Can Meat Eaters be Easy to Offend?

[SuperScrub]

Say you like your steaks well-done and you'll have the answer to your question.

Ever get the feeling that people that like well done steaks just have never had a good cut of beef before?

No and since what other people choose to do with their steak isn't any of my business I don't care.

 

[Addendum_Forthcoming]

-cut-

The problem with the 'meat for ecology' argument is they don't chart the damages that livestock do (seriously, look at what happens to a single creek bed after you introduce only a few heads of cattle). In order to meet that 2000 calorie diet, you will find it easier do so with a vegetarian diet by land dedicated to agriculture otherwise given to livestock. Also, because you're using less land means more land given over to active carbon sinking CO2 emissions.

Secondly, most of those vegetarian models ypou linked still had cheeses .... which means cattle. Fish makes sense, but any form of cattle is going to be worse at meeting calorie intake targets than growing of fruits and vegetables. If anything, the growing and greater consumption of mangoes would deliver more nutrition, more energy, than anything else by yard of land given to agriculture and may ultimately be the way to go. Mangoes are the miracle fruit. Fantastic carbon sinking potential of orcharding them, fantastically nutritious, it goes great with ANYTHING, and it's dead easy to grow if you're in the right climate. Wonderfully efficient in terms of nutrition production compared to amount of materials spent in soil improving.

Which is perhaps why US standards of CO2 emission shouldn't be what you look at, given the limited means by which to grow a whole variety of fruits and vegetables which would better suit the nutritional intake of humanity in terms of a global market. When you take into account total land, total water usage, total nutrition by value... cattle are wasteful and far worse than even a badly managed orchard.

There is no argument. If you want a greener planet, a focus of vegetable and fruit production is far better than running cattle. No argument. I've seen how much produce a small orchard can maintain... cattle require 30 times the amount of pasture. Fruit orchards also act as carbon offsets... which is a two for one benefit of better nutrition, greater volumes, and greater environmental usage of land. There is a reason why mangoes are eaten everywhere in the tropics and subtropics. Look up what a green mango tree looks like when it is reaching optimal fruit harvesting maturity. There is no argument as to the far superior benefits of greater fruit and vegetable consumption. Running cattle also quicker destroys top soil. The force pressure of their hooves reduce the rate by which foraged grasses can replenish themselves.

If you don't know what the effects of 'poaching' (soil compaction) is, I invite you to any farm with dams and where sheep, horse or cattle have been ranged. Observe the land all around said dams. Nothing will grow. Not a year later after you've moved livestock onwards. Not two years later. Not five years later. The soil has been hardened, the grass dies ... it's just bare earth. Dusty and dead.

A cattle paddock will be depleted faster than an orchard will, or a vegetable and grain farm. Mangoes as I was pointing to before? You only need to fertilise once with blood and bone right after harvest. That's all it needs. It will provide far more nutrition, with less environmental impact, than a cow on a 2.5 acre lot. That's a given. It will actually help reduce carbon dioxide in air. About the most environmentally unsound things concerning a fruit orchard is harvesting mechanics, of which are still inifinitely more ecofriendly than destroying acre after acre of once viable top soil due to hoof compaction and overgrazing. Simply looking at CO2 emissions of farms is a fucking stupid way to examine the problem solely. Soil erosion, total water usage, total nutrition. If you can feed more people with less, and thus commit less of the Earth's ecosystems to grazing, that is a far more positive ecological measure. More land remaining as forests means morew carbon dioxide sinks.

Running cattle is not merely destructive to land and devastating by emission standards, you just need more land. Cattle happen after a long chain of photosynthesising plants. Energy isn't magically created .... foods closer to that point of primarily utilising photosynthesis for chemical energy are always going to be more efficient sources of ernergy in terms of space, emissions, and continuous harvesting. This is compounded by the fact that cattle requires sound confitions. They need cleaning with chemicals, they need constant food supply (which creates more wastage), they need medical supplies, they need housing, and the effects of natural disasters such as drought or storm hit them greater.

Whilst you can say that drought and storm affect crops as well, keep in mind that cattle require greater feed volumes also when grazing fails. Cattle are simply worse for the environment. In every conceivable way they persistently fail to live up to the nutritional benefits of high vegetable and fruit diets. The persostent myth that cattle generate less CO2 emissions relies on people forgetting they need more land, and more 'support' assets that in total generate far greater environmental distress. A cow is not merely a cow. It is huge amounts of feed, water, available grazing, medical supplies, chemical cleaners, transport, and slaughter operations.

Frankly I think more humans should eat bugs. If you made the meat-eater argument centered on insectivorous cuisine, I might have agreed. But eating insects is the way of the future. I think that if you're vegetariuan for 'ecological reasons' you're doing it wrong. If you wanted to be a more ecologically positive you should be rooting for a high insect diet. Not only that, but insects should be looked at when considering colonisation of space. In terms of protein, iron, other necessary vitamins and minerals, you can beat 1000 hectares of cattle production with a environmentally sealed hectare-sized warehouse given over to insect production.

With a single kilo of biological waste, I can produce 12 times as much nutrition from black soldier fly maggot fat than you can with a cow and a kilo of perfectly edible grain. So you can literally turn food waste into more food. Without chemicals, without all the other bullshit. And you know the best thing? Far better for your body. You could even easier automate the entire process, reducing necessary labour.... making all that available animal fat cost peanuts.

Also probably better in terms of animal rights, particularly when looking at better efficiency protocols enacted elsewhere in the world where cattle suffer major distress. Not only that, reduced CO2 emissions in terms of transporting pallets of insects, better economy by space in stores. Not only that, but the popularising of eating insects and the greater technological knowhow of farming insects will mean that more skills concerning insect production will filter into poorer classes of people worldwide. Meaning more people can access high protein foods by their ownsome, on a regular basis, with little lands.

More people eating for less space, money, and time. That seems like a win-win to me. But cattle are certainly far more extravagant in terms of cost and production than vegetables and fruits. It's not hard to see that when you actually go to a stockyard and see for yourself the environmental impact of running cattle.

