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Eating Meat Is Bad for Climate Change, and Here Are All the Studies That Prove It
(sentientmedia.org)
this post was submitted on 07 Jan 2024
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Agricultural run off is the main polluter of US waterways. It does include the meat industry, but switching to an all vegetarian diet would ramp up the pollutants caused by fruit and vegi farming.
https://www.epa.gov/sites/default/files/2015-09/documents/ag_runoff_fact_sheet.pdf
This is technically true, but rather misleading.
Meat animals eat plants. By not eating meat, you don't need to grow the plants to feed to the animals. Animals aren't perfectly efficient. To grow 100 calories of chicken breast takes way, way more than 100 calories of corn.
In fact, more land is used to grow feed crops than to grow crops directly eaten by people, even though most calories in our diet are from plants. And that's not not counting pasture and rangeland, which makes up an absolutely absurd amount of the US.
So yes: you'll increase the amount of runoff from chickpea and lentil fields, but you'll more than make up for that from much larger decreased runoff from soy and corn fields.
But I get significantly more nutrients from chicken than corn.
Yes, nutritionally speaking chicken feed isn't the best substitute for chicken.
A good vegan equivalent to chicken vindaloo on rice isn't corn vindaloo on rice. It's chickpea vindaloo on rice.
A good vegan substitution for chicken tacos isn't a corn taco. It's black bean tacos.
Yes, beans are a little lower in protein than chicken. No, that doesn't really matter ,reasonable vegan diets will have adequate protein. And there's a reason legumes and a grain are a staple in many cultures - black beans and corn, lentil soup with bread, tofu and rice - it's tasty, nutritionally sound and an efficient use of cropland.
Well, now I want black bean tacos...
I will take your notes. Can we simply reduce the meat intake coverall instead of eliminating it? I think a balance or moderation is good. We are naturally omnivores after all.
Yes.
There's assorted waste byproducts that aren't good eats but can be fed to animals - for example, spent brewery grain or sugar beet pulp. Some number of chickens and pigs can be raised sustainably. Not very many,
but some.
Some number of deer can be hunted sustainably. Likewise with wild boar.
100 people doing meatless Monday is the same as 14 people going vegan. And 100 flexitarians who eat meat on average one day a week are worth 85 people going vegan. Any amount of reducing meat intake is better than nothing.
Holy hell, people consume that much meat? I feel like I don't really eat meat often. I do love bird, but I'm pretty sure I have meatless Monday most Mondays haha.