Less meat is nearly always better than sustainable meat

https://ourworldindata.org/less-meat-or-sustainable-meat

by sohkamyung • 1 year ago

25 56 1 year ago

Better from the perspective of carbon emissions, but that isn't everything.

wyre• 1 year ago

Taste, convenience, or tradition? Am I missing any other reasons? Either way, I think those aren’t great reasons for a lot of people, especially the general user of this site.

ovligatecarn2• 1 year ago

Have you considered health? Pseudovegetarianism is not amenable to all phenotypes.

baggy_trough2• 1 year ago

Why wouldn't they be? Quite a claim.

dehrmann• 1 year ago

Plants are almost always more sustainable because they cut out the middle man in calorie production. It takes less land to grow food for a human than to grow enough food for enough pigs for a human.

spacephysics• 1 year ago

This assumes the same bioavailability with plants and micro/macro nutrient parity between plants and meat products which is not true.

You would need exogenous supplementation for parity.

strken2• 1 year ago

There are exceptions to this. Marginal land can't be used for crops but can support cattle, the permaculture people use animals for various purposes that help them grow plants more efficiently, pigs have traditionally been fed waste that would go to compost today (and are thus somewhat more efficient than just feeding the pig something you grew), diverting existing waste products like whey or mechanically reclaimed meat can be more efficient than growing new plants, etc.

Calwestjobs• 1 year ago

Carbon was chosen as indicator of energy use. Rightly so. If you give it superpowers it is on you. So use it as just indicator of energy use and you will have less problems with it.

No carbon is not everything.

For example who cares about carbon when you can grow all food with same energetic and nutritional value on 3-10 times less area. that means less labor, less machinery, less storage, less fertilizers, less processing....

You can even grow additional plants to act as "fertilizer" for next crop... and still use less land than land needed to feed cows to feed you.

Just how many people are employed in extremely low wage jobs like processing, sorting, butchering poultry. or look up on youtube how involved is to cut beef into final products, people have their bones in their hands crooked from all the work, not even talking about work injuries, they can not work until pension/retirement in that industry. so why not use them in better jobs instead from start, for whole of their career.

Meat markets were suspected with helping the transfer of disease from one type of animal to another species... There is 10s - 100s of MILLIONS of poultry dispatched because of avian flu in europe every year, for last 20 + years. China alone experienced the culling or death of around 225 million pigs due to ASF from 2018-19. foot-and-mouth back in europe this year too, etc, etc.

yes carbon is not everything.

bethekidyouwant• 1 year ago

25% of people are anaemic

chneu8• 1 year ago

Less than 7% of Americans eat enough fiber.

epistasis4• 1 year ago

For people in the US, food emissions are almost a rounding error compared to other categories, such as transportation.

Both cars and meat are huge cultural lighting rods, and focusing on them for climate action has high risk, but focusing on meat as climate action is high risk with very few climate gains.

deepsun• 1 year ago

Any data to support it? I've heard cows emit methane, way more powerful greenhouse gas than CO2. And there are a lot of cows, especially in India. But I don't know the numbers.

epistasis4• 1 year ago

There are two types of climate inventories that account for emissions either at time of production or time of consumption. Production-based inventories are easier to measure, but consumption-based inventories can be more informative for individual consumers.

I'm mostly familiar with California-centric inventories because I want to influence state and local policies.

California State's inventory: https://ww2.arb.ca.gov/ghg-inventory-data

There used to be really great consumption-based maps at this site, but I'm not finding them at the moment. Instead here is a per-city breakdown of estimates: https://coolclimate.berkeley.edu/inventory

One thing that takes a very long time to change is transportation. City planning is pretty ossified. Cars have multi-decade lifespans. So starting the change for transportation is a very very urgent need. Diet is far more flexible, and there are innovations such as specific types of algae added to cows' diets that drastically reduce methane emissions. Changing the diet of cows is a far faster change than replacing every consumer's vehicle with a clean one.

The history of environmental action shows that it's very easy to regulate and bring business in line. It when it comes to consumers, it's far far trickier. Tackling meat, which is a quarter of the emissions of the diet of folks, may need to happen eventually but it will have far less impact than legalizing apartments in dense urban cores and allowing people to live without cars.

Maxatar• 1 year ago

Beef alone accounts for 6% of greenhouse gas emissions with livestock in total accounting for 14.5%. That is not a rounding error by any means:

https://openknowledge.fao.org/server/api/core/bitstreams/492...

lagniappe• 1 year ago

Not interested pal, my family is going to eat meat. I'll be reasonable about other topics but this one's a non starter.

xdennis• 1 year ago

The population of bison in the US before Europeans was similar to the current population of cows.

Animals rights activists often hide this type of information to tie themselves to climate activism.

epistasis4• 1 year ago

You linked to a global analysis, not one for the US, as I was talking about. I live in the US and am interested in tackling the massive massive amount of emissions from the US. People in the US emit far far more carbon than nearly anywhere else. Solving that huge problem means tackling transportation.

