'On a vegan planet, Britain could feed 200M people’
theguardian.comIf I spent 1/8 of what I earn, eight of me could live on my salary. It's functionally achievable, people live in my country on that amount. But I don't like that, so I spend a bit more.
There is no sense in reducing the entire human experience to the lowest common denominator one in order to fit more people on the planet. If that's in your plans, you have a literal fight on your hands.
Eating pigs & poultry requires less than 5% of land than beef. Eating something more sustainable is not equal to reducing the human experience. That's just your taste buds talking.
You could say, that the only way to have the entire human experience, is to eat carnivores (lions, anyone?).
With carnivore diet how many people you think the planet would support?
Would there be a place for yourself, now?
What about your children and children of your children? For wildlife? For nature?
Come on, grow up, people.
And there will be some way of eating that requires 5% of the land of whatever you suggest, ad infinitum, until we have tens of billions of humans and we end up back at square one.
A line in the sand will be drawn somewhere, here's mine. I don't believe in infinite growth, it will result in us all drinking Soylent in cages.
The objective for me is to have a high quality of life for a reasonable number of people, not a low quality of life for the maximum amount possible.
> until we have tens of billions of humans
We don't even have enough room to supplement the current population on western version of meat-eating diet. We already use more land for beef production, than we have forests.
> until we have tens of billions of humans
Agree, we have to abandon our current notions of growth, if we want to preserve life for future generations. On our current path we're going to hell (too many things to enumerate here).
> a high quality of life for a reasonable number of people
Plant-based diet means a higher quality of life for everyone - people, animals, wildlife.
I for one would rather have more forests, than beef burger packaged in plastic.
If you think that we handle animals humanly, please see Dominion (2018) movie [https://www.dominionmovement.com/watch]. If you can watch it till the end and still have the same opinion about putting meat above your taste buds, please, let me know. You'd be the first.
Just chiming in to add my support for your arguments. I enjoy fast food and drinking beer, and all the moreso when I know that the former is plant-based and that the latter is brewed in an environmentally-friendly manner. I believe that both of those are possible in ways that make better use of existing agricultural land and that are therefore more scalable in terms of provision-of-nutrition -- although transition can be tricky and involves battling vested interests and long-held opinions and preferences.
I believe your debating partner is presenting false dichotomies regarding resource consumption and distribution.
> false dichotomies
That's why they create throwaways. They know they're wrong.
The idea that you think there is a "right" and "wrong" here is bizarre. You have a different value system to me, that's all.
Collectivism results in a world I and many people I know don't want to live in, so we reject it.
And yeah, we have to resist it quite harshly, because there are a lot of you guys who'll try and impose it on us via force. Good luck.
I don't have to be right for you to be wrong. That is your core logical error, here.
>Plant-based diet means a higher quality of life for everyone - people
Where is the evidence that vegan/vegetarian diet is beneficial? I've never been more depressed and tired then when I've tried to go all vegan.
It's not possible to argue in good faith if you're just going to resort to "taste buds" nonsense.
Of course if there's zero benefit then we should expend no cost on something. You may as well argue that we don't need literature, art, friends and family, freedom, sex, etc. It's just your brain cells and neurotransmitters, right.
If you don't care about eating meat, that's cool. I'm glad - genuinely - it's scarce, so the more of you there are, the better off I am.
Cheers.
>If you can watch it till the end and still have the same opinion about putting meat above your taste buds, please, let me know. You'd be the first.
I watched it and it didn't change a thing. I used to behead chickens to help grandma back in the days. Thinking that a video will suddenly make me a soylent chugging vegan is nothing short of religious zealotry.
As a young boy I too was taught how to kill rabbits and poultry by my grandparents.
As a city boy I was chasing my screaming village nephews with a rabbit eye all over the grounds.
I've spent few summers around cowhouse and young calfs, "helping" my aunt take care of them.
I've killed and cleaned few fish for christmas.
The animals I watched killed were living good life and there was no suffering at the end.
So I always had an image in my mind of animals living in green fields, and then miraculously and humanly killed in an instant.
