Being vegan isn’t as good for humanity as you think
qz.comA pretty weak article and omits any new developments in the future of food production.
The main argument of the article appears to be that some farm land won't be used (perennial cropland) when people are on a vegan diet. Well, then use that space to build some aeroponic or hydroponic farms [1]. You'll get produce all year around.
Other studies have shown that it's not sustainable if we'd have to rely on meat to feed the world. The only reason why we keep eating meat is because it's cultural, traditional and pleasurable. Our society doesn't need meat anymore to survive, plenty of other protein sources available that doesn't involve killing other sentient beings en masse. Even some high performance athletes are relying on a plant-based diet only - making the argument 'you need animal protein to be strong' moot [2]
The future of food is going to be plant based [3].
[1] http://aerofarms.com/ [2] http://thediscerningbrute.com/more-vegan-athletes-rise-to-th... [3] http://beyondmeat.com/
In future all meat will be genetically engineered and grown in bioreactors, and it will be cheaper higher quality and suffering-free. As a result, the line between meat and vegetable will blur as to become irrelevant. We will engineer custom food according to nutritional needs and taste. That's assuming the corporations don't fuck everything up with their stupid greedy patent laws.
One of the larger problems I've found with the vegan diet is, where do you source your Omega 3 from? ALA (found in flax and chia seeds) has low bioavailability as opposed to EPA and DHA found in fish and eggs.
Not only that, flax and chia seeds are very high in Omega 6, thus promote dangerous levels of inflammation.
So, can a vegan please explain to me how your community has managed to solve this?
Fish get their Omega 3 from algae, and so that's probably the best and most direct way to get it. That's what Soylent does for Omega 3's using bio reactors.
Also, vegans are healthier than the average population with lower rates of death in major categories like heart disease[1]. In other words, from the standard american diet to veganism, it's generally much healthier which I think is the better comparison to make.
I would argue that the reason vegans are much healthier isn't their specific diet but that they're paying so much attention to their diet.
That sounds less of an argument and more of an opinion. Throwing out anecdotal evidence, I'm a vegan and I know a couple dozen vegans, most of us don't pay any attention to what we eat except making sure it doesn't include an animal product.
In most measures, vegetarians of most types are healthier than nearly all vegan populations and tend to not suffer from the typical dietary deficiencies that plague vegan populations.
I gotta run, but there's quite a few studies available online about this.
> Also, vegans are healthier than the average population with lower rates of death in major categories like heart disease
That's not really a high bar...
I feel like it's important to point out that the modern approach to diet of picking one nutrient as a magic one, is, well, kinda magical thinking. Omega-3 fatty acids, beyond the minimum amount your body needs, haven't been shown to be a cure for anything and supplementation hasn't been shown to improve outcomes or performance. You need it, yes; but you probably don't need to build your diet around it. e.g. from WikiPedia:
"Dietary supplementation with omega-3 fatty acids does not appear to affect the risk of death, cancer or heart disease. Furthermore, fish oil supplement studies have failed to support claims of preventing heart attacks or strokes."
OK, so even if we assume we need more Omega-3 than a normal vegan diet contains, most meat also does not contain a good balance of Omega-3 to Omega-6. Eggs are only a good source if they have been supplemented with flax or other good sources of Omega-3. Fish is often a mixed bag, when it comes to health; it may be better to get our nutrients from the same place they get it. Seaweed and other edible ocean plants are a pretty good source of Omega-3 and are healthy on other fronts, too.
Finally, there are many normal foods that have a good Omega-3 to Omega-6 balance. Walnuts and other nuts, most seeds, several kinds of fruit and vegetables (while it's a smallish amount, the balance is good and you really don't need mega-doses).
In short, if you're eating a diverse vegan or vegetarian diet, you almost certainly don't need to think about any specific nutrient (except B12 for vegans, which does need to be supplemented, or obtained via nutritional yeast that has B12). You're just as likely to have specific nutritional deficiencies on a meat-based diet; folic acid deficiency is a common problem of a meat-heavy diet that would not trouble a vegan or vegetarian, for example.
