Here's an interesting thought experiment for meat-eaters:
Why not stop eating beef?
your response might be a knee-jerk "but I really like it!". Everyone knows the huge environmental costs we are responsible for when eating meat. But it's really interesting to pursue the tension in your own personal logic-brain vs lizard want-it-brain.
I've stopped eating most refined sugar and massively cut down on meat in the past few years. But the mental battles I had with myself in the process were surprising.
I cut down massively on beef during the worst of the California drought, when I found out what the resource consumption looked like. To the "if it's yellow let it mellow" crowd: just the beef in a typical burger has the water usage footprint of something like 40? 50? high-flow toilet flushes.
Chicken is about 1/3rd the water footprint, and IMO it's a lot easier to get good texture when cooking it.
Is the cow for the burger you eat in California grown in California?
It's a good idea to be aware in general, but local under-supply isn't necessarily a helpful metric, I think. We've had the argument in Northern Germany that we should use less water, and it often went along with reports about droughts in Spain. But we're not Spain, we have plenty of rain (though it's not always equally distributed over the year).
Needless to say that we're not building a pipeline to transport the saved water to Spain. At the same time, we now have to regularly flush the sewers because we don't have enough "natural" flow and we have more issues with rising ground water damaging building foundations.
actually, we are currently in drought conditions some years in a row in Germany. Forests are dying and the groundwater is exhausted. But hey, it's all the media making up a story.
I'm on a diet, please don't put words into my mouth. There are months that we have too little rain, but we're far from continuous drought conditions. We're still getting 50+ liters/sqm per month.
That's a different issue entirely from ground water though. The droughts mentioned are surface water, not ground water. The lower water usage does affect ground water levels but not surface water, because we're not pumping up surface water. That's not a specifically German issue, many regions that have less industry now than they had 60 years ago are dealing with the same problem.
The surface water strongly affects farms and forests, but we won't change that by using less ground water (unless the hope is to have the ground water climb to -1m everywhere, at which point we're living in a bog). Additionally, rising ground water might have nasty side effects for plants, as salt in the earth will also be transported up.
Surface water retention is about management, not about offsetting that with savings. We do get plenty of surface water, but much of it will be "wasted" because it'll cause floods. Aggressive diking and straightening of rivers does play a part there, and we'll be wise to adapt to changing weather patterns and climate.
It’s worthwhile noting what the water lifecycle going through a cow looks like.
If it’s grazing on natural pastureland vs irrigated vs animal feed and what the water lifecycle looks like. The water doesn’t disappear but it can have impact if it’s drawn out from limited aquifers that don’t get replenished quickly.
Animal urine and feces are not clean water, if you only have a couple of animals it doesn't matter but at a large scale you need to treat it before releasing it into the wild unless you want to taint the water supply. Of course the water molecules don't disappear, but that's not the point. There's plenty of water on earth, but only a tiny fraction is clean enough for human consumption. If you pour your bottle of mineral water into the ocean, the water doesn't disappear but you still effectively wasted it.
>you wouldn’t have a farm away from a water source.
That's sort of the problem actually. Many aquifers are tainted to various levels because of farming. We need clean water, not cow piss.
The problem is the availability of vegetarian / vegan meals in western society. Sophisticated food culture revolves around meat. It requires planning and work (in addition to dealing with the lizard brain).
In particular, as a gym-goer I want my protein, and if soya is out too, then it's quite a bit more difficult. Excuses, I know.
"Western society" (which is diverse and fragmented) started to eat a lot of meat when it became wealthy. There are plenty of low/no meat dishes in Western culture. The often cited Southern European/Mediterranean diet does not include that much meat.
Cereals (expecially in the form of bread and pasta) and vegetables used to be staples that accounted for most of our food intake.
While we probably eat too much meat in general, going vegetarian/vegan is going from an extreme to the other. I'm sure most 'normal' people can cut their meat consumption by half without noticing it too much.
Globally the issue is that people are starting to be wealthy enough and we are probably too many.
Also, relying on ready-meals in general is not a good idea for both health and environment.
unfortunately the no-meat dishes of our grandparents are not especially tasty in their "peasant"-version (northern europe) and making tasty vegetarian meals is an art not really known anymore (was it ever?) in my family, nor in any of the everyday restaurants/employee-cafeterias I visit.
Well I would suggest you get yourselves a book on Southern European/Mediterranean cooking (or just look around online).