But I've never been around slaughterhouse or in a highly industrialized meat production facility. Even now many people in cities don't know where milk comes from (yes, they know it's from cows, but they don't know that you have to artificially inseminate the cow and take away the calves, and they never heard them crying for days).
The amount of suffering, brutality and aggression of slaughterhouse staff, the supposedly human ways of killing our food, the long, painful and stressful process of killing, the amount of screaming of distressed animals, skinning of alive animals - documented in the Dominion (2018) movie - I was not prepared for that.
But that's not what made me vegan. I've seen it long after I've become vegan.
I'm not advocating for soylent (soylent green is people, anyhow).
But it is an argument for changing our practices, because it shows that propaganda of meat industry (happy cows & meals in burger joints, pictures of cows grazing in the fields on supermarket shelves, etc.) is just a big lie. And that we simply don't know how to kill painlessly.
Few quotes:
If you visit the killing floor of a slaughterhouse, it will brand your soul for life. [Howard Lyman]
If slaughterhouses had glass walls, everyone would be a vegetarian. [Paul McCartney]
Those who purchase meat, fur, and leather have no right to be shielded from the sights and sounds of the slaughterhouses from which these products were produced. [Peter Singer]
>The animals I watched killed were living good life and there was no suffering at the end.
>So I always had an image in my mind of animals living in green fields, and then miraculously and humanly killed in an instant.
Now this is something I haven't heard before from a vegan. Does this mean that in principle, you'd have no problems eating an animal you are 100% sure died in a dignified, painless way because you killed it that way?
No, I've been taught that to survive/be healthy we need to eat meat. So I didn't question it (for several decades).
The idea of animals happily living on the farm somewhere and their painless/swift death is a part of the lie. The reality ... is of course much, much worse.
I've become vegan because of other people (not enough space for everybody to eat same amount of meat as westerners do), because of the loss of biodiversity (such shame to erase so many "cumulative billions of years of dna code generation") and because of meat production's adverse effects on the environment.
Health and moral aspects came later, for me.
Now that I know (and verified it myself) that we the people in fact don't need animal products to be healthy, that quite the opposite is true, that we don't need to cause unnecessary suffering for our own livehood, I'm not interested in eating animal products anymore.
It may change if our civilization collapses. For now ... with the plants available ... no, thank you.
That's really arguing against your own strawman. How will living well bellow your means cause extreme population growth? Living above your means while depleting resources is not constraining future resource problems.
The basic argument that I am living above my means by eating meat relies on the idea that I should consume 1 / 8 billion of the Earth's resources.
I reject that. I've spent my life outcompeting others in order to ensure that this is not the case - if you want to eat bugs, crack on. Meat could cost 10x what it does and I'd still smash it on the daily.
> reducing the entire human experience to the lowest common denominator
Care to clarify what this means, if not a hyperbolic statement about how much you enjoy eating meat?
If sustainability is more important, eating at least fish too is bound to be better. There's no way leaving 71% of the surface of the planet off-limits for nutrients isn't going to increase pressure on the other 29%.
And yes, much fishing and aquaculture is presently unsustainable, but that can be said about agriculture too. It's not nearly an adequate argument for abandoning it entirely.
The argument for full veganism has to be that animals are people. Sustainability arguments won't cut it. If animals aren't people, you never get to full veganism, and if animals are people the sustainability argument is redundant anyway.
Please see SEASPIRACY if you have a chance.
Eating fish is not sustainable. Overfishing and by-catch is a real problem (already more than 90% of sharks are exterminated), and in near future the seas could be totally devoid of life (except for jellyfish).
[ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seaspiracy ]
> The argument for full veganism has to be that animals are people
I don't agree.
(1) We shouldn’t be cruel to animals, i.e. we shouldn’t harm animals unnecessarily.
(2) The consumption of animal products harms animals and Earth.
(3) The consumption of animal products is unnecessary.
(4) Therefore, we shouldn’t consume animal products.
> SEASPIRACY
Every time I see that title I ask myself why they didn't go for "conspirasea"
...The Seamen of Qanon? That has a bit of a ring to it.
I even addressed that argument in advance, you made it anyway...
Again: No matter how bad harvesting of sea resources is, it can't be enough to abandon the oceans entirely, any more than the vast land-use impact of agriculture can be used as argument for abandoning agriculture.