A balanced and diverse diet is the right answer to questions about food and nutrition. Laser-focus on any one particular nutrient is probably counter-productive, unless there's a specific reason to focus on it (some people have difficulty processing some nutrients, for example, but Omega-3 isn't one of them, to my knowledge).
In short: Omega-3 is the new fad nutrient. There will be another in a year or two, and the entire health nutrition industry will figure out ways to sell you books, and pills, and diet plans, and the food industry will figure out how to cram more of it into foods, and we'll find that, like most of the other supplements over the years, it doesn't really do anything. You need some to be healthy; you don't need gallons of it to be healthy.
I completely agree that laser focusin on one nutrient isn't good, buy even if you were fixated on omega 3s bioreactors making algae is healht and way more efficient than fish, and where they mostly get their omega 3's anywyas.
Although this is no good for religious vegans, if you are only following a vegan diet for health/ethical/environmentalist reasons, it's hard to argue against eating rope-farmed salt-water mussels. They are high in long chain omega-3 fats.
See:
https://sentientist.org/2013/05/20/the-ethical-case-for-eati...
The article approves of oysters too, but note that oysters may contain oyster crabs:
They are rich in mercury in my waters, so I don't want to consume them :D
Although eating animals that do not have a central nervous system is equivalent to eating plants, so it should be vegan.
Forgive my ignorance, but is the presence of a nervous system really the defining factor? What about mycelium in mushrooms, which operates as a signalling network?
I know a guy who will only eat windfall foods - plants that have died a natural death or fruit that have fallen from the tree (super hardcore fruitarian), and won't eat germplasm (I.e. Seeds - wheat, nuts, etc.) which seems to me, if the reason is ethical, to probably be the right place to draw the line.
Personally I'm an omnivore, but try to keep my meat consumption generally very low.
Central is the key word. Mushrooms have no chance of being sentient in any sense we consider significant.
Baby cows can be traumatized by separation from their mother and scarred for life. Cows are also mourning the loss of their best friends for a long time. Many other animals that human use for agriculture clearly fit the description of sentient beings that have a "wish" to live.
As others have mentioned, there are a variety of algae based vegan EPA and DHA supplements on the market now, but most people probably don't need to worry about it. Some people do not feel good when switching to a vegan diet, and EPA/DHA supplementation might be something to try. There is a lot of vegan food in the world and two vegans can easily have completely distinct diets.
One particular supplement I like is Green Foods True Vitality, which I think is the least expensive for vegan DHA supplementation: http://www.greenfoods.com/store/p/44-True-Vitality-Vanilla.a...
It isn't bad on its own, but I mix it with my usual soy drink which is NOW Foods soy milk powder (which is just powdered soybeans; sadly the only equivalent with rice is rediculously expensive), (vegan) cane sugar (because it is much less expensive than maple syrup :( ), a dash of ground whole stevia herb (to reduce the amount of sugar needed), and a little vanilla powder. Quite delicious :).
Edit: After reading SwellJoe's excellent reply again I would also like to emphasise that many fruits and vegetables have really excellent nutritional profiles and just eating more of them can solve most nutritional issues. Even with vegan diets it is quite easy to not do that, but it is almost certianly the healthiest option.
It's likely that vegans don't suffer from EPA and DHA deficiency because the body gets better at converting them from ALA. As this study have found: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20861171
From the study: "Despite having significantly lower intakes of EPA and DHA (from fish or fish oil), blood levels of EPA and DHA in vegans and vegetarians were approximately the same as regular fish eaters.
The results indicate that the bodies of vegetarians and other non-fish-eaters can respond to a lack of dietary omega-3 EPA and DHA by increasing their ability to make them from omega-3 ALA.
And as they said, "The implications of this study are that, if conversion of plant-based sources of n-3 PUFAs were ... sufficient to maintain health, it could have significant consequences for public health ..."
