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Eating meat creates four times more greenhouse gases than being vegan, landmark study finds
(www.independent.co.uk)
this post was submitted on 20 Jul 2023
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This study misses two major things that need to be considered to properly evaluate a majority vegan diet for the population vs a diet that has meat. Whatever your personal thoughts, we should be able to agree that we don't have a full picture without this information.
What are emissions, land use, and water use going to look like if vegan food production is scaled up to provide the same calories that a diet with meat has? This is a nontrivial consideration especially since meat is more calorie dense. You will need a larger quantity of vegan options to match a caloric equivalent of meat.
Humans need amino acids that are only found in meat for our full health. This is easy enough to counteract by taking vitamin supplements, but if the entire world needed to take these supplements regularly, what sort of emissions and water use would the scaled up production have? Is manufacturing a high quantity of necessary vitamins going to be better environmentally? I honestly don't know.
Assuming we want the global population to have at least the same food access and nutrition as today, these are questions we need to know the answer to. Maybe the points I've raised are easily addressed without significant emissions. That would be fantastic -- we just need to have a full picture.
I believe both of these questions have been thoroughly answered by the scientific community.
You're right that meat is more nutrient dense than plants. But if we were to replace meat production with crop production for human consumption at scale, we would be averaging far more (I think on the order of 10x) human calories per acre.
When you replace a beef farm with vegan food production, you're not just planting crops on the beef farm. Each of those cows eats for years--crops that humans generally wouldn't eat grown on other farms specifically as livestock feed. You need much, much more land and resources to produce 100 calories of meat than you do to produce 100 calories of vegetables.