> No matter how bad harvesting of sea resources is, it can't be enough to abandon the oceans entirely
I probably don't understand your point (sorry english is not my first or second language).
At this moment we're seriously overfishing our oceans and killing it's population, that's what i have beef with (pun intended).
So your argument is - let's continue fishing?
> any more than the vast land-use impact of agriculture can be used as argument for abandoning agriculture
I'm arguing for changing agriculture (or better land management practices), not its abandonment.
I know you are! But if better land management practices is good enough on land, why can't better fisheries management be good enough at sea?
There are many issues, wikipedia seems ok, no time to summarize it, sorry.
I didn't ask about what was wrong with fish farming.
I said: you don't want to cut out ALL agriculture, even though a big part of present agriculture may be unsustainable.
So why do you want to cut out ALL fishing and fish farming? I know the answer is that you're a vegan, but that doesn't cut it if you want to convince those who care about sustainability.
How do you fit pesticides in that framework of thought?
- They are unnecessary. Humanity lived thousands of years without them.
- They harm billions of animals.
- But not using them would condemn us to a subsistence economy.
Edit: though for thought lmao
> They are unnecessary. Humanity lived thousands of years without them.
Totally agree.
Cca 75% of pesticides/herbicides are used for meat & dairy production (we need 75% of agriculture land for it).
> They harm billions of animals.
And they harm people, too. Pesticide bioaccumulation in milk has been linked to Parkinson's disease, for example.
> But not using them would condemn us to a subsistence economy.
I'm not sure that's true.
There is a lot of regenerative agriculture styles not needing pesticides/herbicides. Current agriculture practices are oriented on mass scale and low prices - when you modify that need, you can have much greater yields, but have to change your way of thinking about it.
One example (sorry, have to return to work process). We've all seen the large fields of wheat, so large, you can see the earth curvature. And not a single tree in sight.
If you remove all the nature, tile it, seed large swaths of land with a monoculture, you remove a place for wildlife to live in.
Without predators (foxes, owls) your crop gets all eaten by mice, which overpopulate easily. So you have to use pesticides (which we then eat in our food & drink in our water).
If you have a monoculture, then bugs easily propagate and there is nothing to stop them and you'll have a large loses. But if you stop planting monoculture (maybe alternating rows of crops with rows of trees, and some bushes & flowers between them), bugs will have harder time to infect whole harvest and there is enough natural predators from the bug world to take care of them.
Biodiversity is the key.
[https://www.imdb.com/title/tt8969332/ - The Biggest Little Farm, sustainable farm on 200 acres outside of Los Angeles talks in some lengths about this] [https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/may/07/secret-w...] [https://www.agricology.co.uk/field/farmer-profiles/iain-tolh... - a single person from previous article]
I find your take on alternative forms of agriculture a little too optimistic. Even with rotation and biodiversity famines and plagues were common before the use of pesticides. Our technology and knowledge are better now but even with that, I doubt that we could sustain the current population. Not in a way as predictable as now for sure. And for the figure of 75% it is not that simple. A considerable part of the crops consumed by meat production are conformed by not edible material that would have to be produced anyway. Material that ruminants can magically transform into food.
But for the sake of the argument let's say you are right. I'm not as interested in the pesticides example as in knowing how much are you willing to sacrifice in order to follow that logic. Let me rephrase my question then.
- Having more than 2 kids per couple is unnecessary (even less than that for some time).
- Each extra human consumes resources necessarily damaging the animals and the earth.
Would you pass a law banning having children whenever the birth rate surpasses 2?
> I find your take on alternative forms of agriculture a little too optimistic.
I've read a lot about alternative agriculture systems and methods. Maybe that's where my optimism comes from.
> the figure of 75% it is not that simple
I know that 75% is not so simple. But meat industry needs cca 75% of the agriculture land and meat is produced mostly by feeding the animals seeds and vegetable oils, so ... yes, it's a guess, but if we'll account for other stuff, like antibiotics ...
