Eating the rich is by far the most eco-friendly approach as it can dramatically reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
Jeff bezos probably tastes like drywall and hooker spit.
Compost them first then you can eat the rich while also being vegan = Billions and billions of carbons.
Hooker spit. Lol. Imagine Jeff Bezos paying you hundreds of thousands to spit on him while trying to hide the fact that, you would gladly do it for free.
I vehemently disagree with this statement.
We need to compost the rich and use that as a soil amendment to grow heirloom vegetables.
One Elon musk can feed a family for a year.
One farm fertilized with musk mulch can feed a city block!
Ok, are actively working on this? Is your work on it so horrendously demanding of all your attention of every single day, that you couldn’t ALSO go vegan, or vegetarian, or just eat less meat? Eat the rich is just a fun day dream and a lazy excuse to not do what you can (like going vegan).
Eating the rich would also vastly reduce racism, sexism, classism, and worker exploitation. Can I therefore ignore my negligible personal impact, and keep being racist, sexist, classist, and buy only the cheapest clothes crafted by the most exploited third world toddlers?
You sound like you are fun at parties. This was obviously a joke. Also, Why can’t we do both?
In this thread: Shit loads of people who will say they care about the climate crisis on one day, then say they don’t care about the 18.5% of global carbon emissions that the meat industry causes the next day because they can’t get over the decade worth of anti-veganism jokes and memes that they’ve constantly repeated uncritically.
Individual habits MUST be changed to solve this part of the problem, there is literally no way around that. Getting triggered and writing screeds because you’ve spent decades getting caught up in hate over food choices won’t stop the planet burning.
Oh look, another article pointing the finger at the meager consumption habits of citizens and completely ignoring the massive ocean of CO2 production by large companies.
Don’t people get tired of seeing this same argument being made? The amount of carbon produced by barges carrying cargo over the Atlantic so far greatly exceeds the consumption of many millions of people every single day but I’m supposed to feel guilty for eating a piece of steak today instead of some semi-edible “impossible meat” bug protein?
ETA: Nice, my first blowup since leaving reddit. Very refreshing to see some people arguing passionately. I appreciate the vigor and the quality of argumentation, everybody. The quality of discourse here is so much better than on reddit.
I’m willing to admit the “semi edible impossible meat bug protein” gamut was a bit tongue in cheek, but I recognize how it can sound genuine. I do think Impossible Meat is disgusting, but that’s neither here nor there.
I eat plenty of plant matter and I regularly forage in the local forests to learn about edible plants. But I’m not going to stop enjoying steak just because it might put a bit more CO2 (why do people keep writing it as C02 online?) into the atmosphere. If removing subsidies and putting more pressure on the meat industry to be less wasteful, less environmentally impactful and more ethical towards animals causes steak to rise to $40/lb as some here have stated I’ll gladly pay.
FWIW, I get my steak from local farms that are free range and grass fed. Grass feeding is healthier for the cow than the typical grain, it produces less CO2 and the steak is better quality. Plus the cows are better taken care of. Again, thanks for the great messages (generally).
This crucially important caveat they snuck in there:
“Prof Scarborough said: “Cherry-picking data on high-impact, plant-based food or low-impact meat can obscure the clear relationship between animal-based foods and the environment.”
…which is an interesting way of saying that lines get blurry depending on the type of meat diet people had and/or the quantity vs the type of plant-based diet people had.
Takeaway from the article shouldn’t be meat=bad and vegan=good - the takeaway should be that meat can be an environmentally responsible part of a reasonable diet if done right and that it’s also possible for vegan diets to be more environmentally irresponsible.
That’s both absolutely true and a massive distraction from the point. An environmentally friendly diet that includes meat is going to involve sustainable hunting not factory farming. In comparison an environmentally friendly vegan diet is staples of meat replacements and not trying to get fancy with it. It’s shit like beans instead of meat, tofu and tempeh when you feel fancy. It means rejecting substitutes that are too environmentally costly such as agave nectar as a sweetener (you should probably use beet or cane based sweetener instead).
So in short eat vegan like a poor vegan not like a rich person who thinks veganism is trendy
Haven’t we known this for a long time? With good peer reviewed studies?
A couple of people have spoken to me before about wanting to cut back on, or completely cut meat from their diets, but didn’t know where to start. If anyone reading this feels the same way, here’s some fairly basic recipies that I usually recommend (Bosh’s tofu curry is straight up one of the best currys i’ve ever had - even my non-vegan family members love it)
Written:
- ‘Butter’ Tofu Curry (Written Recipe)
- Lentil Soup (Written Recipe)
- Caribbean Stew (Written Recipe)
- Sweet Potato & Cauliflower Curry Pies (Written Recipe)
- Afghan Kidney Bean Curry (Written Recipe)
Videos:
- 5 Minute Vegan Pasta Sauces (YT / Invidious)
- Ultimate Vegan Chilli (YT / Invidious)
- Enchiladas Verdes (YT / Invidious)
- Ultimate Plant-Based Fried Chicken (YT / Invidious)
- Mac & Cheez (YT / Invidious)
- Wicked Lasagna (YT / Invidious)
- Smash Tacos (YT / Invidious)
Tofu is also super versatile and is pretty climate-friendly. there’s a bazillion different ways to do tofu, but simply seasoning and pan frying some extra/super firm tofu (like you do with chicken) with some peppers and onions, for fajitas, is an easy way to introduce yourself. Here’s a little guide for tofu newbies: A Guide to Cooking Tofu for Beginners - The Kitchn. If you wanna level up your tofu game with some marinades here’s six.
