Rikudou_SagePlants Really Do 'Scream'. We've Simply Never Heard Them Until Now
JeeBaiChowVegans: … uh… now what?
Vegans consume fewer plants than anyone else. It takes a LOT of plants to raise a cow, pig, or chicken. From an economic point of view, meat is a way of refining mountains of cheap, plentiful, safe plant products into a scarce, harmful and addictive luxury product. This comes up a lot, you’d be amazed how many plants rights activists your average vegan runs into.
Unless you count grass and non-human consumables and non-potable water…sure…until then that’s bullshit.
oce 🐆How is that bullshit? I am not vegan, but that’s just a scientific consensus and a major reason why plant diet is way lower carbon than a meat diet. If you need to grow plant food for your animal food, eventually you have to grow way more plant food.
Most animals raised for meat consumption are fed with crops, notably soy.
Thinking animals raised for meat only consume resources (land (first cause of biodiversity loss), plants, water, energy) that would not be useful to humans anyway is undoubtedly wrong.
Researchers Poore and Nemecek are a great source of meta-analysis information about those subject. Check this summary here for example: environmath.org/…/paper-of-the-day-poore-nemecek-…
Let me know if I misunderstood your point.
Paper of the Day: Poore & Nemecek (2018): Reducing food’s environmental impacts... - EnvironMath!
Synopsis A new analysis drawing on 570 studies with data covering 38,700 commercial farms shows dramatic variation both worldwide and within-region in the environmental impact across all major foods, but confirms that beef in particular and animal products in general are responsible for the greater part of food’s impact on earth, which adds up to …
www.ars.usda.gov/…/HO_what-cows-eat.pdf
We do not feed them food we can eat, it would be such a waste to do so. We literally feed them shit we cannot consume. Feeds are made from roots/stalks/inedible plants.
The vegan industry doesn’t like this, so they say well that land could be used for other things, when in reality it’s already being used for the food that we eat.
They are also fed grains and soy in varying percentage depending on regions and countries.
There is also still the use of land, energy, fresh water and the methane emissions typical of cows.
This is another break down of the above-mentioned study: ourworldindata.org/land-use-diets
You can see that indeed, the USA does better than other countries on not dedicating crops to animal feed, but it is still about 14%, while the world average is around 40%. Isn’t that a lot that could be earned back?
The majority of the land used for cattle grazing is not suitable for farmland. It’s either to hilly or rocky or just plain doesn’t have great soil. Not to mention the level of crops it would require to feed people and the amount of people who just cannot sustain on a all vegan diet. There is a reason we are omnivores and not herbivores.
This is also covered by the study and the article I shared above. It would require using more lands for crops that feed people, but that’s ridiculously small compared to the land that would be regained from stopping animal agriculture, which is 75%. Just removing cows would do the vast majority of that.
Crops for feed can be regained and if most pasture land is inappropriate for crops, some are, so we would gain from freeing those too. Furthermore, this land can be given back to biodiversity, which will also benefit us in the long term, if just protecting biodiversity for the sake of it is not a good argument for you.
Again, I am not vegan, I mostly advocate for reducing, not forbidding, consumption proportionally to ecological impact. If some people for medical reason require meat, I’m completely fine with it, this would likely be a small percentage of the current consumption.
Omnivore, not obligate carnivore except for a few exceptions maybe, so we could use a low meat diet or a fully plant based diet fine.
poore-nemecek is based on misreading LCA studies. LCA as a measurement is not transferable between studies. poore-nemececk just went through and did averages. it’s not good science. it’s not even science.
Do you have a source more reputable than Science and the Oxford university?
the papers themselves. look at their LCA references
I don’t have the current knowledge or the time to reach the level of researchers in the domain to make my own meta analysis. Where can I read a reputable rebuttal to this meta analysis?
you can read the sources that poore-nemecek cite. they are explicit that their research cannot be combined with other LCAs
I am skeptical that researchers and reviewers of Science wouldn’t have accounted for that. I made some research about rebuttal to this study, so far the only ones I have found are from farmer related or anti-vegan communities, which are probably more biases than a scientific journal. I will need at least a contradictory peer reviewed article to convince me this meta analysis is incorrect.
if the source material can’t convince you, then live in ignorance
When you are not an expert of the domain, it is easy to get mislead by aegument such as the one you gave, maybe you’re correct, maybe you’re misleading, I don’t have yhe knowledge to verify by myself. That’s why I need to rely on reputable source, and it’s hard to do more reputable than a meta-analysis in Science. If you are correct, the rebuttal will eventually be published in a peer reviewed journal, I’ll will be happy to read the conclusions then.
it’s stated explicitly in the papers cited by poore-nemecek. all you need to do is read