> conformed by not edible material that would have to be produced anyway
The ruminants supply a fraction of our nutritional needs, so I would argue, that we don't need them and that we can switch to more sustainable (less land expensive) sources of food. I would return that "non-edible" areas into forests for wildlife/biodiversity, which they were previously and which could even reverse our climate/extinction events currently happening.
Other non-consumable material could be composted and/or left in the fields as a mulch. Exposed soil kills microbes/fungi in the soil.
> Would you pass a law banning having children
No, I would not, because I now know that there is better way.
That population is still growing is a result of our exploitation of poor countries, poverty, a lack of education, and our religious and governmental practices. As we see in western countries, the developed and educated countries have a tendency to stabilize their population.
So the current growth will stop on its own, in time. But we have to make sure that we set the correct example for the new billions, or we'll together eat the Earth dry, till nothing than deserts will remain.
> No, I would not, because I now know that there is better way
So if there wasn't a better way you'll do it?
No, that's bad formulation on my part (bad language skills and time pressure, i'm not used to debating on the net all day).
But I think that human civilizations does not have the right to live to the detriment of wild animals or that we have the right to destroy nature completely, just because we love our current food so much.
Your last three points can be applied to any products.
Yes - but you're supposed to start at point 1 :)
Meat eating is a complex matter - no time & space to cover it extensively here.
As I'm convinced, without forests the water cycle gets disrupted and the climate won't be able to support life as we know it [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kKL40aBg-7E - The Biotic Pump: How Forests Create Rain].
With cows, there is not enough land to even have forests.
And if we can agree that we don't need cows and dairy (plants can replace it easily), why not also remove all the suffering that's connected to the meat industry?
Sorry for the detour.
Can you make any recommendations for replacement of dairy products? Personally i found that dairy stuff (cheese especially) is the one thing that seems to not have any acceptable plant based replacement (IMHO)
Most other vegan alternatives aren't good, but they are toleratable. The vegan cheeses i tried so far however were absolutely atrocious.
I don't like vegan cheeses from supermarket much. And there are no artisanal vegan cheese producers in my area - maybe you'll be more lucky.
So I've been making my own. Better quality, better price, better taste compared to the supermarket stuff.
Cheese [https://thehiddenveggies.com/how-to-make-vegan-cheese-provol... - from coconut milk], yoghurt [https://www.spoonfulofkindness.com/how-to-make-vegan-yogurt/ - soya, cashew, almonds, coconut, oats, chickpea], and butter [https://veganheaven.org/recipe/vegan-butter/, https://lovingitvegan.com/homemade-vegan-butter/ - with olive oil, not canola].
I have eat vegan for years at a time. You're 100% right about cheese. There is nothing like dairy. But when I'm well nourished on a vegan diet I get over the desire pretty fast. I should probably go back to plants. It was so good for me.
I do think that vegan diets are a good goal and industry will catch up. It will come down to comfort, not avarice. Vegan diets lower inflammatories and increase meaningful longevity. Joints hurt less over time, lots of expensive cardio issues go away. Tom Brady of NFL fame eats that way specifically for injury recovery properties etc. and no one would call him a treehugger.
I don’t think I’ll ever be pure vegan but I’ll see how far I can get. Except for cheese as noted elsewhere, most meals are not lacking anything in terms of taste or satiation.
According to the linked paper, the UK would require 3 million hectares to provide sufficient calories (assuming everyone ate nothing but barley stew). It also points out that, at least in 1975, that's more or less what happened - the UK grew enough barely in that year, using 3.6m hectares, to "feed" its population (at least, in terms of calories needed).
So - it's already true! We grow all the barley we need to sustain ourselves, and the rest is given over to other produce that provides the other nutrients we need, as well as some luxury. Yay vegan sustainability!
I don't think at the end of the day that the issue is the sustainablility of meat that will be its downfall (with the exception of greed, as you can see already with the big shots in the meat industry trying to lobby away lab grown meat / TLM products even though they barely exist).
Instead it's the very wasteful food culture especially the west has, let's take steak as an example, for the around 5 steaks a family of 3 will eat you could easily make a stew for 4 with only 3 of those steaks.
This is not a good example of waste. Also, I don't agree that people like to waste food or resource. There is no reason to waste food unless you are super duper rich. And according to normal distribution majority of people aren't rich, even in America.