It's very easy and quick to make tasty dishes with no meat, even just salads. Plenty of possible variations on the theme: pasta salads, rice salads, potato salads, for example. Of course there are also plenty of hot dishes to cook with potatoes, tomatoes, etc.
Curries are also an endless source of tasty dishes that do not need to include any meat.
yes, for myself, I've taken that step for some time. It's just the case that most corporate cafeterias have not really jumped on the bandwagon already (offering 80% meat-dishes, e.g. all but one – take it or leave it then...) and frankly I think I would've gotten a lot more used to vegetables as a child if it would not have been some variation on steamed cale-likes together with salted potatoes most of the time as a purely "vegetarian" meal (my mother and grandmother cook pretty well - I tend to like it most if there's a pinch of animal in it though...).
How many calories are you eating daily and how many grams of protein? Unless you're a bodybuilder at the end of a cut it wouldn't be very hard to get enough protein on even 2000 calories. I know this because I'm a large, military serving man who has been full vegan and now chooses to eat vegan where possible.
The big loss is food culture. It revolves around meat and animal products.
I’ve looked in to eating more non meat meals. What I struggled with is getting the macros right.
For example to hit 190g of protein a day, eating vegan my carbs would be way up compared to my current diet. At the moment I’m trying to drop body fat and from dexa scans/metabolic test they recommend I keep my protein high, increase fats and try to reduce carbs. I’ve tried doing the macros on a few vegan recipes but struggled to get the numbers right without increasing calories which I can’t do when trying to drop body fat.
When I have more flexibility in calories i.e bulking some of the vegan recipes look quite good as calorie dense when you add beans, lentils, nuts, oils etc. I reckon I’ll do better on this than when I was eating 5kg of beef a week as the dexa scan then was terrible with high visceral fat.
From a quick search, common dietary recommendations for protein seem to be 0.8g to 1.4g per kg bodyweight per day. 190g per day would likely be way more than most people need, being that both a) a lot of people weigh less than 190/1.4 (much less 190/0.8) and b) a lot of people won't need more than the standard dietary requirements of protein.
Definitely seems like you're not in at least one of these sets, though, so definitely not going for a "I know more about a healthy diet for you than you do", because hahaha no I don't. Mostly just posting to emphasise to casual readers that they (likely) don't need to target 190g protein per day.
Yes, I do strength training and also trying to cut body fat.
I’m on 2.5g protein per kg body weight which is high as I’m trying to maintain muscle while on a calorie deficit.
If I didn’t need to be in a deficit on lower carbs it does look like I could achieve the macros I need from vegan meals. It’s not I need 190g protein right now, it’s I need to aim for 190g on about 2300-2500 calories with a bias towards gaining those calories from protein/fats. Hitting 190g protein would take me above 2300-2500 calories due to the amount of carbs consumed from vegan protein sources.
Wheat protein based shake - 120 calories, 25g protein
Two soy coffees - 300 calories, 16 calories.
Those 3 proteins complement the amino acid profiles of each other. I typically only aimed for around 130g, so with two protein shakes daily and those other foods I'm very close after only 1000 calories.
Black beans are one of the highest protein beans from what I read and a complete protein. Even so it’s 20g carbs to 7g protein. So for 190g protein that’s nearly 540g carbs a day which is over double what I need for my macros.
I also prefer real whole food over shakes as it keeps me from getting hungry as doesn’t digest as fast. Right now I eat 6 times a day and only my late afternoon snack is a shake with a rice cake, 20g almond butter and banana.
You mentioned in another comment here that you're eating 2.5g per kg of bodyweight, nearly every recommendation I see is between 1.4-2g/kg. Be careful with too much protein, one of my gym buddies put himself into hospital with serious kidney issues from going overboard. I'd assumed you were about 100kg lean eating that much protein.
If you don't want to eat vegan food, the only excuse you need is "I'd rather eat meat 6 times per day". The vast majority of western people could eat bodybuilder vegan diets if they needed to. If it is something you're interested in then there is a TON of vegan bodybuilders. Google Nimai Delgado or Torre Washington, for example.
If you order a normal salad in a restaurant, not the salad with chicken, you get very little protein I assume. Where is the vegan protein, non soja, anyway? Rhetorical question, it's on me to do the research, but here we are. A piece of meat is always available and estimating "enough protein today" is easy. It's getting better of course, restaurant and supermarket selections are improving.
