this post was submitted on 17 Sep 2023
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Meat alternatives are perfectly fine. And tons of people do perfectly fine with zero meat at all and thrive just as much as people who eat meat daily. I have no qualms with eating meat since I do but let's not kids ourselves and say it is a necessity.
The big problem with beef is the amount of land and resources it takes. It takes a fuck ton of water and feed to get a pound of beef. The added carbon from beef is largely due to transportation of the feed, electricity, and also transportation of it on its way to the store. If that were all green sources, cattle would basically be carbon neutral. We are a long way from that though. And even if the energy sources for those were green, the other resources they eat up leads to massive destruction of environments.
Animals can certainly play a part in sustainable farming but the amount we currently have is absurd and is nowhere near sustainable. Just killing the subsidies alone would bring it significantly closer to sustainable. If the US stopped providing subsidies for the cattle industry, beef would be $35/lb.
Veganism is unhealthy
The land used for beef isn't useful for anything else. In Australia it's arid grasslands. We can't eat grass, sheep and cows can turn grass into wool and milk and meat
Transportation of feed is not a factor in grass fed, grass finished animals
Who said anything about veganism? You do know that being a vegetarian is not the same as being vegan, right?
If the beef industry was largely composed of grass fed cattle that requires no grass to be watered, there would be much less of an issue. But that only makes up a small percentage of the industry. And saying that grassland is not useful for anything ignores the ecosystem that is already there. It may be arid but it is not devoid of life.
But forcing a sustainable model and removing subsidies would absolutely go a long way toward mitigating the environmental impact of the beef industry since beef would likely be USD $70/lb.
A statement like "veganism is unhealthy" is so objectively wrong that it really harms your credibility in general. I wonder how much you actually read from the article, or did you just grab the title and run with it?
There are a small number of specific nutrients that are readily available in meat that are harder to come by in a vegan diet. Harder but entirely possible, especially with supplements.
And many of the meat alternatives that you were disparaging earlier are specifically engineered to provide those nutrients (in particular Impossible and Beyond brands).
"Veganism is unhealthy" in the same way that any eating pattern is unhealthy if you aren't mindful of what you're eating. Conventional meat-based diets have much higher risk of heart disease due to high cholesterol, so let's go ahead and label that unhealthy too.