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Eat more plants, transportation is <10% of the food supply chain. For beef it's <0.5%. https://ourworldindata.org/food-choice-vs-eating-local
Nothing wrong with in season / local produce, but the bigger impact (by orders of magnitude) is switching off meat
buying plants or meat, local or transported doesn't have an impact: it's all in the production.
To be fair, meat requires tens of thousands of pounds of plants used as feed over the lifetime of the animal (in this case, a cow), which also requires transporting the feed, pumping water to the crops for feed and for the animals to drink, etc. Unfortunately, there simply isn't enough land on earth for all animals to be free range.
a lot of what we give to animals as feed is parts of plants we can't or won't eat,like silage. if we grow and use the part of the plant we want,and we can reclaim some more of the resources through animals,that's good.
As anybody who has spent time working on a farm can attest, whole corn and soybean are some of the primary cattle feed. The majority of all soybean grown in North America is used as cattle feed and corn is a large market segment. The reality is that meat production uses far more land than plant-based alternatives, even adjusted for caloric output. You don't need to believe me as this is a well researched topic and you can find reputable sources for yourself.
can you cite any sources for that?
most cows mostly eat grass for most of their lives. whole corn is fed as a treat to entice them to eat the rest of the silage it's sprinkled on (in my experience).
No. Most cows do not because most cows are not free range.
instead of platitudes, maybe you could provide some facts about cattle diets. maybe a link from the USDA or FAO.
looks to me like cattle get very little of the global soy crop, and most of what is fed to livestock is, as i said, the parts of the plant left over after we've taken what we want for ourselves.
You just shared an infographic which showed that animal feed accounts for 76% of global soy production vs only 20% for direct human food. The point we were discussing was that eating meat is a less efficient use of land which appears to be supported by what you shared.
Judging by the other comments and profile, it's clear that you're not trying to have a discussion in good faith and may be a troll. I'm not going to engage further.
this is poisoning the well and name-calling. what i said is true, whether you want to engage with it or not.
that graphic shows that the feed that is given to animals is almost entirely the industrial waste from oil production. it's called "soy meal" or "soy cake"
making food is a good use of land.
And the production of meat is ~5-10x worse than almost all plant food sources.
by what metric?
if that's true (i'm dubious) then you should be finding an effective way to curb production.
Which brings us back to reducing consumption of meat
buying beans is not an effective way to reduce meat production
Got suggestions for effective ways (that are affordable and available today) of reducing meat production?
do you own bolt cutters?
by what metric, and using what methodology?
Literally linked a whole article showing the emissions breakdown of meat vs plant production.
can you explain the methodology?
It's looks like a meta analysis of other papers - are you questioning methodologies because you were unable to find them in referenced papers?
i was asking because i can explain the methodology, and it is dubious.
if you total all the inputs that go into a product (the water, the carbon emissions, the land use, etc), then you can see what it would cost to produce it if you made no other products. but that's not actually the environment in which meat dairy and eggs are produced.
the most illustrative example is cotton. cotton is not a food. it is grown for textiles. it wrecks the soil and it is THIRSTY. after you harvest the cotton and separate the fiber from the stalk and seed, you have seed left over. way more seed than you need to replant. cottonseed can be and is pressed for oil, but it takes much less processing to mix it into cattle fodder. why should the water used to grow cotton count against the water inputs for beef and milk? it's actually a conservation of resources. these industries are all interconnected, and trying to just put a singular value on every product in the absence of the context of its production is not actually useful in determining what would be ecologically responsible.