Are you aware it's basically a meme in vegan culture that non-vegans assume they only eat salads? The food culture part I mentioned is difficult since a lot of places don't have vegan options.
I don't eat out a lot. A 450 calorie bean burrito that I make (zero soy) has about 28 grams of protein. A wheat protein based protein shake is 25 grams of protein for 120 calories. Two shakes and 1 burrito and I'm already on 78 grams of protein off 700 calories for the day. A couple soy based coffees pushed me near 95g for 1000 calories. All 3 protein sources here have complementary amino acid profiles.
Red meat is possibly the most nutrient dense food in the world. With everything from essential proteins and fats, to minerals like zinc, iron and magnesium, to water soluble vitamins like biotin. It's also tasty and satisfying to eat.
My parents had only two children, same as my grandparents. My family isn't growing and taking up an exponential amount of resources, so I do not personally feel responsible for unsustainable population growth. Therefore I will not sacrifice my health and well-being in order to satisfy some resource quota being morally applied. Meat production isn't even a proportionally large source of energy use compared to transportation and electricity, so being asked to give up eating it to increase sustainability before larger slices of the pie are confronted really smacks of dogmatic imperialism.
I think the discussion would fare far better with people who think along lines that I do, if you focused on 'how can we make meat production more energy and land efficient' instead of 'you are sinful for eating meat, give it up.' More efficient grazing patterns and breeding animals to better digest alternative food sources like kelp, for example, are promising. I'm sure there are many other avenues yet thought up.
This Oxford University study [0] concluded that the best thing a individual can do is to reduce or remove dairy and meat from their diet - because of the high costs to our environment.
You can get all the nutrients the body needs from plants - read articles by the Physicians Committee of Responsible Medicine.
Finally, how do you justify the high cost of your pleasure of eating meat. The cost is not just the environment, it's also that our demand for meat keeps people employed in this horrific industry (slaughterhouse workers experience PTSD) and the fact that an animal has to suffer immensely, so that you can get a piece of its flesh.
I glanced through and the study seemed targeted at dietary choices, which ignores my point that transportation and other energy intensive aspects of life far outstrip meat production. It also did not go into my suggestion, which is investigate ways to mitigate environmental impact.
>keeps people employed in this horrific industry
I am for reform of the industry and personally buy in bulk from local farmers. Factory farming is horrible, I will not argue with that.
>and the fact that an animal has to suffer immensely, so that you can get a piece of its flesh.
Moral grandstanding. You don't care about the environment or health, you wish to impose your view of the world and personal choices on others. Your pretention of care for sustainability is a tool not a real concern. I'm willing to bet you have never met or talked to a beef farmer or slaughterhouse worker.
Also, it said what the best thing is an individual can do to reduce their footprint. Giving up meat & dairy is a practical thing we can do today - no need for policy changes etc.
RE: Moral grandstanding. You don't care about the environment or health
Can you explain this further? How do you know what I care about? And I can't impose anything, I can only share information.
As far as I know what differentiates us from other animals is that we have moral faculty.
Isn't it our responsibility to point out things that are wrong? And after looking at various studies - supporting the large scale meat industry is wrong, because of the damage to our biosphere.
We are not hunter gatherers anymore, so we in modern society don't need animal flesh anymore to survive.
The only reason we keep doing it is mainly because of taste - which you've hinted at already.
Hence the question - does your demand for mouth pleasure justify the death and suffering an animal has to go through?
And you don't need to speak directly to slaughterhouse workers. Again look at studies and what that kind of work does to ones psyche.
Look at farmers who cry when they have to explain what happens to a dairy cow (this was in BBC documentary called 'Dark side of dairy). Our demand for these products creates those situations.
Humanity is about moving forward - doing things in a better way.
Well how far behind will we be in telling people to not consume sea food or any animal product. However for many diets meat products are there as it is a simple means to satisfy nutritional requirements and depending on meal a little meat and related products can go a long way.
Here's my unorthodox take. If I do the morally right thing and decide to stop eating beef, why should I be punished by not getting to eat beef?
It sounds silly but I'm not kidding. If I could vote to reduce the global production of beef by one average person's consumption, I would do so immediately. I would probably continue to eat it though. I'm aware that many people would make the same choice, and this will result in raising prices and harder availability of beef, but that's fine with me.
