I hate that this used to be me.
Personal growth :)
:)
It’s especially ironic considering I’ve gone vegan this year.
Personal growth++
I’m a vegetarian.
I was, and still am, surprised by how often people will go into a long rant justifying why they eat meat to me as soon as they find out I’m vegetarian. All the while I’m just sat there, not saying anything, because I literally do not care whether or not they eat meat.
Me being a vegetarian is a personal choice for me and myself only. You do you. I don’t care. You don’t need to explain yourself to me. It makes me feel so awkward.
People will often ask me why I’m a vegetarian too. But it feels like a very personal and heavy question to ask someone immediately after finding out they’re vegetarian… I don’t especially want to talk about animals dying all the time and how it makes me sad especially to strangers.
Edit/Addition: It feels like a lot of focus is brought on how vegetarians/vegans force their views onto other people but my experience personally is non-vegetarians/vegans trying to force me into conversations about this topic.
So… Tell me how vegan alternatives to items reduce carbon footprint lol.
Vegans in ideology make sense, but if you are paying more for food [that’s worse for you, instead:] just buy local stuff from your farmers market or ethically-farmed things… Local eggs, cows, vegetables… Surely this can’t be unreasonable.
- Oil comes from dinosaurs.
- Electricity comes from oil.
- This means electricity is made from dinosaurs.
- Dinosaurs are animals.
- This means electricity is an animal product.
How curious it is that vegans still use electricity, when in most places it isn’t even vegan!
😂 not sure if you are joking. But most of the biomass which became oil was from plants.
Definitely joking.
To be fair. There is much debate around whether livestock is indirectly carbon neutral with very valid studies on both sides
Please link any study on livestock being CO2-neutral. I’m very skeptical, but would love to read your source first.
I don’t have access to my schools library atm. But here’s one I found off google (which is admittedly a poor method to find studies)
https://smallfarms.oregonstate.edu/new-study-finds-grass-fed-beef-reduces-carbon-footprint
Full disclaimer I should have clarified in my original comment. Grass fed livestock specifically is carbon neutral
It’s not carbon neutral if you look at studies that account for more factors. For instance, here’s an article with an interview of the researchers in the field talking about how there is no carbon-neutral beef
There’s not been a single study to say that we can have carbon-neutral beef
[…]
We also have to ask how much of the sequestered carbon in these systems is actually due to the cattle. What would happen to the land if it were simply left fallow?
The answer is, depending on the land, and on the kind of grazing, it might sequester even more carbon https://www.washingtonpost.com/food/2022/10/03/beef-soil-carbon-sequestration/
If we look at much more rigorous reviews on the carbon sequestration potential of “regenerative grazing” it’s pretty slim. It cannot even sequester enough to counteract just grazing only production which only produces 1g protein/person/day
Ruminants in grazing-only systems emit about 1.32 Gt […] These are their emissions. The question is, could grazing ruminants also help sequester carbon in soils, and if so to what extent might this compensate? As the following numbers show, the answer is ‘not much’. Global (as opposed to regional or per hectare) assessments of the sequestration potential through grassland management are actually few and far between, but range from about 0.3-0.8 Gt CO 2/yr 301,302,303 with the higher end estimate assuming a strong level of ambition.
https://www.oxfordmartin.ox.ac.uk/downloads/reports/fcrn_gnc_report.pdf
And keep in mind that this doesn’t scale very well due to the massive land it requires. Already clearing land for pastures is a large deforester. Trying to even scale to a quarter of beef demand would require using 100% of grassland which would put enormous pressure for further deforestation
We model a nationwide transition [in the US] from grain- to grass-finishing systems using demographics of present-day beef cattle. In order to produce the same quantity of beef as the present-day system, we find that a nationwide shift to exclusively grass-fed beef would require increasing the national cattle herd from 77 to 100 million cattle, an increase of 30%. We also find that the current pastureland grass resource can support only 27% of the current beef supply (27 million cattle), an amount 30% smaller than prior estimates
[…]
If beef consumption is not reduced and is instead satisfied by greater imports of grass-fed beef, a switch to purely grass-fed systems would likely result in higher environmental costs, including higher overall methane emissions. Thus, only reductions in beef consumption can guarantee reductions in the environmental impact of US food systems.