(Edit) I'm skeptical of US studies concerning food and food security. Mainly because no one wastes green stock like an American family. In the Philippines, nothing is wasted. Many families have chickens or pigs where all meagre scraps go to. Nothing is taken for granted. Unlike the US, Japan, Australia or Europe... empty lots of unsold land don't simply stay empty. Communities will use it until construction or habitation. Life is both cheap and expensive. Looking towards how poorer communities like the Philippines operates in terms of fruit, grain and vegetable production offers immediate and simple solutions to finding new ways to feed people and fight green waste.

 

[MishaK]

This doesn't seem like a real question, just like an attempt to start a fight. 6 Pages of Mission Accomplished there.

 

[Lightknight]

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.

Just had to respond to this...

Within any diet, fruit and vegetables are not an important source of calories. The nutritional value of that food group is in things like certain vitamins and fibers. Vegetarians are also not going around by replacing meat with heaps veggies, because meat serves a different purpose within diets. It's not just a source of calories, but also of, for instance, vitamin B6, B12 and iron. So if you decide to stop eating meat, you're going to have a big sickly problem if you don't replace it properly. Generally this means eating a bit more of other food groups. Nuts are a good source of protein and iron, so adding a handful of those to your daily food intake helps. Beans are pretty great too.

Whether these replacements come with a worrysome carbon footprint depends on the choices you make. My neighbours have a walnut tree and I buy a few kilo from them every year. You'd have a hard time measuring the carbon footprint of those walnuts. Imported almonds, however, are a whole different story. It's the same with veggies and fruit. Pay attention to what can be grown locally and to when it's in season, and you'll leave much smaller carbon food prints.

I didn't argue that all vegetarians eat is veggies. It is established that they eat significantly more veggies than omnivores in addition to other things which would also qualify as high emission products. As such, the overage vegetarian diet has a higher carbon footprint per calorie than an omnivore diet does. That is certainly contra-conventional wisdom but the original belief was only held because of the original mistake of using emission by weight rather than by calorie. Had we been using emission by calorie all along we would have recognized that non-meat is extremely inefficient in calorie by weight and as such it takes far more pounds of non-meat to replace the calories lost when substituting it for a pound of meat. With this in mind, you can look at nearly every study produced in the past along the lines of emissions per pounds and when you do the conversion to calories you can see the same information established there being produced today now that the right metrics are in place.

The problem is that some of the other sources, like Quinoa (which provides a variety of benefits to vegetarians like 24g of protein, 8% daily value of calcium and 43% daily value of protein per cup), can be worse than nearly anything else. Quinoa was the most popular vegetarian recipe of the last couple of years and yet it has a significant human and emission cost. From the distant transportation (usually one of the biggest source of emissions of a lot of other things) and non-mature production methods (see inefficiency and waste) to our demands skyrocketing the local prices to the point where the natives of quinoa producing countries can no longer afford what used to be a cheap staple in their nation. That's just one item but one that is increasing significantly in popularity due to those benefits and versatility in food preparation.

The average vegetarian diet does include more vegetables (more than 25% more than omnivores), it includes more than double wine consumption (significant carbon footprint), with the most significant (proportionate) difference being legume consumption. That's fine but overall it's still a small segment of the average diet:

http://ajcn.nutrition.org/content/78/3/626S/T4.expansion.html

Keep in mind though, that study is from 2003, we have had some significant changes in diet from things like quinoa which weren't even a line item in that study (Grains included: Bread, Cereal, Rice and pasta). So at the time grains were only 15% more common in a vegetarian diet with legumes doing most of the footwork in the protein department. That ratio has likely changed and 2013 was the US year of the quinoa after all.

As stated in the overall post you responded to, if Americans converted to even just the USDA recommended diet which is significantly closer to a vegetarian diet compared to our average diets now, then we would see significant increases in energy consumption, water footprint, and overall emissions. That's also if we all only went down to the 2,000 recommended calories which also wouldn't happen. A full move to an average vegetarian diet should increase that significantly.

Remember, we aren't talking about the vegetarians who get it and organize their diets to specifically accommodate emissions. We're talking about the average vegetarian.

 

[Addendum_Forthcoming]

I didn't argue that all vegetarians eat is veggies. It is established that they eat significantly more veggies than omnivores in addition to other things which would also qualify as high emission products. As such, the overage vegetarian diet has a higher carbon footprint per calorie than an omnivore diet does. That is certainly contra-conventional wisdom but the original belief was only held because of the original mistake of using emission by weight rather than by calorie. Had we been using emission by calorie all along we would have recognized that non-meat is extremely inefficient in calorie by weight and as such it takes far more pounds of non-meat to replace the calories lost when substituting it for a pound of meat. With this in mind, you can look at nearly every study produced in the past along the lines of emissions per pounds and when you do the conversion to calories you can see the same information established there being produced today now that the right metrics are in place.

The problem is that some of the other sources, like Quinoa (which provides a variety of benefits to vegetarians like 24g of protein, 8% daily value of calcium and 43% daily value of protein per cup), can be worse than nearly anything else. Quinoa was the most popular vegetarian recipe of the last couple of years and yet it has a significant human and emission cost. From the distant transportation (usually one of the biggest source of emissions of a lot of other things) and non-mature production methods (see inefficiency and waste) to our demands skyrocketing the local prices to the point where the natives of quinoa producing countries can no longer afford what used to be a cheap staple in their nation. That's just one item but one that is increasing significantly in popularity due to those benefits and versatility in food preparation.

The average vegetarian diet does include more vegetables (more than 25% more than omnivores), it includes more than double wine consumption (significant carbon footprint), with the most significant (proportionate) difference being legume consumption. That's fine but overall it's still a small segment of the average diet:

http://ajcn.nutrition.org/content/78/3/626S/T4.expansion.html

Keep in mind though, that study is from 2003, we have had some significant changes in diet from things like quinoa which weren't even a line item in that study (Grains included: Bread, Cereal, Rice and pasta). So at the time grains were only 15% more common in a vegetarian diet with legumes doing most of the footwork in the protein department. That ratio has likely changed and 2013 was the US year of the quinoa after all.

As stated in the overall post you responded to, if Americans converted to even just the USDA recommended diet which is significantly closer to a vegetarian diet compared to our average diets now, then we would see significant increases in energy consumption, water footprint, and overall emissions. That's also if we all only went down to the 2,000 recommended calories which also wouldn't happen. A full move to an average vegetarian diet should increase that significantly.