A fun take from the currently defunct SlateStarCodex was buying "offsets" for activities you wanted to support. Carbon offsets for plane trips already exist, in the range of $30 to $150 or so.
In theory, you could find someone who normally eats meat and offer them some amount of money per day to be vegetarian/vegan (or, find two people and pay them to halve their meat intake, or whatever). This might satisfy a moral obligation while costing you in a currency that you're happier to spend.
The obvious argument is "why not buy offsets and then also not do the bad thing for 2x effect". I don't think anyone's morally obligated to buy carbon offsets arbitrarily even if they're not flying, and similarly, maybe people aren't obligated to not do the bad thing either? But this gets into the weeds of moral obligation in general, which is probably a complex topic. Suffice to say, while buying an offset might cost some amount of money, not eating meat is ~free, and that's a trade some people may be willing to make if they're feeling obliged to reduce meat production too.
> an interesting thought experiment for meat-eaters: Why not stop eating beef?
I know that this was likely meant for an internal thought experiment, rather than everyone who reads it responding. But personally: I eat beef as part of ~1.5 meals per week. I could cut this down to one meal every two weeks, with a bit of effort. Eliminating it entirely would mean eliminating certain food products that I enjoy that don't have a comparable vegetarian alternative. Reducing chicken or pork would be more difficult, particularly because there is very poor availability of tofu at my local grocery stores.
The most interesting thing I identified from the thought experiment: my eating habits have changed pretty dramatically from the pandemic. I've gotten in the habit of eating homemade food for about 19 out of 21 meals per week (i.e. i never buy lunch out), which results in far less meat consumption. And far higher egg consumption
Side story: I have relatives that raise their own beef, in very small amounts (one per year) as a side-effect of running a dairy farm. Their farm is small scale, about 40 milking, with surface treatment of manure runoff (constructed wetland). No water supply issues where they are. Poor quality land (very shallow topsoil) wouldn't be any good for commercial crop production. They are pastured most of the summer, all hay/silage is harvested on site, with additional feed/salt provided in the other months (I should ask them where their feed comes from). The reason they are able to stay in business is because there is a stable price for milk in Canada (supply management), which results in mildly higher consumer cost for dairy products, but a ridiculous amount of political controversy from right wing political parties.
I am missing the very long intestines and multiple stomach of a herbivore, so I cannot live on vegetables only. Meat is one of the very few things I can digest and there are many with similar food restrictions. I don't like chicken or beef, but I include it in my meals for diversification.
Different people have different time preferences (preference for futures vs current satisfaction). Evidently most people don't even care what their diet does to their own health in fifty years time (given the massive rise in diet-related preventable illnesses), so I don't imagine they'd care about much about the environmental effects either. And there's nothing wrong with that; there's no "objectively correct" time preference, no objective way to say "X units of satisfaction thirty years from now is worth Y units of satisfaction today".
Just because there's no objectively correct measure, I wouldn't say that means it isn't wrong. There's nothing objective in ethics.
In your example of people not caring about their health: the environmental impact of diet is in a different ethical class for me. If you choose to ignore your own health that's your deal, but if you make choices that negatively impact the lives of millions I think the ethics are different.
>If you choose to ignore your own health that's your deal, but if you make choices that negatively impact the lives of millions I think the ethics are different.
The impact of any individual unit of meat consumption by an individual is incredibly marginal. The standard society generally uses to determine whether an individual has harmed another is way higher than that. The satisfaction an individual gets from eating meat might well be greater than the dissatisfaction that instance causes others, and indeed since there's no objective standard it's impossible to measure exactly.
I think it requires a certain mental state of almost complete lack of empathy to enjoy meat though. If you eat meat and never think about these issues, you simply don't care.
That goes for any activity that is harmful on any scale at any time frame. Smoking is obvious. Skiing? Your accident rate is higher than average, taking away health care resources from people who also need them, also nature is being negatively impacted. Watching Netflix? Have you ever thought about the power your TV needs, and the resources used to manufacture it?
That goes on and on. You may draw a line somewhere and declare "no, from here on it's nonsense", but there's no objectivity, there's no reason why the line should be exactly there, and not, say, on the other side of eating meat.
I don't care that much for my own health, but I do care about my ecological footprint. Not because of X units of satisfaction I'll take from glaciers thirty years from now, but because I don't treat the world as my property. We're guests here and should behave accordingly.
>Looking at the lens of "who will clean this up", future generations.
