Thanks for the responses. I've enjoyed the discussion with you. I may be out of the loop until Monday just FYI but I will come back to see what you've said.
Dizchu said:
Lightknight said:
The alternative is to not meet the food demand. An artificially low supply then means exorbitant prices that end up hurting the most vulnerable among us.
Or eat fewer foods that are unsustainable for the environment. You keep hammering in this point that somehow I should be eating chicken because broccoli has a higher carbon footprint per calorie (and as I said a few posts back, where are these "Kentucky Fried Broccoli" chains?). Yeah this might mean that meat should be more costly, but certain fish have increased in price because they are becoming too few.
Why are you singling out meat? Plants should be more expensive too under your regime according to their emission.
Please keep in mind that study I posted that was released this month where if we just changed our diet to meat the USDA's recommendations (less meat more veggies) that we'd be increasing energy use by nearly 40% and water use by 10%. That's not even going full vegetarian but just less servings of meat. That's also assuming we also reduce calorie intake just like you're recommending. If we ate less meat but maintained calorie intake then those numbers get much higher. Vegetarians exceed the USDA's recommendations of less meat and as such many may be actually inducing more harm to the environment without even knowing it just because previous studies foolishly used emissions per weight without ever pausing to think that we don't weigh our food by the tonnage before plating it but do consider it by the calorie. This has been a tremendous source of misleading data for us. This is major, people have been told to eat organic or do this or that in order to have a positive impact on the environment and have inadvertently been doing the opposite due to a lie.
I'm not saying that this makes vegetarianism bad. It just means that if you follow the number of servings of each food type in a vegetarian pyramid then you can easily do more harm than good unless you're specifically eating according to emissions which is something an omnivore can do too without cutting out several meats. Do you personally have a chart at home of emissions by food type or are you just eating things you want according to food group and nutrition?
Do you think we should form a food police? Limit and regulate population calorie intake? I'd love to see the black market that produces. Crack dealers become chicken dealers... Perhaps we should attach battery cables to food criminals' testicals and shock them every time they salivate? Are you OK with revoking individual rights in order to make them conform to your policies? Or are you just saying that if every person joined hands and sang a song in unison then unicorns and rainbows would appear and the future would be set? People aren't going to want to do this. It is within our nature to resist this both along the lines of forfeiting our personal freedom and our instinct to store.
The solution isn't to reduce supply though. High supply means cheap food which is good for the poor and I tend to get all pissy when people start advocating things that would hurt them. Not only that, but our country has a significantly lower spoilage waste proportion than other countries so we're actually doing better along the lines of the supply and demand ratios. So you're railing against the wrong country on these lines.
I know I've been sounding snarky here and there with my reductio absurdums, but one way to achieve this is to place an efficiency tax on the worst offenders that is specifically used to improve efficiency within those industries. This is a viable solution and considering the volume of food items sold it can end up only being a couple pennies per item rather than dollar shifting issues like screwing with the supply causes.
Of course not, and neither do you. You can't use evolutionary psychology to justify behaviours, only explain them. How many times do I have to say this?
That depends, if you're talking about telling people to eat less and I'm telling you that we naturally want a layer of fat to protect from scarce times then we are talking about demanding people do things they don't want to do.
Not really, the inherent understanding is that if you were going to reach for a leafy salad that a person who eats bacon instead would be doing three times better than you. I'm comparing a very popular vegetarian food item with a very popular omnivore food item. The comparison is valid though I also understand that you could eat something like brussel sprouts or nuts instead of either and come in lower.
No animal of that size can ever evolve to live in conditions as restrictive as they do.
This fact brought to us from thin air? You are making assumptions here. Humans born in these conditions adapt to them and we aren't even evolved for large herd groups.
If they're so suited to their environment, why does the lack of exercise and cramped conditions cause so much injury and disease? We can pump them full of as many antibiotics and steroids as we want, they're simply not meant to live in that way.
And yet the way they're living has drastically reduced emissions. Which do you place a higher premium on, free range cows or the environment? Because at the moment it's mathematically impossible for you to have both. We're more likely to come up with various strains of bacteria that consume waste and break down emissions than we are to have free range cows suddenly start producing enough calories per level of emission to compete with large farms. Imagine you are the supreme ruler of how cows are produced but cannot prevent them from being produced. Do you help the environment by leaving industry in place or do you help cows living conditions by requiring free range only?
Personification is cute and all but it isn't always right.
Because as we all know, humans are the only animals that have instinctual self-preservation and autonomy.