Remember, we aren't talking about the vegetarians who get it and organize their diets to specifically accommodate emissions. We're talking about the average vegetarian.

But carbon emissions alone isn't the issue. Soil erosion, soil compaction, overgrazing, excessive land use, etc. For starters, the USDA model diet still contains cheeses, which contains cattle. Also, water consumption? Yeah ... cattle still use way more water by volume. An adult cow will consume 24 gallons a day in a 94F high. They're a mammal and they themselves require feed to supplement their grazing, also. Requiring more total water supply. Also their hooves create the effect known as 'poaching' which reduces a soil's means to store water, creating denitration and desertification far sooner than crops.

Your idea only works if you assume the land replenishes itself each year and there's no consequences whatsoever. A cattle owner will have to move their cattle far sooner than someone with an orchard will have to find a new orchard. If people were to cut cheese and meat consumption, you would have far less land loss, greater carbon sinking via plant growth. There are commercial vineyards that have been constantly operating for centuries in Europe. Constantly operating. Just how long do you think they would last if they instead decided to run a head of cattle per acre/acre and a half?

About the only benefit of livestock is you can run them on land which is pretty low yielding in terms of fruit and vegetable planting. But that's of marginal benefit when you consider that sheep, horses, cattle ... all of them permanently damage the topsoil far sooner, and in low yield environments the effects of soil erosion from the clearing of forests, disturbance of creek beds and the water absorption rate of soils means long term ecological damage.

Oh, and if you want to see just what effect overgraving can have, I invite you to look at the border country between Israel and Egypt as one of the more famous examples of the effect of running cattle and what happens when you push for greater meat supply... Israel, it's green. Egypt, the land is largely dead. Same climate, different agricultural practices. Wildly different results.

People who push the idea that vegetable and orchard development are worse than cattle are on drugs. You only need to see what happens to a paddock of once viable land and what a few thousand pairs of hooves will do to it in a year or two. The idea that cattle generate less emissions is predicated on the idea that there will always be grazing land to run cattle. Which is insane. It's like saying we shouldn't look for a suitable substance to replace crude oil because it would cost us more, and simply pretend that we'll always have crude oil in plentiful supply.

 

[NPC009]

[...]

Remember, we aren't talking about the vegetarians who get it and organize their diets to specifically accommodate emissions. We're talking about the average vegetarian.

And the avarage vegetarian is as dumb as the average person, sadly...

Still, you're making it look as if you can't be ecologically responsible as a vegetarian, while that is simply not true. And what I find quite strange about your sources, is that they speak of 'the average American'. The United States takes up a good chunk of a continent and as a result there is big variety in climate, terrain and more. When looking at ecological impact, there is not no single diet that's ideal for every American.

I'm from a (non-American) region with a lot of farmland and there are near monthly debates about what the increasing number of lifestock is doing to our environment. People consuming less meat and dairy would have a big impact on our area. I have no beef with people who enjoy a steak once in a while, but overconsumption is bad for everyone.

 

[Lightknight]

-cut-

The problem with the 'meat for ecology' argument is they don't chart the damages that livestock do (seriously, look at what happens to a single creek bed after you introduce only a few heads of cattle). In order to meet that 2000 calorie diet, you will find it easier do so with a vegetarian diet by land dedicated to agriculture otherwise given to livestock. Also, because you're using less land means more land given over to active carbon sinking CO2 emissions.

Actually, since meat farms are required to mitigate the manure impact on their local environment we do have measurements of this. Manure used to fertilize veggies can also have a significant impact on the environment but their pesticides can be FAR worse.

Secondly, most of those vegetarian models ypou linked still had cheeses .... which means cattle. Fish makes sense, but any form of cattle is going to be worse at meeting calorie intake targets than growing of fruits and vegetables.

Yes, vegetarians eat cheese. That's why they're included in the vegetarian models I presented. As of 2003 (let me know if you find a newer article comparing what vegetarians eat with what omnivores eat on average in the US), vegetarians ate 24% more cheese than omnivores did.

But that's mostly irrelevant. There is a misconception that all cattle is the same, but that's not true. There are meat cows and there are dairy cows and the two have a different carbon footprint. While cows aren't that efficient at converting feed into calories for meat, they do a perfectly fine job producing dairy. When looking at emissions per 1,000 calories of cheese (3.6), it (along with yogurt (3.6) and eggs (3.4)) is a low emitter that is closer to tofu (2.9) and potatoes (3.8) than to broccoli (5.9) or potatoes (6.1). The only thing that put cheese high on the lists before was when studies erroneously used emissions by weight but to replace one pound of cheese calories you'd have to use several pounds of other stuff. So even if something like lettuce was significantly lower per pound than cheese where emissions are concerned, you would have to use multiple pounds of said lettuce which multiplies the emissions by each pound increased to make it far less efficient per calorie.

If anything, the growing and greater consumption of mangoes would deliver more nutrition, more energy, than anything else by yard of land given to agriculture and may ultimately be the way to go. Mangoes are the miracle fruit. Fantastic carbon sinking potential of orcharding them, fantastically nutritious, it goes great with ANYTHING, and it's dead easy to grow if you're in the right climate. Wonderfully efficient in terms of nutrition production compared to amount of materials spent in soil improving.

No, that's simply not true.

Mangos have a tremendously high water footprint which is big all by itself.
Mangoes just have a comparable carbon sinking potential with other plants. It's higher than the carrot, for example.
Transportation is a major carbon emitter and mangoes aren't grown locally in most of the developed world.

As for its nutrition, it's also comparable with other foods. I mean, having vitamins and protein isn't unique to mangoes.

Mango is a good food with relatively low emissions. But it isn't the savior of foods and diets. It has a good amount of some vitamins but none of others just like any food types.

Which is perhaps why US standards of CO2 emission shouldn't be what you look at, given the limited means by which to grow a whole variety of fruits and vegetables which would better suit the nutritional intake of humanity in terms of a global market. When you take into account total land, total water usage, total nutrition by value... cattle are wasteful and far worse than even a badly managed orchard.

"Far worse" no. "Worse"? Generally.