To be safe, I occasionally take an omega-3 supplement from algae.
Humans vary in their ability to elongate fatty acids. It's possible that poor elongaters fail to thrive on a vegan diet and revert to a omnivorous diet, biasing the sample. We'd need a randomized controlled study to see if this is important.
Several studies have found omega-3s in the bloodstream of vegans (I'll try and post links later), which suggest it endogenous production of it's metabolites actually occurs at a low level.
While this doesn't get you into the recommend blood levels of omega-3 oils (it's mostly suprising because it's been found at all, and consistently), I have not seen a non-drastic method for meeting the amounts of omega three that the science reccomends, vegan or not.
Omega fat science is quite out of whack with the dietary recomendations commonly made. If you do the math, in order to acheive the ratios that are described in most papers I've read, one would need to forgo all omega 6 sources (olive oil, tofu, many other things), or consume unrealistic amounts of omega-3 oil each day to offset them. (I once calculated it to be in the region of a pint of omega-3 rich oil a day)
I'm equally mystified, but about the whole thing.
I try to add more foods that contain omega 3 to my diet, such as walnuts, cooking with rapeseed oil, spirulina powder in my smoothies, avocados.
Or simply get some supplements like this one here: http://www.nothingfishy.co/
Also don't forget your B12 and D3 vitamins.
Not a vegan but algal oils look promising.
http://www.foodprocessing.com/articles/2012/algae-dha-health...
According to [1] the conversion rate puts the required daily intake of 2 teaspoons of flaxseed oil per day to meet the EPA and DHA RDA.
GMO could easily solve the problem of omega-3 and B12. [2]
[1]: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9637947
[2]: http://www.gmo-compass.org/eng/database/plants/63.rapeseed.h...
Soy & walnut have plenty of Omega 3
Going vegan isn't supposed to be as good for humanity as possible -- it is supposed to be as good as possible for all conscious beings, including non-human animals. It would be rather surprising if the best diet for humans would also be the best diet for humans and animals taken together. On the other hand, it is encouraging that these two goals do not conflict for the most part: The paper only finds pretty minimal land-use efficiency gains if one mixes some animal products into a plant-based diet.
Exactly. The idea of the vegan diet being "good for humanity" isn't something that crosses the minds of many "die-hard vegans", quite the opposite in fact. Many have a profound dislike of humanity and choose a vegan diet out of concern for the animals harmed in food production. Morrissey would be an excellent example of someone who really takes that philosophy to heart. For the record, I'm a vegetarian, my daughter is vegan, and I'm a Morrissey fan.
"profound dislike for humanity" seems unfair.
Besides that, the article is talking about 100% global adherence to the vegan diet. As long as there are some vegetarians, the non-human-only farmland will have use.
And even with 100% veganism, assuming no miracle crop is invented to use that additional land, it was still a pretty slim gap between the vegan diet and the "optimal" ones.
Really, the article kind of buries the lede when it puts veganism under the microscope considering that its numbers show how moving away from the modern meat-heavy diet would like triple the food supply.
The idea of the vegan diet being "good for humanity" isn't solely about land use which this article focuses on. It's mostly about use of energy.
Vegan diet: food from land -> truck -> grocery store -> my mouth.
Meat/dairy/what have you: food from land -> truck -> animal's mouth -> truck -> grocery store -> my mouth.
And when it comes to meat it means years feeding and water etc. until the product can actually be sent to the store. That's the idea behind it being "good for humanity". A lot of energy/pollution/water use is going into something we simply do not need in such large portions. If we ate less meat (like humans have been doing for most of our history) things would be a lot better for the environment and therefore humanity.
"And when it comes to meat it means years feeding and water etc. until the product can actually be sent to the store. "
Years? No. Chickens are normally slaughtered at around 40 days. Pigs, 4-10 months. Beef cattle around 14 months.
