickin love chicken and I still have fried chicken once a week and a roast chicken every Sunday. Maybe sausages once every few months as well. And I love eggs.
But it’s not super hard to change and generally a good thing to do.
This being said: it’s not just about individuals; we need to stop using all fossil fuels yesterday and reduce reliance on private automobiles, too.
I’ve cut down my meat consumption by about 80%. Not for ethical reasons but purely because the quality of meat sold in the supermarkets has been so poor these last few years. Who wants bacon pumped full of water or gristly, veiny steak?
Some of the meat-free options are absolutely delicious now too. I could live on Quorn Southern Fried Bites.
[Eliminating animal agriculture would reduce the amount of land required for agriculture globally by 76%](https://www.ox.ac.uk/news/2018-06-01-new-estimates-environmental-cost-food) (3.1 billion hectares, or 1.8 Russia’s) according to the findings of the most comprehensive study ever conducted on the relationship between farming/ land use by Oxford University. Largely as a result of the obscene amounts of land used for monocropped soy/ corn which is grown directly as livestock feed.
Oh and before anyone asks the lead author on that paper, Dr Joseph Poore was not a vegan when he started the study, but he sure as hell is now.
It’s funny, I’ve been vegetarian all my life, and am being forced to incorporate red meat into my diet for my health.
Until three years ago, I couldn’t even eat eggs. Now I eat chicken and eggs mainly, sometimes beef or pork. I can’t stand pieces of red meat, so I only eat it minced.
Veganism and vegetarianism is a moral, environmental, and economic imperative. We need to learn to live without the abattoirs if we want any future for the next generations.
When we finally evolved capacity to reason, empathise and innovate, we could have recognised the cruelty we had been inflicting and done away with it. Instead we industrialised it and justified it, and we’re all going to pay.
People in comments saying there are no downsides don’t have IBS 😩
I ate meat of every type and lots of it for 48 years. I became increasingly aware that red, processed mean in particular is a leading cause of heart disease and cancer in middle aged men and that fact, together with all the hormones, preservatives and other rubbish we all know is in it (and milk) made me give up meat six months ago. I still eat eggs, tiny amounts of fish and cheese but I surprised myself by how astonishing easy it was.
4 years vegan and never been better. Highly recommend it, it’s really easy to live cheaply and have good food too. Even reducing is better than nothing, but a lot of people overestimate how tough it is to go vegan and as a result they end up never even trying.
I understand why you’d go vegan or vegetarian but don’t you need the masses to do it to make a difference?
It was tldr but what I scanned it appeared they didn’t consider the outside the box part, they didn’t consider the Deforestation required for the expansion of growing soya and other vegan food ingredients to meet demand, the contribution it has to palm oil crisis, the amount of chemical intensity that is required to grow these inputs and the environmental damage such chemicals have on nearby ecosystems. By comparison a cow just eats grass that has very little chemicals required to produce its food and if the farm/herd is healthy: low requirements of vaccinations or other health related supplements/chemicals. And the whole farm can run carbon zero and zero fossil fuels. Shipping at the moment would never be carbon zero and heavily reliant on fossil fuels.
Is there such a thing as organic soya? I would say it’s nigh on impossible to grow soya organically that produces any significant profit.
All of these ‘sustainable diets’ are artificial bullshit consisting of soy and corn syrup grown on Amazonian land put together in a factory.
The natural diet for twelve thousand years has been some variation of meat, fish, grains, legumes, fruit and dairy. Within the past seventy years people have been becoming increasingly obese, depressed, cancerous and low-T with all these Nu-Diets (high sugar, low meat, vegetarian, not enough iodine and animal fat).
Is it not blatantly fucking obvious that we need to return to a traditional diet? Every vegetarian I know is dependent on supplements, alcohol and nicotine. We have too many mouths to feed, and putting people on awful diets that ruin your life isn’t the solution.
As a particular tweet went, we can have trillions of humans if we grind everyone into a fine powder and store them in silos covering every inch of this earth. When the bloody hell will people realise that we can’t have an unsustainable number of people without drastically reducing the individual’s quality of life with absolute bullshit like this?