“And keep in mind that this doesn’t scale very well due to the massive land it requires. Already clearing land for pastures is a large deforester. Trying to even scale to a quarter of beef demand would require using 100% of grassland which would put enormous pressure for further deforestation.”
Most deforestation is intended to produce land for crop farming. There is still a lot of agricultural land left that is ideal for grazing, and that cannot be used for growing crops. We may not be able to feed everyone in the world on meat, but we definitely can’t do it with plant-based foods alone.
And apart from that issue, there is the matter of protein quality, which is complicated to assess. Most mentions of plant protein are referring to total nitrogen content (“crude protein”), but not all of that comes as amino acids, which is the only form in which nitrogen can be assimilated by the human body.
So mixing and balancing plant protein sources has to be done with a certain amount of skill and care, because if one of the essential amino acids in the mix is deficient, that limits the assimilability of the rest of them.
Extensive cattle ranching is the number one culprit of deforestation in virtually every Amazon country, and it accounts for 80% of current deforestation
Plant-based food production uses less cropland
The research suggests that it’s possible to feed everyone in the world a nutritious diet on existing croplands, but only if we saw a widespread shift towards plant-based diets.
[…]
If everyone shifted to a plant-based diet we would reduce global land use for agriculture by 75%. This large reduction of agricultural land use would be possible thanks to a reduction in land used for grazing and a smaller need for land to grow crops.
https://ourworldindata.org/land-use-diets
Complete proteins matter doesn’t really matter all that much in practice. Things like soy are complete on their own, and things that are technically incomplete proteins like beans can be made complete with rather little like even rice. You don’t need to be getting every amino acid in with every meal. If you eat the amino acids at some point in the day, you will be fine
got any reading on that ? legit never heard that before
Check out the “sodcasts” of Peter Ballerstedt on his YouTube channel. He’s a forage agronomist with a lot of knowledge. You may not like his conclusions, but he gives you the data to check them out.
got nothing against vegans it’s just when they try to force it into others
What do you mean by “forcing” veganism onto others?
Like you force your lifestyle on animals, by exploiting and killing them?
As a vegan myself, I completely agree! I won’t tell others what to eat and they shouldn’t tell me what to eat. If I were to ever get “preachy” it’s purely about reducing impact on the factors mentioned in the meme and by no means forced… One less meal a week with meat in? Go you! Locally sourcing meat? Hell yeah, less environmental impact!
For the bit about local, it’s worth noting here that the difference is substantially less than one might expect. Transport is a surprisingly small portion of emissions and environmental impact
Transport is a small contributor to emissions. For most food products, it accounts for less than 10%, and it’s much smaller for the largest GHG emitters. In beef from beef herds, it’s 0.5%.
Not just transport, but all processes in the supply chain after the food left the farm – processing, transport, retail and packaging – mostly account for a small share of emissions.
This data shows that this is the case when we look at individual food products. But studies also shows that this holds true for actual diets; here we show the results of a study which looked at the footprint of diets across the EU. Food transport was responsible for only 6% of emissions, whilst dairy, meat and eggs accounted for 83%
I always thought the party of sourcing from local wasn’t transport but supporting your local economy and small producers, keeping the money within your city and raising buying power for its citizens.
Yeah, they’re always outside the Steakhouse picketing. Running at me constantly with a fork full of green vegetables.
THIS IS A REAL PROBLEM THAT I CONSTANTLY HAVE IN REAL LIFE.
This is the sarcasm we deserve.