Got me there
It's a pretty common trope that meat requires more resources to produce than plants, but it is wildly inaccurate.
Rather than breaking things down by meat or plant, we should just be looking at cost per calorie.
There are classes of plants which use much less resources than meat to produce a single calorie. These are generally grains, potatoes, and anything which produces edible oils (olive oil, canola oil, etc.)
There are also classes of plants which require much more resources than meat to produce a single calorie. Generally speaking, all fruits and vegetables, especially leafy greens (which are an order of magnitude more expensive per calorie than meat).
So, veganism or vegetarianism are not necessarily good for the environment. If you switch to being a vegan/vegetarian, but your grocery bill stays the same, then you environmental impact is probably about the same.
Your grocery bill point isn't valid because of a) the complicated state of farming subsidies (in the U.S. at least) and b) the interests certain companies take in pricing various items (for example, at McDonald's a burger is much cheaper than a salad, but one could argue this is because McDonald's has invested much more in making their burger production efficient and has a vested interest in making their customers eat burgers rather than salads).
The bottom line is that your food bill in no way accurately reflects the cost required to produce your food.
Yeah, but we're talking orders of magnitude here, not a few percent.
So, lettuce, for example, is an order of magnitude (10x) more expensive per calorie than ground beef. And ground beef is almost an order of magnitude more expensive per calorie than cereal grains.
My guess as to the reason for these differences is some aspect of the chemistry involved in creating the foods, combined with how easily they spoil during transport. And I don't think it's any accident that the advent of human civilization coincides with domestication of grains.
I think focusing on calorie cost is a good start, but has its caveats. A cup of lettuce is 8 calories, an ounce of beef is 70 calories. People generally eat a cup or less of lettuce in their serving of salad. Whereas they eat 8 oz. or more of beef per serving (16 oz. burgers anyone?).
For decades my bodyweight would not go below 195 lbs. I turned vegetarian and now vegan, and my bodyweight is 178 lbs. I can do more pull ups, my body fat is at 14% vs. 21%, and I feel more energetic than before. I am very active compared with the average person.
One of the great revelations to me was how many calories I was actually consuming compared to what I thought I was consuming. When I was an omnivore, I was trying to keep my caloric intake to 1900 to 2200 calories per day given my activity level and weight. When I actually counted every piece of food put in my mouth for two weeks, I realized I was generally consuming 2500 to 2800 calories. It was cultural and habitual.
When I went vegetarian, and became more conscious of what I was putting in my mouth, I was down to 1850 or less calories a day. My body has stabilized at this weight. All of my standard blood tests show I am in good health.
My point of this expose was to point out that at 10x the expense eating green or vegan gets chipped away at by:
1. I only eat one-tenth of the lettuce or leafy greens based on calories vs. old beef consumption. 2. I eat 33% less calories per day as a healthy, active person. 3. If everyone ate healthier, and more greens (but less calorically), I think the numbers work out better.
Tell that to someone forced to paleo diet due to health/performance reasons. We obviously don't have as complicated ingestion system as cows nor as simple as cats so we aren't "designed" to eat vegetables/meat only but most likely both.
I find it hard top believe that we need both. People have populated (almost) every part of the world for centuries, and have vastly different diets wherever you go. Indians are vegetarian in general, while I imagine that Inuits traditionally ate pretty much anything but plants.
We should probably look at dominant human type and dominant diseases in populations skewed to a particular diet to see what the effects are. I would be interested in looking at strength/muscle/fat ratios, how does their tooth decay, % of population affected by frequent vegetable/fruit toxins and % of population affected by gout and similar illnesses caused by excessive meat consumption.
What kind of "performance" reasons are we talking about, because I'm having trouble thinking of "force"ful ones.
