This is such a critical point, and especially salient to me because unlike steronz, I bike about 2 hours a day, not because I am disciplined, but because I love doing it and, therefore, it’s much easier for me than foregoing meat.
It would seem to be that the entire argument is moot, as we are all going to be in the soup when the Oglala Aquifer is finally drained and the extreme drought conditions drop the reservoirs beyond workable depth. Can’t grow crops or sustain meat production (or life, for that matter) without water.
There are a number of things you haven’t considered. For example:
“Many people don’t realize how interrelated the fields of growing plants and raising livestock are. Farms provide crop waste for the animals to feed on and in return, the animals provide manure to be used as fertilizer for the plants. If everyone decided to go vegan, then a lot of the land now used for grazing animals would have to be converted to cropland and we would significantly reduce the amount of livestock on this planet. That means there will be more crop waste, but less animals to consume it, leaving farms with few options but to burn the waste, releasing carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.”
“Then we have to consider fertilizer: if we cut our population of livestock, we have less manure to use as fertilizer. This means that we would have to manufacture a lot more artificial (read: not organic) fertilizer. That alone, according to an article published by the National Academy of Sciences, would produce about 23 million tons of carbon dioxide emissions. The burning of agricultural waste would produce about another 2 million tons. So when taking all these factors into account, an entirely vegan United States would reduce its greenhouse gas emissions by less than 3 percent. Not really the drastic decrease we were looking for.”
Your vegan diet may not be as green as you think it is.
All the more reason to get off the moral high horse and engage with realistic solutions, rather than condemning anyone who eats meat.
The central point isn’t that vegan diets are ineffective: Jackmanii’s cites notwithstanding, they’re plainly effective.
The central point is that food is a key part of human culture and is deeply tied up with our identities and emotions in ways that make it really difficult to change. I could change my clothing from cotton to polyester without much difficulty; but my deep emotional associations with hamburgers and roast chickens and bacon and cheese make it really, really hard for me to contemplate giving them up. I’ve tried.
Yes. I still remember an upper division American Folklore class I took in uni. The professor had a special interest in food and foodways, and that was the emphasis of the class. Food traditions are extremely deep and difficult to change.
What we eat and how we eat it are primary to who we are as individuals and as cultures. How we get from place to place, get warm or cool or make light, those shift all the time. Humans reliquish their foodways with deep reluctance and often with a great sense of loss.
It is also true that most of the changes that must happen in order to save the planet are going to have be enabled, supported, and ultimately, enforced, by governments, not by individuals making ‘lifestyle choices’. The scale needed is far too great, and global capitalism has a deathgrip on us all, that will never be loosened without government intervention. Of course this intervention must come with a majority of the governed seeing the need for it. Otherwise … (I refer you to the civil war thread).
I’m not a vegan, or even a vegetarian, but I eat meat only occasionally, and only locally sourced and humanely raised. Thus, it’s expensive, and I have plenty of incentive to eat beans instead.
Maybe there is some nuance here. Sure, I think anyone would agree factory meat farming is harmful to the environment for a number of reasons. But what about more ethical and less destructive locally produced meat? If I occasionally enjoy a high-quality steak sold in my local grocery that was produced at the cattle ranch in my county, and the animals were free-roaming and grass-fed, isn’t that steak less offensive? I think that sort of production is less harmful than mass-produced, fast-produced, low-quality feed-lot meat. I think a more effective way to help the environment is to curtail consumption of cheap, mass-produced meat and instead encourage producers of quality, more sustainable meat products. Getting enough people to quit meat cold turkey (heh) just is not realistic, no matter how guilty you make them feel.
And as for lumping liberals into a giant, homogenous bloc, we should note that there are liberals who own guns, smoke cigarettes, drink alcohol, drive gas-guzzlers, go to church, fly in airplanes, and like to eat meat.
I’m a tree-hugging bleeding-heart liberal. I live in a major metropolitan area, where I have a wide range of food options, including vegetarian options. And, I make enough money that I can opt for pretty much any food choice I would like.
I also recognize that meat production in the Western world has a bad environmental impact, as well as being, in many cases, not particularly humane. And, I recognize that a plant-based diet would probably be largely better for me.
My problem isn’t that I’m ignorant of any of the above – it’s that I am a fussy eater, and I have never really developed a taste for most vegetables. I’ve tried, and tried, and tried, to eat and like vegetables, and it’s just not happening for me, on a large scale.
Over the past few years, I’ve been trying to work more plant-based protein into my diet (veggie “chicken” patties, nut butters, etc.), but I’m still eating meat regularly, and that’s not likely to change, because (a) I enjoy the taste of meat, and (b) I would be miserable trying to eat like a vegan or vegetarian.