I’ve known plenty of vegans and not once have I seen them “try to force it into others”… Outside of internet rage baiting crazies.
…Now the religious on the other hand, I have first hand experience with.
The worst force a vegan ever deployed against me was… a disapproving face and some statement of disagreement. I guess some people can‘t take even the slightest disagreement in their life.
You joke, but there have been cases of steakhouses and butcher shops having troubles with protestors. It’s not an everyday thing, but we are talking about a small, crazy portion of an already fringe group.
So crazy to protest ppl profiting off the rape and murder of thousands of sentient beings
…that is a profoundly stupid way to look at it, you cannot exist without hurting something or someone, your mere existence causes pain to some people, and they’d much rather you stop existing, are you going to oblige them too? To define pain and suffering as unacceptable in all forms is to deny reality.
Nice ableism. No one is forcing you to support the rape and murder of sentient beings so you can put their corpses in your mouth. You can choose not to do it, don’t pretend your hands are tied
Very few will force it on others, though. Anyway, I find it hilarious how people can get riled up about the idea of a person not eating meat or any animal products. I’ve seen it often that they take it personally for some reason and will “compensate by eating extra bacon/steak/chicken”. It’s bonkers.
Eh, I don’t care what you eat. But I find very offensive, naive, and just plain wrong the idea that it’s impossible to sustainably raise animals for meat, eggs, dairy, etc as many vegans will try to insist.
Does it cost more? Yes. Can we raise as many as we do today using conventional farming techniques? No. Will/should we all cut back on our meat, dairy, etc? Yes. But, then again being more mindful of what we all eat is going to be required regardless, if we’re going to manage to feed everyone.
Claiming that something is on its whole sustainable is rather loosely defined (i.e what level of impact is considered sustainable and on what metrics), so let’s look a little closer. What many are saying there is that process is still going to inherently be much more inefficient compared to growing plants directly for human consumption
It turns out to be the case that the worst-case production of any plants-based production comes out ahead compared to best-case production of meat, dairy, etc. on virtually all environmental metrics
If I source my beef or lamb from low-impact producers, could they have a lower footprint than plant-based alternatives? The evidence suggests, no: plant-based foods emit fewer greenhouse gases than meat and dairy, regardless of how they are produced.
[…]
Plant-based protein sources – tofu, beans, peas and nuts – have the lowest carbon footprint. This is certainly true when you compare average emissions. But it’s still true when you compare the extremes: there’s not much overlap in emissions between the worst producers of plant proteins, and the best producers of meat and dairy.
https://ourworldindata.org/less-meat-or-sustainable-meat
Plant-based foods have a significantly smaller footprint on the environment than animal-based foods. Even the least sustainable vegetables and cereals cause less environmental harm than the lowest impact meat and dairy products [9].
https://www.mdpi.com/2072-6643/14/8/1614/htm
Even true of synthetic fertilizer usage compared to the best case of animal manure
Thus, shifting from animal to plant sources of protein can substantially reduce fertilizer requirements, even with maximal use of animal manure
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0921344922006528
In terms of biodiversity
Livestock farmers often claim that their grazing systems “mimic nature”. If so, the mimicry is a crude caricature. A review of evidence from over 100 studies found that when livestock are removed from the land, the abundance and diversity of almost all groups of wild animals increases
If we compare more typical production rather than best to worst, the differences are even more apparent
To produce 1 kg of protein from kidney beans required approximately eighteen times less land, ten times less water, nine times less fuel, twelve times less fertilizer and ten times less pesticide in comparison to producing 1 kg of protein from beef
Holy shit massive wall of text lol
Because I see quite a lot of misinformation in this area, I created a doc of sources where I put relevant quotes as I look into things. It’s now 28 pages. You’ll probably see more walls of text from me on that front :)
Actually, do you have a link to those 28 pages? I’d be interested in reading through it all.
It’s not anywhere online, but I can DM you a copy of the file if you’d like