I'm unsure what your point is. Cows are already naturally large herd animals (as compared to humans which are small core family herd animals) and have been frequently kept in close proximity for all of humans' cultivation history of them. Same with buffalos who were at one point so numerous that they packed themselves into similar density rates naturally. So the close proximity may not be causing them any anxiety at all and we are just projecting that on them. The work of Temple Grandin did tremendous good in reducing stress being imposed on the cows and the industry really responded to it and benefitted from making the animals more at home. Yes, they are packed closely together but they are significantly less stressed now than they were back in the 70s. Things have only gotten better. More than half of the beef facilities in the US follow her designs.
There's no "staples of the vegetarian community". A vegetarian diet literally excludes one food group, that's all there is to it.
Every demographic has staples. Staples are merely the most common foods of any demographic. While I do understand that ignorant people asking if you get tired of eating salads all the time is reaching to point of asking black people about fried chicken in offense to the individual, the numbers bear out a significantly higher consumption of lettuce and several of the highest emitters.
http://ajcn.nutrition.org/content/78/3/626S/T4.expansion.html
Criticisms I have of this study (to be consistent if I'm going to criticize yours):
1. Low sample size proportion of vegetarians (they have over 13,000 respondents and only around 324 vegetarian respondents. That doesn't make this a bad study but the proportion of the respondents do not match the proportion of vegetarians to omnivores. This either means that vegetarians were significantly fewer in the US at the time of the study which is possible or there was an issue of randomizing the sample size to equally attract vegetarians). However, depending on how the randomization was off, 300+ samples is plenty to perform a study on the vegetarian population if they were spread out regionally. I will also point out that this study is decidedly pro-vegetarian so the randomization isn't as important to your side of things as it is to mine since randomization typically benefits bias.
2. The study is from 2003. A number of leafy green alternatives like Quinoa have exploded on the market. However, newly introduced food items tend to have significantly higher carbon emissions until the market matures.
3. The study is grouping Vegans along with Vegetarians. So the animal derived numbers like lactose are deflated.
Take last year for example, quinoa recipes were the most common vegetarian dishes viewed and downloaded (I just googled most common vegetarian foods and a few recipe sites had published this by year and quinoa has been mighty popular across all of them). Yet quinoa has an incredibly high carbon footprint (even just accounting for the transportation alone) and it has recently been learned that our demand for it has caused poor south American inhabitants to be unable to afford what was once a staple in their diet and that is causing some pretty significant issues for them (particularly Bolivia). Though, I admit this wouldn't just be vegetarians downloading those recipes.
I'll also point out that vegetarians appear to drink more than twice as much wine and wine is a significant carbon emitter. Apparently to the point where environment conscious wine enthusiasts have established a break even line down the middle of the country to determine when a Californian wine is more environmentally friendly compared to a wine from France.
Why are you asking me? There's a food group that is a heavy burden on the environment when there's such high demand, all I think is that less of it should be consumed.
Heavy how and by what definition? What is heavy and what is light? We've established that lettuce is three times that of bacon? But is either of those high? Is emitting twice what a tomato emits per calorie bad or are these both not really that bad individually? Just because people eat a lot of beef so the total footprint of the industry is large doesn't mean that swapping it out with something else would be better. Like we already stated, just moving over to a less meat model appears to make things worse in energy consumption, water usage, and overall emissions.
The emissions produced by agriculture in general is largely necessary. We aren't going to see it magically go away. Even reducing to the recommended calories you're talking about is just a 9% reduction. That's downward sure, but still less than 5% overall which isn't going to change the fact that feeding humans incurs cost.
2. The study is for the UK but the blogger is applying them to the US which isn't the same demographic.
You're right, it isn't. People in the USA consume an additional 40-50% meat per individual. http://chartsbin.com/view/12730
It's not just down to raw numbers, our emissions per calorie are lower too. Remember, the UK has to import a hell of a lot of food and that's an instant jump in their food emissions since transportation is a major emitter. Me, I can go to my neighbor and by beef and cheese. I can go to my other neighbor and get chicken, eggs and veggies. I can literally watch my plant and animal food grow year round if I want to purchase from them and cut out transportation, pesticides (if they use pesticides, it's usually a jalapeno, garlic, onion blend because they have an organic rating). As far as I'm concerned my own personal carbon emission would require it's own separate emissions testing. But my main point is that we have these farms all over the country and major retailers like Walmart *shudder* are beginning to source local foods in a way that has to have a tremendous impact on transportation emissions.
5. The study failed to account for waste emissions which are much higher in veggies and fruit. This is HUGE and the study acknowledges that this could have significantly reduced the difference between categories and even linked to a 2013 study that indicated veggies would be much higher waste emitters.