Athletic and mental performance. Paleo alongside intermittent fasting is super popular amongst endurance athletes reporting significant energy increase comparing to popular liquid vegan diet; a low-carb, high fiber, medium fat/protein diet also has significant positive effects on some mental disorders (like the currently "popular" BPD or ADHD). And you often see vegans with significant health problems later in life as well (cancer), though this might be side effects of past extremes such as eating junk fats like margarine and plenty of sugar because of mistaken belief those were healthier alternatives, making them as ill as frequent red meat consumers. Will see how this would fare for Soylent users in a few decades.
We probably shouldn't be on either side of extreme - vegan vs meat-only but rather figure out what works for our DNA/RNA-based protein factory best (maybe using personalized ML?) and exercise self-restraint.
No-one's "forced" to be an endurance athlete tho.
Not if you are a female; males are thrown into a hypercompetitive world to fight for resources/females and anything that gives you an edge helps.
I never said anything about not eating meat at all. If everyone had a paleo diet we would still be eating A LOT less meat.
Omg, people go and find out how agriculture works if you only have that primitive view of it. Field, truck, my mouth… my ass.
I don't really see the energy problem here, I mean it's not like cows are powered by electricity.
Lol, surely you're not serious?
In case you are, the energy problem comes from having to ship the cows, lighting, heating, water pumping and fodder shipping to house and feed them. Then further energy requirements for processing the meat, freezing or refrigerating it during shipping, packaging etc. Some of these costs (refrigeration, mostly) are shared with plant-based foods, but most others are extra.
The main point of the article appears to be that the vegan diet doesn't use the perennial cropland. Would be nice if they bothered to mention why. Are the perennial crops 100% feed crops and not something that humans can use, even in crazy reprocessed vegan food substitutes?
Reading the actual study, I can't help but think that the authors are being intellectually dishonest. Their logic is thus:
> Cropland in perennial forages included hay crops and grazing on land which could be cropped but is used for pasture.
A: Perennial cropland is used as pasture for animal agriculture.
> Perennial cropland requirements were zero in the vegan diet.
B: Vegans don't require pastures for animal agriculture.
> The ovolacto- and lacto-vegetarian diets used about half of the cropland restricted to perennial forages, while the vegan diet used none of the restricted cropland.
C: Therefore the vegan diet wouldn't have any use for perennial cropland.
This would be true if perennial crops for humans didn't exist, but that's just not true. For example, we can grow perennial sunflower (!), grain (!!) and rice (!!!): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perennial_crop#Example_crops
Land is not a problem if vegetables come to reign, hydroponics and aeroponics will easily substitute the inefficient land-use.
Tom et al. (2015) [1] also show that in the US the switch to a vegan diet would be less efficient. But it's natural, from an economic perspective, that existing processes are optimized for efficiency and low costs and given the high demand for vegetables and fruits there would obviously be a huge incentive to optimize the production processes and lower the prices.
Vanham et al. (2013) [2,3] show that EU would benefit from a vegan diet when it comes to water usage.
Overall, it's quite obvious that the medical costs of today are extremely large mostly due to overconsumption of animal products. It is unfortunate that they can be easily overconsumed and thus cause health issues. Diet that includes animals is much more destructive when it comes to dead ocean zones, rainforest destruction, species extinction and water pollution, being the biggest factor in mentioned issues.
[1]: Energy use, blue water footprint, and greenhouse gas emissions for current food consumption patterns and dietary recommendations in the US http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10669-015-9577-y
[2]: The water footprint of the EU for different diets http://temp.waterfootprint.org/Reports/Vanham-Bidoglio-2014....
[3]: Potential water saving through changes in European diets http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0160412013...
> Overall, it's quite obvious that the medical costs of today are extremely large mostly due to overconsumption of animal products.
Whoa there, you have no evidence for that claim. The medical impacts of sugar and corn syrup for example have been a disaster. Probably more so than excessive meat. You can't single-out meat, Americans overconsume everything.
There's no evidence for sugar and corn syrup that is better than evidence for animal products.
Robert Lustig's bitter truth is a complete lie.