And how do we weigh the satisfaction of potential future people against people currently existing? It's not easy; if we assign some value to future people, then that implies we should try to have more children, to maximise the sum total of future people's satisfaction.
>Looking at "who was there before and will be after my visit", then human civilization outlives each and every one of us.
Metaphysically speaking, it's quite possible that every moment of human experience is going to happen anyway, regardless of what we do: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boltzmann_brain.
> if we assign some value to future people, then that implies we should try to have more children, to maximise the sum total of future people's satisfaction.
Not quite. While it would be true (The Repugnant Conclusion) if every future person had positive quality of life, there can be a point where adding new people pushes everyone's quality of life into negative.
> Metaphysically speaking, it's quite possible that every moment of human experience is going to happen anyway, regardless of what we do: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boltzmann_brain.
My point was more that the purpose of life could be seen as sustaining the continuity of this civilization. Presumably, Boltzmann brains would not correspond to any civilization more often than any other, so they don't take anything away from the value of a life and the duty to preserve resources.
I see this down voted, and frankly not surprised, this is a really unpopular opinion somehow, but this is not wrong. As a community we do see the duty of protecting environment imposed on us, but as an individual I don't think many people see it as that.
I don't know how to put it in words exactly, but "future is doomed" is somehow "everyone knows" one way or another (at least I am going to die before doom happens and a single individual cannot be held responsible for the doom anyways).
And then we also have the factories polluting the environment where we can debate on how useful the end product is, but when it comes down to a person eating meat the discussion just never would convince meat eaters in my opinion. Meat eaters could say "who's ultimately benefiting from the factories polluting environment" and the answer would more or less be some corporation. Why should they have all the fun ?
I'm inclined to agree. Framing environmentalism as a problem that individuals need to solve isn't going to get us anywhere. It's a problem with the rules of the game, it requires political willpower.
But to have any chance of getting out of this mess everyone will need to make sacrifices at massive and micro scales. The bit I was trying to draw attention to is whether, when faced with a very small piece of the puzzle, people are able to make a relatively small sacrifice or not, even something as trivial as cutting out beef. At the end of the day, it's only food and there's plenty of other things one could eat.
Because there's a lot worse coming in a few decades.
> something as trivial as cutting out beef. At the end of the day, it's only food and there's plenty of other things one could eat.
There's a lot of road left before this line of thought stops though. Why have any nice food instead of nutrient-rich tasteless slime? When you argue that it's about the most efficient resource usage, there's really no reason to stop at beef, or meat in general. So we could feed 15bn (or whatever number) if we quit meat? We could feed 30bn if we switch to soylent!
I don't believe that individual sacrifice is the answer, and in my experience, it's usually somebody who, for some reason or another doesn't eat meat who says that "we" don't need it. Much like somebody who is rich and earns their money via capital gains might argue that it's really not a problem if income tax gets increased.
I simply invited you to ask yourself a question, and suggested that the initial response can be a useful thing to engage with, rather than a hard stopping point. Like I said, an experiment.
Why is this being downvoted. It's true, I don't think non vegetarian pay higher health insurance premiums, so society as a whole will foot the bill of both health and environmental impact.
well, otherwise it would get expensive pretty fast with rainforest soil. I mean, you learn this in highschool around here (rainforest soil=most often bad for agriculture, so one must take means to mitigate that → one must move the crop...), so what do people expect?
I admit it is only a speculation, but I made a link between the phytoestrogens and some health problem I had.
I had a scare with a autoimmune problem, but luckily it was benign. However I learnt that estrogens weaken the mechanism by which the body learns to avoid fighting itself, and that it was explaining why women had a lot more of some kinds of autoimmune diseases than men. And the missing puzzle piece was when I understood that my autoimmune problem started a few years after I discovered Japanese food culture, and as I had always been in fond of soy drinks, soy creams, tofu, etc, when I was in Japan I was drinking/eating/dreaming soy every meal of every day (this for a few years).
Are you sure about they are lowering estrogens level?
To draw you the picture, I was drinking tonyu (soy drink) all the time so there always was some in my stomach (except when I was sleeping). Maybe the mechanism by which phytoestrogens lower blood level estrogens works only when you give it time to overcompensate after your last intake.
I think the title should be ‘Brazilian soya and beer exports linked to deforestation’ because surly ALL amazon exports of soy and beef would be linked to deforestation.