How exactly is eating and fully digesting something "waste"?
Is it a waste for me to use a nice keyboard because a cheap 5 quid one will do?
That's a very lenient definition of waste, when nothing keeps you from eating that stew without steak.
Pretty sure the bigger problem is still the tons of food we throw away after going through everything to grow and ship it.
Throwaway for obvious reasons.
What's the current academic consensus on nutritional deficiencies of vegan / lacto-vegeterian diet?
I grew up on a lacto-vegeterian diet in India. I can't shake off the feeling that I would've had a better physique and growth if I had access to non-vegetarian food during my youth.
> It is the position of the American Dietetic Association that appropriately planned vegetarian diets, including total vegetarian or vegan diets, are healthful, nutritionally adequate, and may provide health benefits in the prevention and treatment of certain diseases. Well-planned vegetarian diets are appropriate for individuals during all stages of the life cycle, including pregnancy, lactation, infancy, childhood, and adolescence, and for athletes.
How much difference in cost between 'well planned vegeterian diet' and normal healthy diet with animal products?
> normal healthy diet with animal products
Most people don't eat a "normal >healthy< diet with animal products". It takes as much work to have a meat based healthy diet as a vegetarian based healthy diet.
This. Any healthy diet today involves actively choosing and avoiding products marketed to us. Eating meat is not magical, and I called myself a vegetarian for a while when I was really a carb-etarian and my fitness suffered.
I think its just a propaganda by meat industry that you need to eat meat to live a healthy life. If you take vitamin b12 properly or take fortified foods you should be ok. (Also, the vitamin b12 is supplied to animal in many industry, so people shouldn't use vitamin b12 to argue to vegans.)
The propaganda argument could be turned around, too. There are more than enough vegan companies trying to make a quick buck out of this. You take your average vegan burger package, it's stuffed with the same crap as a regular premade burger, except it uses tofu or beans instead of ground beef.
Regardless, the bigger problem is the lack of long term research we have on mindful omnivores vs mindful vegetarians vs mindful vegans, etc. Most comparisons are between mindful vegans and omnivores living off of incredibly poor diets.
There are even vegan body builders so I would probably say that's not necessarily true.
Yes but I think they are heavy on the lacto part, which I don't think a common person can follow.
They are full vegan, but the majority heavily supplement or juice. Both which aren't things the average person will do and which a significant portion won't have access to.
It's important to differentiate between "surviving" and "thriving"!
You can easily thrive on vegan diet.
You can't just leave meat and eat the rest and call it vegan diet. Most anti-vegans never had a real vegan meal. We all have an idea of vegan meals - but your mum's vegetable dish, which left you hungry after eating it, is not a real representative of vegan diet.
You'll just need to learn to cook differently - or better, what to substitute with what.
No need to invent new recipes. There is a lot of vegan meals in India, Mexico, Greece, Ethiopia, even your country for sure has some. Just make sure you eat diverse food and don't forget your B12 supplement (in vegan variant, because B12 is from earth bacteria or seaweed, not from meat).
When searching for a recipe (burger recipe) on the net, just add "vegan" (vegan burger recipe) and you'll certainly find something you'll enjoy.
[https://www.peta.org/living/food/vegan-egg-replacer-guide/ - 24 Ways to Replace an Egg] [https://html.duckduckgo.com/html?q=vegan%20replace%20meat] [https://html.duckduckgo.com/html?q=vegan%20milk%20recipes]
Vegan fake meat is frankenfood. Yes, you can try to mimick a carnivore diet, but you eventually will have to eat frankenfoods. Lots of plant foods are loaded with natural antinutrients and toxins.
Not everybody eating plant-based is trying to mimick a carnivore diet.
But nobody likes to eat baked vegetables and porridge all the time. Just because we have meats, milks and cheeses, it does not mean we're after the taste. We're after variety in taste and structure. We also have favorite foods from our time not being vegans, and recreating them in plant-based version is satisfying. And no, it does not taste 100% like the "real" thing. If it would, some (I) would not eat it.