People in the US sometimes focus on global action, but as a US resident it seems completely inappropriate to be telling people who emit far far less carbon that they need to stop eating beef, before people in the US have stopped far far worse activities.

zvmaz• 1 year ago

Less meat means less sentient beings suffering.

chneu8• 1 year ago

It also means less resources used which benefits everyone. It also means healthier people which benefits everyone.

spwa4• 1 year ago

Really? The problem with this argument is that if you go look at communities where the least resources are used, to put it very mildly, you will not find happy people. Or even healthy people.

We are still in the situation that even though specific uses of resources might look wasteful, nobody has trouble coming up with good uses for more resources, even in the world's richest places. Building housing. Fighting disease. Transportation. Less resources means taking those things away from the level they're at right now.

throwaway4224324• 1 year ago

The land cattle is often raised on is unsuitable for anything else. Poor soil, unpredictable rainfall that can fluctuate between drought and flooding.

Some Australian outback cattle stations may cover millions of hectares, but you're not going to be able to grow anything else out there: too hot and little water and unlike cattle you can't move your pea farm to where the water is.

I would agree that land-clearing (cutting down forests) to raise cattle is unacceptable, as are the use of feed-lots, but I would disagree that we need to eat less meat, and I would personally never give up my grass-fed organic beef.

rich_sasha2• 1 year ago

The usual counter is that even then, afforestation is better than grazing lands. And that's a CO2 sink. I don't know specifically about the land down under.

throwaway4224324• 1 year ago

We try and preserve forests and tree lines to counter erosion and salinity, better for raising cattle in the long term.

Snow_Falls• 1 year ago

Just because that land is there doesn't mean we need to have cows on it though. Also don't forget that the methane porduced by cow herds also contributes to climate change.

If we don't raise cows on land that could sustain crops or use that land to produce animal feed, that would necessarily mean there will be less meat to eat. We would in fact need to reduce our meat consumption to account for this. Surely you can see you're contradicting yourself by saying we don't neede to eat less meat but also shouldn't use feed-lots?

throwaway4224324• 1 year ago

I mainly know about what's going on in the Australian industry, but 2/3 of our beef is exported, and that is only likely to increase.

There are projects to develop and market seaweed-based feed to reduce burping:

https://www.csiro.au/en/research/animals/livestock/futurefee...

Grass-fed cattle in Northern Australian mostly eat native grasses as they are more hardy given the environment: Queensland Bluegrass and Mitchell Grass for example.

Yes, feedlots do allow for raising cattle faster and more consistently, but are problematic for runoff.

https://futurebeef.com.au/resources/beef-cattle-feedlot/

https://www.qld.gov.au/environment/agriculture/sustainable-f...

chneu8• 1 year ago

The latest research shows that cows destroy even the worst landscapes. They encourage invasive grass spreading which leads to more intense wildfires, which leads to more emissions. Any water spots get destroyed by cattle and consumed, usually before native animals can get there

They're also responsible for ranchers killing predators and the cows themselves out competing for the scarce resources.

Cows are invasive to Australia. They do a lot of damage that folks choose to ignore. They are not the same as native ungulates and there's tons of research proving that.

There's a growing movement in the US to get cattle off of public lands. These are lands that you just described. Why do people want them off the land? Because it's very obvious they hurt the ecosystem.

Meat is a status symbol food. We're told from a very early age that beef is what kings and successful people eat. Rich people even have different vernacular for their status symbol food. Grass fed beef is just beef with a higher environmental cost. It's literally "my status symbol is better than your status symbol. Me more successful cuz I eat grass fed beef."

The simple fact is we likely can't feed 8 billion people sustainably even with the most efficient processes.

There's zero chance we can sustainably feed 8 billion people with our current level of beef consumption. Beef is at least 20x more resources intensive. It's crazy inefficient. Being proud of eating beef is like being proud of burning tires in your back yard or something.

throwaway4224324• 1 year ago

As soon as you say "latest research", you really need to cite your claims.

Meat is not a status symbol food. Culturally/historically eating roasted meat was a family event: The Sunday lamb roast, the roasted pig or bison in an earth oven in Polynesian/Maori/Native American cultures for example. The only status may be the quality of the cut where you're eating Wagyu rather than ground beef.

There are no native ungulates in Australia. There are also no predators except wild dogs (also introduced) and there's a 3000+km fence to keep them out of grazing areas.

All cattle, sheep, goats and pigs in Australia must be tagged with an EID/RFID tag or device. We track where they were bred, raised, sold and eventually killed. There's no cattle just roaming around wherever.

We have kangaroos which are regularly culled because of the lack of predators and they compete with cattle and sheep for the grass, and most people don't want to eat kangaroo. (National symbol and also because it has a strong flavour)

There are also feral pigs, camels and other introduced pest species like rabbits that we try to eradicate.

Feral pigs in particular damage tree roots, destroy water sources and irrigation and are a vector for exotics disease such as African swine fever, Japanese Encephalitis, lumpy skin disease, foot & mouth and all sorts of parasites.

uslic001• 1 year ago

As a gastroenterologist for over 30 years the healthiest patients I see are either on carnivore or paleo diet. The sickest patients are the vegans. This article does not agree with my experience.

Less meat is nearly always better than sustainable meat

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