There is no argument. If you want a greener planet, a focus of vegetable and fruit production is far better than running cattle. No argument. I've seen how much produce a small orchard can maintain... cattle require 30 times the amount of pasture. Fruit orchards also act as carbon offsets... which is a two for one benefit of better nutrition, greater volumes, and greater environmental usage of land. There is a reason why mangoes are eaten everywhere in the tropics and subtropics. Look up what a green mango tree looks like when it is reaching optimal fruit harvesting maturity. There is no argument as to the far superior benefits of greater fruit and vegetable consumption. Running cattle also quicker destroys top soil. The force pressure of their hooves reduce the rate by which foraged grasses can replenish themselves.

That's not true, a focus on a vegetarian diet would increase overall emissions. Just by reducing servings of meat to come into line with the USDA recommendations which is far more veggie and fruit focused than the current average diet would increase emissions by 9%. I know it sounds counterintuitive, but beef isn't that much higher than veggies and just things like broccoli and tomatoes together make up more than beef's carbon footprint per calorie. You say that it's no argument, but just because beef is popular does not mean that is automatically beyond the threshold of acceptable emissions per calorie. What is the acceptable emission level per calorie and who gets to define it?

A pound of beef (453.6 grams) is 1136.6 calories. A pound of lettuce is 63 calories (just googled the nutrition, not sure what type of lettuce they're basing that off of). In order to replace a pound of beef you'd need 18 pounds of lettuce. So whenever you see a number of emissions per kg for lettuce, you should mentally multiply it by 18 to see its emissions per calorie as compared to beef.

 

[Lightknight]

[...]

Remember, we aren't talking about the vegetarians who get it and organize their diets to specifically accommodate emissions. We're talking about the average vegetarian.

And the avarage vegetarian is as dumb as the average person, sadly...

Still, you're making it look as if you can't be ecologically responsible as a vegetarian, while that is simply not true. And what I find quite strange about your sources, is that they speak of 'the average American'. The United States takes up a good chunk of a continent and as a result there is big variety in climate, terrain and more. When looking at ecological impact, there is not no single diet that's ideal for every American.

I'm from a (non-American) region with a lot of farmland and there are near monthly debates about what the increasing number of lifestock is doing to our environment. People consuming less meat and dairy would have a big impact on our area. I have no beef with people who enjoy a steak once in a while, but overconsumption is bad for everyone.

The US has the lion's share of available research data. If you want me to run the numbers by another country or region then that region will have to start producing more research to make comparisons simpler. Europe is the closest to the US in availability of research but that's more segregated by country rather than landmass. Since America also has a ton of farmland and a significant agricultural footprint it makes it a rather convenient place to compare items.

If you can explain why the US market isn't a valid landmass to compare products then I would be glad to adjust my approach to the issue. But believe it or not, 1 kg of carbon emissions in the US is the same as 1 kg of carbon emissions produced wherever you're from. So I'm having a hard time believing that the CO2 "standards" of relative countries have anything to do with the discussion at hand.

 

[Lightknight]

I didn't argue that all vegetarians eat is veggies. It is established that they eat significantly more veggies than omnivores in addition to other things which would also qualify as high emission products. As such, the overage vegetarian diet has a higher carbon footprint per calorie than an omnivore diet does. That is certainly contra-conventional wisdom but the original belief was only held because of the original mistake of using emission by weight rather than by calorie. Had we been using emission by calorie all along we would have recognized that non-meat is extremely inefficient in calorie by weight and as such it takes far more pounds of non-meat to replace the calories lost when substituting it for a pound of meat. With this in mind, you can look at nearly every study produced in the past along the lines of emissions per pounds and when you do the conversion to calories you can see the same information established there being produced today now that the right metrics are in place.

The problem is that some of the other sources, like Quinoa (which provides a variety of benefits to vegetarians like 24g of protein, 8% daily value of calcium and 43% daily value of protein per cup), can be worse than nearly anything else. Quinoa was the most popular vegetarian recipe of the last couple of years and yet it has a significant human and emission cost. From the distant transportation (usually one of the biggest source of emissions of a lot of other things) and non-mature production methods (see inefficiency and waste) to our demands skyrocketing the local prices to the point where the natives of quinoa producing countries can no longer afford what used to be a cheap staple in their nation. That's just one item but one that is increasing significantly in popularity due to those benefits and versatility in food preparation.

The average vegetarian diet does include more vegetables (more than 25% more than omnivores), it includes more than double wine consumption (significant carbon footprint), with the most significant (proportionate) difference being legume consumption. That's fine but overall it's still a small segment of the average diet:

http://ajcn.nutrition.org/content/78/3/626S/T4.expansion.html

Keep in mind though, that study is from 2003, we have had some significant changes in diet from things like quinoa which weren't even a line item in that study (Grains included: Bread, Cereal, Rice and pasta). So at the time grains were only 15% more common in a vegetarian diet with legumes doing most of the footwork in the protein department. That ratio has likely changed and 2013 was the US year of the quinoa after all.

As stated in the overall post you responded to, if Americans converted to even just the USDA recommended diet which is significantly closer to a vegetarian diet compared to our average diets now, then we would see significant increases in energy consumption, water footprint, and overall emissions. That's also if we all only went down to the 2,000 recommended calories which also wouldn't happen. A full move to an average vegetarian diet should increase that significantly.

Remember, we aren't talking about the vegetarians who get it and organize their diets to specifically accommodate emissions. We're talking about the average vegetarian.

But carbon emissions alone isn't the issue. Soil erosion, soil compaction, overgrazing, excessive land use, etc. For starters, the USDA model diet still contains cheeses, which contains cattle. Also, water consumption? Yeah ... cattle still use way more water by volume. An adult cow will consume 24 gallons a day in a 94F high. They're a mammal and they themselves require feed to supplement their grazing, also. Requiring more total water supply. Also their hooves create the effect known as 'poaching' which reduces a soil's means to store water, creating denitration and desertification far sooner than crops.

Your idea only works if you assume the land replenishes itself each year and there's no consequences whatsoever. A cattle owner will have to move their cattle far sooner than someone with an orchard will have to find a new orchard. If people were to cut cheese and meat consumption, you would have far less land loss, greater carbon sinking via plant growth. There are commercial vineyards that have been constantly operating for centuries in Europe. Constantly operating. Just how long do you think they would last if they instead decided to run a head of cattle per acre/acre and a half?

