this post was submitted on 09 Dec 2024
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While I support not eating meat, I am also realistic and reducing is good enough.
But the problem is that not every meat is created the same. There is one footprint for meat feom animals that are grazing and are used in regenerative agriculture and much bigger from industrial farming of cows fed with irrigated alfalfa in desert.
It should certainly be the first step. I've started like this, continuously less meat, your gut-biome slowly adjusts. I'm still not vegan/vegetarian but basically eat no meat anymore (mostly leftovers of others). A good part of it is that I just don't really like meat anymore (tastes kind of rotten?).
I recommend going this route, as I think it's easier to get into a vegan diet.
That said I think we (as a global society) should strive towards eating only vegan long-term. We got the food science and it just feels wrong (moral, inefficiency, health) and isn't sustainable.
No, we gotta completely uproot the animal agriculture industry if we want to save the planet and no “regenerative farming cattle” still uses too much land/water and has bovines abused and slaughtered for nothing.
https://veganuary.com/try-vegan/
Okay, then I might as well just keep eating as much meat as I do now though? If we have to be perfect and most people aren't going to be perfect, there's no point in even trying.
Or maybe get off your high horse, accept that humanity isn't perfect, and try to get people to eat less meat first, then worry about getting them to eat no meat at all. 50% of people doing 70% of what they should is more useful than 10% doing 100%.
That's a straw-man fallacy. Just because you're trying doesn't mean you have to be perfect right away.
I also believe that we have all reason to go completely vegan long-term. Thanks to food-science, it's not a radical shift anymore, just a slow adjustment and a little bit of discipline until you've adapted that new habit. I was a very much into meat and slowly adapted to a vegan diet, it get's easier over time until a point (for me at least) that you even prefer the vegan/vegetarian option.
I agree, but the other commenter specifically was saying that it's a case of do or do not, there is no try.
There are no baby steps to stoping animal abuse. It’s not hard to follow a 31 day challenge.
Do that first then comeback critic my “big ask”.
Each child born produces as much CO2 as 71 people going vegan for life. That ignores all the other ways humans pollute. Given that 130M babies are born each year, even if the entire planet went vegan right now (forever), it would only offset the next 324 days. If you care about the environment at all, you would focus all of your ire on the the real danger: countries with high birth rates.
However I suspect this has nothing to do with the environment for you. There is a duplicitous tactic employed by vegans which seeks to hijack the environmental movement for moral aims. People such as yourself have a moral problem with eating meat, and you know that many others care about the environment, so you attempt to wed the two. I am of course happy to be proven wrong.
Isn't the calculation misleading? It looks like it calculates the modern lifestyle CO2 and applies it to a baby. So the argument just goes, if no people, then no co2. Which is correct, although completely skipping anything about the actual underlying systemic issues for producing this much co2 in the first place.
This isn't an argument about morality or veganism, the link just seemed like a hit peace against environmentalism
Which in effect tells me that we need to be even more radical in policies to bring this to net-negative. It just doesn't help when there are a lot less people in the future as we need to get net-negative. Fewer people means also potentially less leverage here.
But I agree that we need to split between moral and environmental factors (though it doesn't help when these are often correlated).
Your effect on people opting NOT to eat less meat because you're trying to moralize them is going to outdo your personal contribution at least 10 to 1, maybe 100 to 1 if you interact with enough people.
Well okay then.
If my only options are, "Continue eating all the meat you want and the planet is fucked."
...or, "Stop eating all meat and go completely vegan...and the planet is still fucked unless everyone else does it too."
Well...
... fire up that grill, man, I've got some steaks and burgers in the freezer.
God, seeing the comments from some people that I'm even nominally on the "same side of the aisle" makes me see how the other side finds it so easy to not only ridicule, but automatically unite in opposition against it.
Like, nothing brings me closer to being understanding and sympathetic to the people I'd normally be ideologically set totally against...like visiting Lemmy and seeing the shit flowing from the people I broadly tend to align with.