Fact-checking bunch of his "extraordinary" statements, like those about Japanese not consuming fructose, and similar, points that he has an agenda to share.
why the downvotes? such a welcoming community. I seem to have replied to the wrong parent.
well, I'll leave then :(
It's not at all obvious that the "medical costs of today are extremely large mostly due to overconsumption of animal products". Some people blame sugar, which is made from plants. Some people blame fat, which in the modern American diet is largely vegetable oil. But human nutrition is notoriously difficult to study, so making strong claims about any specific thing being to blame is probably dishonest in some way.
USA eats excessive amounts of sugar, fat and calories.
3500kcal per person per day 150kg of meat per person per year (compared to chinese of 60kg, or world average of 40kg).
overconsumption is the word. there was not a hint of criticism of meat being "unhealthy" -- it was mentioned in the frame of overconsumption.
150kg of meat/year is 411g/day. Making the conservative assumption that it's all 20% fat ground beef (in practice it's likely leaner), that's only 1041kcal/day. This is well below the minimum calorie requirement for a healthy adult, so for it to be "overconsumption" there must be something unhealthy about meat specifically.
add to that 250kg of milk and 15kg of cheese and you'll soon have no space for any kind of beans, legumes, vegetables and fruits.
as I've said before, problem is overconsumption of everything and animal products take a huge part of that 3500kcal intake.
reducing intake of calorically dense foods is a good step towards battling the rise of killer diseases since most of them are obviously caused by unhealthy lifestyle.
Yes, I agree. It's all about balance and proportions.
If the average American counted everything they put in their mouth for two weeks, they would be surprised as I was when I did it.
I am from Brooklyn, and grew up and lived their and in Manhattan until my thirties. I was raised on a typical meat and potatoes, with the occasional over-cooked vegetable (no salads) diet.
I remained at +195 lbs and 19 to 22% body fat even when active. I had thought I had cut my caloric consumption down, but when I really counted it for two weeks, I was consuming 2500 to 3000 calories per day. The only reason I was not too obese was that I was very active. I was not a soda drinker or a fast food person. I did like my eggs and cheeses, and pizza, and burritos with cheese and sour cream. My cholesterol levels were very high, and my sugars were out of whack even if I looked healthy to my American friends, but fat to my SE Asian peers.
I have been living in SE Asia for 8 years now. For the last year, I have been living in the rice fields of East Java. Food, rice and fruits, are not transported, they are within reach of my doorstep. One of the benefits of locally-grown produce. This is why I think city rooftop gardens, hydroponics, and other tech will ameliorate some of the energy use in food transport.
I went vegetarian, and then vegan, almost 3 years ago. My weight has stabilized at 178 lbs at 14% body fat. My blood work was all good last I checked. I feel healthier and stronger. I still bench 190 lbs. which is 18 lbs over my bodyweight now, and was under my bodyweight before, so yes, I am stronger by that comparison. I can run further with less fatigue, and do more pullups. I make it a habit to not sit for extended periods (read standing up, squatting Asian-style with heels on the floor, or reclined on the floor).
My Mom always pushed for good posture. She would turn in her grave at all of the youngsters with craned heads down peering at their phones ;) That and shoulders back, and no slouching!
I think that genetics plays a role in some people's weight issues, but after having my own, and listening and watching my peers, a LOT is just diet. It has even been proven that exercise only 'polishes' off the last 10% or so. It is diet that has the largest effect. I still like exercise for the other benefits it has in reducing stress, helping me to sleep better, and maintaining or building bone, joint and muscle strength.
This issue puts most people in direct conflict with their own cognitive dissonance: objectivity goes out the window.
Provide some decent evidence. I see plenty of fat unhealthy looking vegetarians.
For example - utter non-sequitars like the comment above.
It doesn't matter: it's a hit piece. Maximising 'the number of people that can be supported by existing farmland' is not the be all and end all of 'good for humanity'.
This made me wonder: Maybe returning these lands to their wild state can also be good for humanity when looking at it from another angle than just food production. Something to also consider.