About the only benefit of livestock is you can run them on land which is pretty low yielding in terms of fruit and vegetable planting. But that's of marginal benefit when you consider that sheep, horses, cattle ... all of them permanently damage the topsoil far sooner, and in low yield environments the effects of soil erosion from the clearing of forests, disturbance of creek beds and the water absorption rate of soils means long term ecological damage.

Oh, and if you want to see just what effect overgraving can have, I invite you to look at the border country between Israel and Egypt as one of the more famous examples of the effect of running cattle and what happens when you push for greater meat supply... Israel, it's green. Egypt, the land is largely dead. Same climate, different agricultural practices. Wildly different results.

People who push the idea that vegetable and orchard development are worse than cattle are on drugs. You only need to see what happens to a paddock of once viable land and what a few thousand pairs of hooves will do to it in a year or two. The idea that cattle generate less emissions is predicated on the idea that there will always be grazing land to run cattle. Which is insane. It's like saying we shouldn't look for a suitable substance to replace crude oil because it would cost us more, and simply pretend that we'll always have crude oil in plentiful supply.

Is your assumption that the land used for grazing then needs to be available to be converted into farm land? If so, what is the problem with a unit of land being converted into land specifically for one designated purpose? Beef feed isn't usually grazed, it's typically imported. That's one of the main reasons that emissions are higher for beef because it includes an entire product of produce within its emissions. You want to tell me about the impact of cattle on a plot of land? It's nothing compared to the impact of pouring concrete and building a shopping mall or industrial complex on one. But that's OK, because that is what the land is being designed to use. It's not like there isn't other land that is itself set aside for farming.

 

[Addendum_Forthcoming]

Yes, vegetarians eat cheese. That's why they're included in the vegetarian models I presented. As of 2003 (let me know if you find a newer article comparing what vegetarians eat with what omnivores eat on average in the US), vegetarians ate 24% more cheese than omnivores did.

Which is why Western vegetarians shouldn't even be looked at. Most cultures eat some form of animal, but if you actually take total animal products consumed, your average Filipino is more vegetarian than an American vegetarian.

But that's mostly irrelevant. There is a misconception that all cattle is the same, but that's not true. There are meat cows and there are dairy cows and the two have a different carbon footprint. While cows aren't that efficient at converting feed into calories for meat, they do a perfectly fine job producing dairy. When looking at emissions per 1,000 calories of cheese (3.6), it (along with yogurt (3.6) and eggs (3.4)) is a low emitter that is closer to tofu (2.9) and potatoes (3.8) than to broccoli (5.9) or potatoes (6.1). The only thing that put cheese high on the lists before was when studies erroneously used emissions by weight but to replace one pound of cheese calories you'd have to use several pounds of other stuff. So even if something like lettuce was significantly lower per pound than cheese where emissions are concerned, you would have to use multiple pounds of said lettuce which multiplies the emissions by each pound increased to make it far less efficient per calorie.

The difference being that cow pastures are many multitudes larger than actual vegetable farms. With proper rotation farming practices, crop growing is by dint of using less land and will commit a far greater reduction of soil erosion. There is not one scientist worth their salt that will tell you soil erosion happens becauses of orchards or crops and pretend cattle are not far worse.

What you're also neglecting is that soil poaching also drastically increases N2O that would otherwise be converted by ground bearing bacterium that would convert it into N2. What you also neglect to show is the fact that one of the best greenhouse gas sinks is grasses and porous soils. Both of which critically affected by the running of livestock. Which means all those low yield properties you destroy by running cattle, not only do you decrease nitration, but you also destroy the means for the soil to recover.

No, that's simply not true.

Yes, it is actually.

Mangos have a tremendously high water footprint which is big all by itself.
Mangoes just have a comparable carbon sinking potential with other plants. It's higher than the carrot, for example.
Transportation is a major carbon emitter and mangoes aren't grown locally in most of the developed world.

If you have proper water drainage, total water consumnption isn't an issue. Philippines doesn't have a water problem because 'too many mangoes' ... it has a water problem because there's not enough water catchment. Vietmnam doesn't have a water problem because of too many mangoes, it has a problem because it doesn't have proper water catchment .... starting to see a pattern here? More over, I can guarantee you that running livestock does more to reduce water absorption rates than growing a few trees. Which is why livestock will always be worse. Not only do they require a LOT of water, but they destroy the land's ability to store it.

Mangoes chew up a lot of water ... but they produce a metric fuckton of fruit. The conversion rate is sound. Oranges are also pretty good, so I hear.

Mango is a good food with relatively low emissions. But it isn't the savior of foods and diets. It has a good amount of some vitamins but none of others just like any food types.

Who said anything about eating mangoes all day long? As a fruit, it is phenomenal. As a single food item that can be mass grown very easily, and can act as a good carbon offset and that in the right climate it is FAR BETTER than running cattle. I would certainly take my chances eating nothing but various types of mangoes than I would eating nothing but various types of cows. I'm pretty sure most of us would die pretty darn soon ... some of us might handle it pretty darn well, but all of them live in the Arctic circle and I'm pretty sure they won't be giving up seals anytime soon to try to grow mangoes.

"Far worse" no. "Worse"? Generally.

Worse generally I'll buy. I've seen some pretty atrocious banana farms, to be honest. But truth be told it's easier to improve orchard and crop farming practices than it is to entirely redesign the physics of a cow.

That's not true, a focus on a vegetarian diet would increase overall emissions. Just by reducing servings of meat to come into line with the USDA recommendations which is far more veggie and fruit focused than the current average diet would increase emissions by 9%. I know it sounds counterintuitive, but beef isn't that much higher than veggies and just things like broccoli and tomatoes together make up more than beef's carbon footprint per calorie. You say that it's no argument, but just because beef is popular does not mean that is automatically beyond the threshold of acceptable emissions per calorie. What is the acceptable emission level per calorie and who gets to define it?

A pound of beef (453.6 grams) is 1136.6 calories. A pound of lettuce is 63 calories (just googled the nutrition, not sure what type of lettuce they're basing that off of). In order to replace a pound of beef you'd need 18 pounds of lettuce. So whenever you see a number of emissions per kg for lettuce, you should mentally multiply it by 18 to see its emissions per calorie as compared to beef.