And plant-based meat does not have to be frankenfood [1] [2]. Take some plant-based protein (wheat, peas, what have you), marinate it in some vegetable broth and soya sauce, maybe color it with beet root, and you've got perfectly healthy meat replacement [3].
[1] https://www.peta.org/living/food/meat-contamination/ - Meat Contamination [2] https://sogoodsoyou.com/6-lessons-eating-plant-based-dr-greg... - The best way to minimize your exposure to industrial toxins may be to eat as low as possible on the food chain, a plant-based diet”. Pollutants that find their way into the soil will eventually work their way up the food chain. When you eat meat from an animal, you must consider the thousands of pounds of (potentially contaminated) plants it consumed before being slaughtered. Avoid these pollutants entirely by eating lower on the food chain [3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yY2YN6krVtk - Washed Flour Seitan Recipe from Start to Finish
I am an Eastern Orthodox Christian, and about a third of the year, we're vegan. Even after giving enough time for enzymatic adaptation and soaking beans the proper way and changing the water at least 3 times (imagine the footprint!), and following all the proper steps, I still cannot digest well beans and lentils, and other plant foods without significant discomfort. If I don't feel well after eating plant foods, I cannot believe it's good for my body! The constant bloating and pain do not occur when I am on the omnivore diet and when those foods are not the main course but are eaten in small quantities. So, maybe for some people, given the specifics of their ancestry and adaptation, the vegan diet is good, but it's not for me. I cannot imagine having no quality dairy in my life (I don't eat surrogates and stress on quantity, not quality), and I don't have issues with gluten like others do, but I don't overeat carbs. I don't feel nutritionally satisfied when eating large amounts of pasta or rice, and I cannot imagine how these carb-heavy foods are better for the environment than traditionally raised cattle. The moral aspect of eating meat is complex: what's better - to raise farm animals humanely and allow them to be alive or not allow them to ever exist? Even in nature, those animals would have been eaten by carnivores - I don't see myself eating a cat, but I do eat prey animals.
Our diets are the culprit of your digestive problems, imho. It's not something you cannot change. Humans are slowly losing their ability to digest fiber, and the bloating & pain is there, because your digestive track is not accustomed to high-fiber foods.
Solution is not to avoid fiber, but to add it to your diet progressively. There is a plethora of health problems connected to the lack of fiber in one's diet. I've found that's best to start adding it after few days of water fast, when the "bad bacteria" is weakened.
I don't feel satistied after rice too (and don't eat almost no pasta), I think that fiber & some proteins are necessary for satiety when on plant-based diet.
> soaking beans the proper way and changing the water at least 3 times (imagine the footprint!)
"The amount of water used for meat production in just 35 hours could provide drinking water for everyone on earth for a year." [0]
> I cannot imagine how these carb-heavy foods are better for the environment
Plant based food are. There is enough evidence and scientific consensus.
> what's better - to raise farm animals humanely and allow them to be alive or not allow them to ever exist
We've stolen living space from wild animals and decreesed their diversity - 100 years ago humans and cattle were 2% of weight of the total biomass of land mammals. Now it's about 96%. [0] In other words, we've destroyed the natural habitat and countless animal species, with tens of thousands more threatened by extincion, and replaced them with farm animals, just for our food preferences. [1]
> Even in nature, those animals would have been eaten by carnivores - I don't see myself eating a cat, but I do eat prey animals.
Without us there would not be so many farm animals (obviously). The lion has no other option than to eat other animals. We've got plenty options ourselves, just the will and/or knowledge is missing.
[0] https://www.theworldcounts.com/challenges/consumption/foods-... - Meat production water usage [1] https://xkcd.com/1338/ - Land mammals [2] https://ourworldindata.org/land-use-diets [3] https://ourworldindata.org/meat-production
...and the wind could generate electricity for a similar number.
Conversation might be a bit limited though. The need to tell everyone you meet, within 5 minutes of meeting them, that you're a vegan would be removed.
At this point I'm fairly convinced anti-vegans chiming in after 5 minutes of conversation claiming vegans can't keep it to themselves for 5 minutes is more common than vegans actually being unable to not mention it.
Similar to how you resort to cheap stereotypes within five minutes of being exposed to an uncomfortable topic.