Lentils and beans are also super planet friendly, super cheap, and super versatile! You’ll be able to find recipies all over that are based around lentils and beans so feel free to do a quick internet search.
Sorry for the huge, intimidating wall of text! I do hope someone interested in cutting back on meat found this useful though :)
Tax meat, subsidize healthy meat alternatives.
Could start by removing subsidies.
Thanks for reminding me meat is subsidized for some reason 😮💨
Removing subsidies alone would make beef $35/lb.
“Healthy meat alternatives” you can keep your phytoestrogens, soy and antinutrients. Thanks
What’s wrong with phytoestrogens?
It sounds scary
/s
Haha, yeah, unlike real estrogen which @Classy@sh.itjust.works probably consumes on a daily basis.
Are you one of those dummies that think phytoestrogens are the same as human estrogen? Good god.
IMO people should’ve dialed down their meat consume for years, everybody knows what it’s doing. I’m not a vegetarian by any means (I love many veggy recipes though & I adore good (!) tofu), we (my family) are getting meat from organic farms or from hunters for years, that’s more expensive but 2 times a week is absolutely sufficient. Same price as before, roughly. Even my meat devouring daughter thinks like that, but she gets real cranky after 5 days of lentils, bulgur wheat and paprika ;)
Better title “Eating meat creates four times more greenhouse gases than not eating meat”.
No, the title is correct as far as I can tell from quickly skimming the actual Nature article.
Unrelated rant - I hate the fact independent.co.uk hyperlinks the word ‘study’ which just searches it’s own site for the fucking word ‘study’ rather than linking to the actual source data. Fucking shitstain practices.
I found the original article by plugging the independent article into ground.news. Fucking love that website.
Edit: what’s more is that it’s eating more than 100g of meat per day is 4 times more GHG than eating vegan. Eating <50g per day is about 2 times more than veganism.
The problem is the misuse of the word “vegan”. Veganism is a moral philosophy. It is more like feminism than like vegetarianism. Veganism has to do with animal rights and liberation. That has consequences on the diet a person eats but also all other things a person does and doesn’t do. None of these studies are concerned with or discuss the rights or experiences of animals, so they aren’t about veganism. It’s a relatively small thing except that veganism is so poorly understood, so extra diligence is always appreciated.
The study is about diets and their consequent impact on GHG. Why does it matter that it’s not about philosophy?
I’ve never said that the title is wrong, or the content is wrong. I just wanted to highlight that the focus should be on the “act” (eating) and not on the “being” (vegan vs not-vegan). The graph you’ve pasted would look friendlier if instead of saying “meat-eaters” … “vegans”, would say something like “high meat consumption” … “100% plant based”. Grouping the actions and not the people.
This seems needlessly pedantic, presumably because of a similar argument as the other commenter - that veganism is a philosophy and not just a diet. However, as the other commenter highlighted, veganism begets a vegan diet.
You also don’t have to follow an entirely vegan philosophy to follow a strict vegan diet.
Not to mention “100% plant based” implies you don’t eat fungi!
I agree that it might be pedantic to some, but I think it is important to strive for a clear message.
You also don’t have to follow an entirely vegan philosophy to follow a strict vegan diet.
That’s the point I wanted to make on my original comment.
Not to mention “100% plant based” implies you don’t eat fungi!
Yeah, my examples didn’t want to be the definitive nomenclature.
Jesus, thank you. It’s hard to get to the actual studies about the environmental impact of dietary choices without being bombarded by vegan propaganda. And even this study doesn’t take poultry and other small livestock into account and treats all meat as corn fed beef.
Jesus that’s a massive overlap in environmental impact for everything that isn’t super high meat consumption. You can be a low meat eater and have a smaller impact than some vegans.
The call to action that they’re making in the study and article is flat out stupid. Looking at this data, there is significant better gains going from high meat consumption to lower meat consumption; far higher than going from low meat consumption to vegan. That’s what the takeaway here should be, and it’s what a lot of people are already doing too.
Bear in mind that graph that I copied overlaps more due to it being relative to high-meat diets (hence no error bars on that group).
The supplementary data shows much less overlap of 95% confidence intervals.
Gotcha! Thanks for the clarification.
This has been known for eons, hasn’t it?
Nah Corporations and industries creates 1000x more greenhouse gases than meat and agriculture.
It amazes me how people can wail about the record breaking heat on one hand and the effects of climate change, and sit in these comments and rationalize that eating meat isn’t contributing. Of course it is.
Going vegan was the best decision I ever made for myself.
“And yet, eating a vegan diet still produces greenhouse gasses! Curious!”
Well that’s no surprise. Raising animals for meat is horribly inefficient compared to plants.
Having fewer children is the number one thing you can do. And it’s not even close.
I mean, do the other things anyway if you like. They can’t hurt. They may even save you money. But they won’t save an overpopulated planet.