Yes, it is true. Less land usage and less denitration and desertification is a good thing. Regardless of whether you're looking at feeding people or maintaining the good of the land, running cattle is worse than orchards or vegetables. Partiocularly with better farming cpractices that can be easily adopted by developed nations. Livestock require far more land. Livestock destroy the land far quicker. Livestock are simply worse for the environment. Under any objective measure, soil poaching and over grazing will do more to affect our means to not merely carbon offset emissions, but in turn affect our ability to maintain natural habitats, guarantee food security, improve agricultural practices, and critically reduce the amount of land for future agricultural development if need be.

Also, why the fuck would you eat lettuce for calories? What is going through your head?

It's called 'oats', fruits ... preferably fruit with oats. Calories are not the only measure of how to feed people, you need other stuff. But if you're talking specificallty calories, half a pound of oats has more calories. I for one love animal products ... but pretending like they should make up more than 5% of our diet is asking for a lot of land that we will frankly not have by the 22nd century if we continue to graze livestock like we do. If we're talking specifically calories ... half a pound of rolled oats is like 2000 calories right there. Any fruit lumps you put in or honey you dribble over it is merely a bonus.

(Edit) Also, who the fuck eats a POUND of beef each day top get 2000 calories? What are you aiming for? Heart attack by forty? Half a pound of beef each day ... tell me, what nation could afford that every citizen gets to eat half a pound of beef each day? That's like ... hold on a tick ... That's one full cow per 2500 people each day. That's assuming you use EVERY BIT of the cow, guts and bone and all. How the hell is every nation going to manage that? Half a pound of animal each day. Maybe insects. I go through maybe 100-200 grams of fried grasshoppers each day whenever I stay in Thailand. It's good stuff.

I also apparently get 1200 calories each day from two bottles of wine. So fermented grapes ... that's the ticket to solving world hunger. At the very least it will make the world a funner place to be in. Perhaps not safer given the number of cars and planes. Though that being said ... if the world mandated all people must consume atleast two bottles of wine each day when over 13, I'd imagine most world conflicts would either not start or go on for eternity.

In all seriousness. Rolled oats. Cheap, efficient calories. Oats + strawberries and mango pieces ... you don't even need to cook it on a stove! You can put it in a microwave. So you know ... all around really efficient and tasty. Also better for you than a pound of beef each day. Go figure.

 

[BakedSardine]

Being a meat eater is like being white - there are things you can say that might be analogous to things that would offend a minority/vegan, but in reality, there is nothing you can say. I'd refer you to this Louis CK monologue on being white.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1cuQTGKD01M

 

[Naraka]

So you mean "Easy" as shorthand for three paragraphs of bitter ranting, and you wonder if people other than yourself are thin skinned?

Bitter ranting? Not once did I insult anyone, not once did I accuse anyone of anything, not once did I judge people for what they eat.

No, you judged them for a supposed correlation between personal fragility and what they eat, and ranted rather than insulted.

 

[Addendum_Forthcoming]

Is your assumption that the land used for grazing then needs to be available to be converted into farm land? If so, what is the problem with a unit of land being converted into land specifically for one designated purpose? Beef feed isn't usually grazed, it's typically imported. That's one of the main reasons that emissions are higher for beef because it includes an entire product of produce within its emissions. You want to tell me about the impact of cattle on a plot of land? It's nothing compared to the impact of pouring concrete and building a shopping mall or industrial complex on one. But that's OK, because that is what the land is being designed to use. It's not like there isn't other land that is itself set aside for farming.

I mnissed this post. Sorry.

It's not an assumption. We actually have hard evidence to show the devastation of grazing even small hooved livestock like goats and sheep.

The problem with running livestock is that it requires far more lang usage. Also, it takes years to replenish soil nitration and absorption rates of CO2, N2O, and water ... which is the biggest factors in determining the viuability of land. Orchards, grain and vegetable crops require less land and the nitration and absorption value of water are less affected, not only that CO2 absorption and nitration of N2O are far higher for far longer. Let me remind you, that N2O is roughly 292 times more impactful on global warming than carbon dioxide by unit ... more means to have helpful nitrating bacterium consolidating that into N2 is almost 300 times more meaningful to curbing global warming than simply cutting carbon dioxide emission alone.

This is why only looking at purely emissions is fucking stupid. You need to look at denitration, soil compaction, and soil erosion. Grazing actively destroys immeasureable quantities of land and its ability to sink emissions. You know what will destroy the Earth's ability to correct emissions usage? It will be continual desertification. One of the best ways to stop that is planting orchards and crops....

( http://www.israel21c.org/top-10-ways-israel-fights-desertification/ )

As more and more people realise this, it's why cattle industries keep pretending that cattle can totally reverse desertification by grazing more on distressed land. Apparently Chile's overgrazing desertification problems can be solved by running more livestock. Yeah ... and copious amounts of heroin helps you become more assertive. It's gotten so comically pseudoscience like that it's looking every part like the 80s and 90s attempts by big tobacco to pretend smoking doesn't cause lung cancer. Apparently 'big cattle' haven't realised that the most barren places on Earth second to oil fields are cattle yards.

Livestock might produce less emissions, but they in turn create fewer means to to sink emissions back into the soil, and have them transformed into beneficial (or at least neutral) gases. As I was saying before ... even if the volumes were twice as high than livestock, it isn't enough to cover the desertification and denitration of the soil that is thankfully avoided with crop and orchard development on farms to a far greater extent by using less land and commiting less land to soil compaction and erosion by grazing.

People have known that for millenia. Prior bulk livestock ownership, most long term pastoralist communities recognized that shepherds that had the ability to range their herds further around (much like migratory herd animals in the wild) had consistently better soils than small xcommunities that had to pen themselves closer in. The modern world, however, cannot allow that return to highly mobile livestock herds. To be a succesful livestock owner and earn a decent paycheque to live off, you need thousands of heads of livestock.