I didn't get that either, there certainly are crops grown solely for animal feed, but it's not at all clear why that land can't be repurposed for human-edible crops.
If I am reading the original paper correctly, there is a bottleneck with the vegan diet that essentially requires you to only use cultivated cropland to get enough of a balanced diet.
The vegan curve never flattens out, because it is entirely dependent on cultivated cropland, unlike the other diets:
https://images.elementascience.org/611000.elementa.f005.PNG_...
Except you can use perennial sunflower which is an oilseed crop for crop rotation.
I was assuming the bottleneck was protein output, but I cannot find the info in the paper at a glance.
There is an implicit assumption that maximizing the number of people who can be squeezed on to the planet is "good" for humanity. I have never heard a reasonable justification for this. Anyone who's taken a long car trip in an automobile packed to maximum passenger capacity will intuitively understand the counterargument.
I'm more sympathetic to the idea of maintaining a population level within which people can live with some amount of dignity e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgia_Guidestones#Inscriptio...
I sometimes wonder if curing cancer and other diseases is such a noble cause. More people consuming more of the finite resources that we have. Its a difficult question, and I am thinking of lots of outliers as I type this. Extending a 70 year olds life by a few years is different from curing a child leukemia sufferer.
The only difficulty is deciding how to define "noble". Such questions appear hard because we vacillate between many different optimization functions, and in conversation we lack precision.
One thing that is often overlooked is the impact on biodiversity. Nothing kills off as many species as converting an area to cropland. Turning it into an enforced monoculture destroys the habitat for all the other plants and animals that would usually live there.
Grazing animals can co-exist with other life, and some cases like forest grazing [1] (which used to be the standard way of grazing animals in europe and is slowly gaining traction again), has been shown to actually increase biodiversity.
So paradoxically enough, if what you care about is biodiversity and the livelihood of animals, you might consider reducing your consumption of cropland produced products like vegetables and grains in favor of meats from grazing animals.
Don't know why land use would be the determining factor for food access. If the goal is to maximize access to food, that seems like a food distribution problem, and not a production problem. Hungry people need cheap markets, not farms.
Indeed, we already produce enough food, that it would be toxic if it were all consumed. Meat production is a symptom of a food surplus.
Interesting article. I have long been of the opinion that a little meat is no big deal. However, the argument that we can feed more people with a mostly vegetarian diet vs a full vegan one doesn't mean going vegan is less efficient. If we want the average diet to have less animal products, then if some people completely give up meat it will be better than if they just cut down - they are in a sense making up for everyone else still eating their daily KFC bucket. Until most people are mostly vegetarian, we can still thank the vegans for taking one for the team.
The article seems to focus more on instances where food production is a limiting factor. Land use is less of a problem in places where we have (collectively) enough food and people tend to focus more on the very serious environmental impact of large-scale agriculture. In the latter case, I would except a diet lower in meat to fare much better than the alternatives simply because it requires fewer acres to be farmed (or the same acres less often as the article points out) and thus has lower pollution output.
Rather misinformed. Also, if farmland is the issue, has nobody in the science world noticed the magic of hydroponic cultivation? Vertical gardening is possible, a skyscraper has the footprint of a huge field when you use every floor to grow food. Can't do that with cows.
Why not? We do it with humans.
Interesting, if a bit vegan shaming :-p According to the research referenced a vegan diet is about 1.8x as efficient as a normal american diet. Seems pretty good for humanity.
Limiting meat consumption by ~50% would have a similar sustainability impact to a vegan diet.
W.K. Kellogg funded the research. Their grant: http://www.wkkf.org/grants/grant/2009/02/foodprints-and-food...
Talk about a strawman. The world is no where near 100% vegan. The fact that all of humanity being vegan isn't the most efficient use of our resources has no bearing whether it's better for you, today, to be vegan.
100% of humans being cops is bad for humanity. Does that imply being a cop is not good for humanity?