But this isn't a veggie vs. meat eater debate. It's curious how you persistently try to make this personal, you inquire about my diet and make assumptions about vegetarian/vegan diets. Which is irrelevant. The fact that the amount of fruit and veg that is wasted has to be taken into account to reduce the difference relates to my "supply and demand" point from earlier. The fact that less meat is wasted
yet still causes more CO2 emissions
per calorie than most other foods does not support your argument very well.
You literally presented this study as a counter to my comments on how much worse veggies are than we thought. I'm showing that they missed HUGE emissions that are much higher in veggies and they even acknowledged it. That's not even addressing that the emissions were calculated by weight and not calorie which is an even bigger mistake. With all that in mind, the study just released may be exactly in line when waste and emission per calorie is concerned. Then again, the data is old in the one you linked so who knows what has changed.
We have been discussing both the overall merits of various diets as well as your own internal consistency. You have placed a premium on your desire to remain internally consistent. If you'd like me to stop following that chain of thought then I'm more than happy to do so. I just wanted to point out areas of inconsistency in your environmental focus on vegetarianism compared to the actual impact of vegetarianism which, as of 2015, appears to have exceeded meat diets overall. It's no wonder if something like lettuce is that much higher though.
Yeah and I recognise that as a weakness. But, let's not forget this, the argument you're making hinges on "a kilo of broccoli causes more CO2 emissions than a kilo of chicken".
No, my argument is that emissions per calories between many popular veggies and fruits are similar or higher than several types of meat and also not that far from the emissions per calorie of beef albeit still lower.
"Emissions per kilo" is something I've been systematically disputing because we eat by calories, not weight. If we take away a kg of meat we have to replace the calorie loss with significantly more kgs of whatever else due to the calorie efficiency of meat. So it has been dishonest of researchers to use weight in the past.
Do you believe that people who frequent vegetarian sites are a valid cross-section of the overall population of the UK?
Are you asking me if I believe that vegetarian sites are a good place to find... vegetarians?
No, I'm asking if vegetarians who care enough to frequent a vegetarian centered site are going to be representative of the overall population of vegetarians or will they likely express even healthier lifestyles like the study acknowledges in their own criticisms?
The study released this year that found lettuce to be three times the emissions of bacon is a newly released study and pertains directly to the US.
Yeah, the study that led to a bunch of clickbait "those pesky vegetarians aren't as great as they think they are" news articles. Which all made the same mistake you're making.
No, studies have recently figured out that emission to calories is the correct quantifier which already put plants in a less superior emission place. The 2015 study saw greater emissions in lettuce and fewer emissions in pork. However, do remember that pork was already low on the list of emitters to begin with so them saying "bacon" isn't really that novel. The three times higher emissions is, but bacon being unhealthy does not mean it is automatically going to emit more. I'm sure the study still has beef above lettuce though.
I'm sorry if the study's findings have led people to levy insults at you. That doesn't make the findings untrue though. It is in line with other studies that have adjusted for emissions by calorie. Since you appear to personally eat low carbon foods, then at least you have a personal rebuttal to address such insults.
Lettuce and broccoli aren't substitutions for meat in a diet that lacks meat. I mean, generally there's lettuce in beef burgers am I right? What I'd like to see is how much of that lettuce is produced for salads and how much of it is produced for Big Macs.
A sliver of lettuce isn't really in the same ballpark as a bowl of it. The study did show vegetarians as having eaten nearly 50% more lettuce than beef eaters but I'm not certain if they tracked a sliver of lettuce on a burger or not. I personally do not enjoy lettuce on burgers for what its worth. The heat of the burger screws with the texture of the lettuce in an unpleasant way. I do like tomato though. But vegetarians do eat 27% more tomatoes too.
You're forgetting about methane here. Also "local environmental pollution" doesn't happen in a closed system. Water sources can spread over continents.
Methane is included in the other emission studies. Seeing as fertilizer is a tremendous contributor to local environmental pollution then I hope you can see why this isn't a problem that is mutually exclusive to meat.
Many aspects of this are highly debatable. You're assuming:
1) The regulations are adhered to
2) The regulations themselves are of a sufficient standard
Let's not ignore how many corners get cut by industries to maximize profit.
If 1 is not true, then that shit needs to get taken care of. You can I could picket arm in arm on that crap (teehee, manure puns).
If 2 is not true then that should also be fixed.
You're not going to get an argument out of me on these points. Producing food sustainably should be part of the price of the food. What's sad is that it would be a trivial amount of just pennies per item to fix this overall.