Also, you can't compare housing development to agriculture. You NEED infrastructure to survive as a modern civilization. You need that shopping center to survive. Been that way since antiquity. Well, replace supermarket with massive public markets, but otherwise the same. More over, there's effective city planning knowledge that can limit pollution, maximise High density housing potential, and decrease necessary private travel to reduce pollution. We have that technology and knowledge basis, and we'd be going backwards in terms of pollution if we exchanged supermarkets and consolidated commercial zones with cottage industries. That is in stark contrast to meat production. You don't need livestock to survive. They are incomparable ... it's like comparing the necessity of a society to work, and being able to spend your weekends merely relaxing. One is a necessity, the other is merely 'nice'. They are incomparable uses of time.

To run a thousand heads of cattle, you need 2,500 acres of decent grazing each year to be ecologically sound. Each year or two. And all that land will still be continually depleted simply for doing so. Ever seen what 6 or 7 large flocks of sheep will do over a pasture? They will permanently, and I mean even thirty years later, bore lines pof dead earth all over it. Super compacted earth that will be visibly for half a century. I've seen a property that was given as a land parcel to a former WW1 veteran ... it was bad land that he was parceled and nobody tried running livestock on it afterwards given it was pretty rocky terrain ... 60 years after everybody stopped running livestock on it, you could see these wide road like litho-structures where nothing grew.

That's not sustainable, regardless of your command of arithmetic.

It is far better to have half of that land usused, and transforming CO2 and N2O into environmentally beneficial gasses, than merely dying earth.

As I was saying before. Highly commercially viable vineyards in Europe. Been operating for centuries. I guarantee you, exchange that agricultural production value by acre with livestock? Far sooner that land will be destroyed. Gone. Eventually you start having to supplement nearly all goodness once gotten from grazing with grain feed, and when it gets to that point there's nothing you can do with the land BUT run cattle on it. And for what? It's a wasteful practice. It could be an entirely averted cycle of continual destruction of land if humans collectively agreed that meats and cheeses should be rare luxuries, to be enjoyed as rare luxuries. We'd be doing ourselves and the environment, and food security in general, a world of good. You know, basically what we were doing until only 120 years ago.

All it would take us to have vastly reduced greehouse gas accumulation is accepting a diet that we spent 2 million years evolving towards, and only 200 years rebelling against. I mean, we don't even sacrifice anything by doing so. Living quality would improve, health will improve, food security will improve, even a reduction in the number of communicable diseases we initially get from our diets. Frankly, people who consume more than 10% of their diet consisting of animal products should pay for their own medical expenses, but that's a petty gripe and I only half-heartedly think so. Right to life is important, no matter how stupid your longterm life decisions are...

(Edit) I make pobvious exceptions for boar you hunt. Fuck boar, and hunters do a good job slaughtering them. If you're going to eat copious amounts of meat, I fully applaud anybody that hunts down pests to do so. I will gladly buy and consume fox if it helps to propmote hunters going out there and slaughtering them also. Not sure if fox is safe to eat, but if it is ... good. Ditto cat and wild dog. I hate guns, but if everybody used said guns to destroy and consume pests I'd happily put my name down saying everyone (sane) should have a rifle in one hand and a portable gas grill in the other (natural gas, of course, environmental protection is important).

 

[ERaptor]

To be honest, I allways took that whole "militant Vegans" thing as a big joke. I remember exactly two instances where I was ever personally involved in a situation like that (One guy yelled at me in MC Donalds, and another was when they tried to have only Vegetarian Menues at our school). And to me that translates to it not being an issue. I know quite a few Vegetarians/Vegans and they are completely chill about it.

Yelling a**holes are in this case the exception, not the rule. At least in my experience.

 

[OneCatch]

I think that this handily demonstrates that the answer to the OP is unequivocally 'yes, meat easters can be easy to offend'. Certainly not all meat eaters, or even many, but some.

I mean, this individual finds the very existence of vegans offensive, irrespective of if they've even mentioned their diet in any kind of proselytising or preachy or political manner. Can't get much more easily offended than that.

Wow, enough straw in that strawman to feed a cow for a year.

Nope.

Silvanus pointed out that another poster had somewhat misresponded to the OP because they'd made the presumption that vegetarians/vegans has been on the receiving end of criticism because they'd started being preachy.
You then responded to Silvanus saying that, premise aside, "the smugness and offensiveness of vegans is overwhelming". Now I may have misunderstood (and if I have then do enlighten me) but the conclusion I draw from that is:
-That you think that vegans are smug and offensive, regardless of the premise - ie whether they're being preachy or not.
-So vegans and vegetarians are intrinsically offensive to you
-So you're easily offended.

Notice how I dislike the harassive and annoying preaching that vegans tend to do? Notice how that's something entirely different from what you're talking about? Notice how you're not defending the vegan preaching in any way, so I'm still right?

I don't care if you find preachy shit annoying. So do I, whether that comes from the vegan who thinks that my veggie diet isn't hardcore enough, or from the hundredth meat eater who thinks that they'll convert me using the merits of bacon.
Here's the thing though; you take it up with the individuals who do it rather than going off on one at all vegetarians and vegans, or all meat eaters for that matter.

 

[NPC009]

The US has the lion's share of available research data. If you want me to run the numbers by another country or region then that region will have to start producing more research to make comparisons simpler. Europe is the closest to the US in availability of research but that's more segregated by country rather than landmass. Since America also has a ton of farmland and a significant agricultural footprint it makes it a rather convenient place to compare items.

If you can explain why the US market isn't a valid landmass to compare products then I would be glad to adjust my approach to the issue. But believe it or not, 1 kg of carbon emissions in the US is the same as 1 kg of carbon emissions produced wherever you're from. So I'm having a hard time believing that the CO2 "standards" of relative countries have anything to do with the discussion at hand.

That's not what I meant at all.

For many products, transport takes up a good amount of the carbon footprint, right? It's not just the transport of the product itself, but also everything that is needed to make that product (animal feed for lifestock, for instance). From an ecological view point, is makes sense to try to limit transportation, meaning the most ecological diets are the ones that are (almost) naturally supported by the region the person lives in. For instance, eating fish makes sense if you live in a region near the ocean or another large water source. It does not make sense if you live in one of the dry parts near the middle of the continent. So of course having some generic guidelines for the whole country wouldn't be ideal ecologically speaking. Just taking those guidelines and saying it would be worse for the environment if everyone followed them is a rather silly argument, because of course it would be worse!