Does that make me a hypocrite? Maybe.
You want me to vote for policies that make meat more expensive and plant-based food cheaper and more accessible? Sure, I’ll gladly do that.
You want me to individually and voluntarily abstain from food that I enjoy, knowing that not enough people are going to do the same to make any difference? Pass.
IMO this obsession with individual choices is unhelpful and actually counterproductive to mitigating climate change. We need concerted policy-driven action to get everyone on board. Not people wagging fingers at a guy enjoying a hamburger because it’s easier to shame an individual than getting compliance from oil companies or the concrete industry.
Actually, we’ve replaced a good bit of the beef and pork in our diets with turkey from a local turkey farm. We eat turkey breast cutlets, whole turkey, turkey burgers, turkey bacon, turkey sausage, turkey ham salad, various turkey lunch-meats, turkey liver, turkey wings, whole roast turkey, etc.
But a vegan diet/lifestyle? No.
Because I love eating meat.
This is where you are wrong. It’s easy for some people. It’s extremely hard for many. It’s the creature comfort i cherish the most.
I love eating meat. I feel healthier when i eat meat. I feel less hungry when i eat meat. And yes, i know there are other protein sources. I even like a lot of bean dishes. But meat is uniquely delicious, as well as being a key component of various social and cultural events.
I do try to reduce the impact, both moral and environmental, of my meat. Most of my meat is locally raised and is pastured. That means that land is paying taxes while unpaved, and that pasture supports lots of insects and assorted plants. Pastured chicken also tastes better than chicken that lives on chicken-chow, so double win. (It’s also tougher, and much more expensive, but I’m okay with that.) I’ve seen the fields where my meat-chickens graze, and can see the biodiversity there.
Most of my milk and eggs come from pastured animals, too.
Honestly, the food i feel the greatest need to cut back on for environmental reasons is almonds. Have you seen what fraction of the water used in CA goes to farm almonds? (It’s more of you only count the water that’s removed from waterways than if you use the calculations promoted by the industry, which counts water allowed to stay in the ground and waterways as being “used” to protect the environment.) And in general i think vegans are being silly about the enslavement of bees, but in the case of almond farms, they have a point.
At least the dairy milk i consume comes from local farms that typically get enough rain to keep the animals adequately watered.
Yeah, I think the real issue here for maximizing environmental benefit is not “Well-meaning liberals should immediately cease all meat consumption” but rather “Well-meaning liberals should be supporting more environmentally sustainable agriculture, both in their individual diets and in governmental initiatives. In most cases this is probably going to involve at least some reduction and/or re-sourcing of their personal meat consumption.”
Well, the problem isn’t just meat though, is it? Plant crops such as avocados and almonds are extremely water-intensive and not particularly environmentally friendly in a desert climate. I don’t think it’s up to us as ordinary individuals just trying to feed ourselves and our family to have to research every single damn thing we eat to make sure it checks out environmentally.
It’ll probably be more like a very dry stew.
I think I missed the part where the only solutions to the problems caused by consumption of meat required people to stop eating all meat altogether.
I think the issue is that most people think that they can have more effect by changing society through group action rather than changing their own individual behavior.
If I’m honest, I want to keep eating meat more than I care about what the world will be like after I am dead. I don’t think I’m alone in this.
I’d have to dig up a cite to verify this, but I recall hearing/reading something years ago that explained that doing that is actually more harmful. What they were saying was that raising a few cows locally, hauling them to a butcher, being slaughtered one at a time and then making their way to your local store required a lot more time/money/CO2 than huge cattle farms that might do a 1000 a day via an assembly line process (disassembly line?). Economies of scale and all that.
Again, I’d have to find the cite I picked that up from. It’s not something I hear mentioned very often leading me to believe it could be incorrect or flawed. Or, maybe because small, local farms aren’t really a threat to the huge ones, we don’t hear arguments against them all that often.
Yeah, I’d like to know who funded that research, too.
I’m guessing that if you’re honest, this isn’t strictly true. I suspect it’s probably more accurate to say that you want to keep eating meat more than you care about the very slight impact that your personal meat consumption will have on what the world is like after you’re dead. Which is not an unreasonable viewpoint, and definitely not a rare one.
But I think that most of the people who subscribe to it would definitely alter their consumption patterns if they had good reason to think that the world after their death would be genuinely substantially better for it. I mean, we all know people who are going to be alive after we’re dead, and unless we’re pure sociopaths we want them to live in a decent world.
The challenge for well-meaning liberals is to bridge that gap between the insignificance of individual action and the potential for meaningful social and political change.