There's this type of bean I like that I eat frequently. They're grown in the (rather small) country where I live and I can't even find an English name for it. It has a fairly low carbon foodprint. For me anyway, as the plant does well in this climate and there's not much transportation involved. However, if you were to start eating it, you might leave a much bigger footprint, as your location may be less suitable or you may have to import it. So in a way, carbon footprints are relative.

 

[Lightknight]

The US has the lion's share of available research data. If you want me to run the numbers by another country or region then that region will have to start producing more research to make comparisons simpler. Europe is the closest to the US in availability of research but that's more segregated by country rather than landmass. Since America also has a ton of farmland and a significant agricultural footprint it makes it a rather convenient place to compare items.

If you can explain why the US market isn't a valid landmass to compare products then I would be glad to adjust my approach to the issue. But believe it or not, 1 kg of carbon emissions in the US is the same as 1 kg of carbon emissions produced wherever you're from. So I'm having a hard time believing that the CO2 "standards" of relative countries have anything to do with the discussion at hand.

That's not what I meant at all.

For many products, transport takes up a good amount of the carbon footprint, right? It's not just the transport of the product itself, but also everything that is needed to make that product (animal feed for lifestock, for instance). From an ecological view point, is makes sense to try to limit transportation, meaning the most ecological diets are the ones that are (almost) naturally supported by the region the person lives in. For instance, eating fish makes sense if you live in a region near the ocean or another large water source. It does not make sense if you live in one of the dry parts near the middle of the continent. So of course having some generic guidelines for the whole country wouldn't be ideal ecologically speaking. Just taking those guidelines and saying it would be worse for the environment if everyone followed them is a rather silly argument, because of course it would be worse!


There's this type of bean I like that I eat frequently. They're grown in the (rather small) country where I live and I can't even find an English name for it. It has a fairly low carbon foodprint. For me anyway, as the plant does well in this climate and there's not much transportation involved. However, if you were to start eating it, you might leave a much bigger footprint, as your location may be less suitable or you may have to import it. So in a way, carbon footprints are relative.

The thing is, America doesn't import a ton of agriculture. We have such a huge agricultural industry right here that importing is mostly only done for specific types of products (like wine from France rather than wine altogether) or things that can't be grown here. So if the cost of X is more here, then that means that the cost will only go higher the further it goes.

 

[Lightknight]

Yes, vegetarians eat cheese. That's why they're included in the vegetarian models I presented. As of 2003 (let me know if you find a newer article comparing what vegetarians eat with what omnivores eat on average in the US), vegetarians ate 24% more cheese than omnivores did.

Which is why Western vegetarians shouldn't even be looked at. Most cultures eat some form of animal, but if you actually take total animal products consumed, your average Filipino is more vegetarian than an American vegetarian.

I'm sorry, but I'm really not cool with this "in-crowd" bullshit. Vegetarians can eat products obtained from animals as long as it isn't part of the animal itself and that the animal wasn't killed in the process of producing it. You're thinking "Vegan" more than you're thinking "Vegetarian" if you're having a problem with consumption of cheese or eggs (unfertilized). Dismissing vegetarians who eat cheese as less than authentic is absolute elitist garbage and should be taken with offense on their behalf.

If you think Vegans are superior to Vegetarians, then it's your prerogative to think that. But it isn't right to force vegan definitions on vegetarianism.

 

[Addendum_Forthcoming]

Yes, vegetarians eat cheese. That's why they're included in the vegetarian models I presented. As of 2003 (let me know if you find a newer article comparing what vegetarians eat with what omnivores eat on average in the US), vegetarians ate 24% more cheese than omnivores did.

Which is why Western vegetarians shouldn't even be looked at. Most cultures eat some form of animal, but if you actually take total animal products consumed, your average Filipino is more vegetarian than an American vegetarian.

I'm sorry, but I'm really not cool with this "in-crowd" bullshit. Vegetarians can eat products obtained from animals as long as it isn't part of the animal itself and that the animal wasn't killed in the process of producing it. You're thinking "Vegan" more than you're thinking "Vegetarian" if you're having a problem with consumption of cheese or eggs (unfertilized). Dismissing vegetarians who eat cheese as less than authentic is absolute elitist garbage and should be taken with offense on their behalf.

If you think Vegans are superior to Vegetarians, then it's your prerogative to think that. But it isn't right to force vegan definitions on vegetarianism.

Wow ... swing .... and-ah-miss!

Did you really not understand the connotation I was driving at?

My point wasn't 'in crowd' bullshit. My point wasn't a discussion about vegans and vegetarians. My point was, that all your meandering diatribes about how vegetarian diets are actually worse by US standards, was that the reason why they are worse is because the common diet of people beyond a Western sphere has less animal products regardless if they're vegetarian or not.

Ask the average Filipino what their favourite dish is ... most of them will say a pork dish. Filipinos love pork. They will still eat far less than their Western counterparts on average depite a love affair with pork. This is why we shouldn't be looking at Western vegetarians to see what a decent vegetarian diet should look like... because they still consume more animal products than non-vegetarians elsewhere.

How is this difficult to understand?

 

[NPC009]

The thing is, America doesn't import a ton of agriculture. We have such a huge agricultural industry right here that importing is mostly only done for specific types of products (like wine from France rather than wine altogether) or things that can't be grown here. So if the cost of X is more here, then that means that the cost will only go higher the further it goes.

Sorry, I have no idea how to get my point across without being condescending. Have you looked at a map recently? United States big. Really, really big.

If I were to buy french wine, it would technically by imported. However, the distance between my country and France is just a few American states.

Are you starting to understand? Distances within the United States may be greater than distances between countries. Basic foods that are produced within the US itself may be transported over much greater distances than imported foods I might eat (like citrus fruits from Spain, or something). If you want to talk about carbon foot prints and get the numbers right, you have to look at the actual distance of transportation (as well as the method and so on, of course), instead of whether something is imported or not.

And because the United States is so big and diverse, you'd need to be dumb as a brick to assume there's one eco-friendly diet for the whole nation. So please, stop misuing numbers to simplify issues to suit your arguments. Broccoli or lettuce is not some drain on the environment if you live in a region where it's easily grown.