To ask everyone to eat less meat and meat products?

[Breadandwine]

There are 3 reasons I eat a plant-exclusive diet:

1. I feel I'm healthier (I became veggie to avoid BSE - and my osteoarthritis has been stopped in its tracks since I went vegan)
2. Animal welfare issues (I went vegan after looking at the inevitable cruelty involved in the meat and dairy industries)
3. Global warming/climate change (the single most important thing anyone can do to fight GW is to go vegan - the world's livestock industry contributes more to GW than does transport!)

Before global warming reared its ugly head, I was quite reticent about my veganism, only talking about it when I was asked. But now that our children's and our grandchildren's future is threatened, I'm a lot more vocal.

And now there's me and the Pope on the same side - who'dda thunk it?

I'm a veggie and one of the most annoying things ever is when people tell me why I should eat meat! So would never lecture others not to. It's a very personal choice

Gosh, you've certainly convinced me it's all bollocks MayPolist!

How many vegans / vegetarians have more than 2 children? Overpopulation is doing far more damage to the planet than me eating my locally farmed (extremely locally, I knew the beef cows before they were steak) organic free range meat. I didn't know the deer personally but I know the hunter who shot my venison patties (wild deer I assume also counts as free range).

I only eat local produce, minimal food air miles. I bike to work, I limit my family size, I live in a sustainably designed (DH designed it) Eco house. I eat meat, I drink coffee. I'm comfortable with my life choices. And very grateful to live in a major wine producing area, my evening glass has travelled less than 5km from vine to table :)

Oh but I might consider increasing my vegetable intake if I can work out how to grow this seaweed that tastes like bacon :-)

Implying the Pope ( an Argentinian ) is vegan, or even just vegetarian. (WTF??) Thanks OP, that's the best laugh I've had all day.

So where is anyone implying the pope is vegan? The op's question is it unreasonable to ask that people eat less meat? And the pope has done that too.

YABU. DH and I own and run a ranch, so does that make me a GW whore? . I am a veggie, but I still think YABU. Hope that clears it up for ya.

OP didn't really make it clear which parts they reckoned Pope Francis agreed with.

Animal welfare & the catholic church? Well at least they finally banned Goat Throwing.

YABU.

YABU. I love my meat. I love cheese, butter, and Oh My God do I love eggs and yoghurt!

We are omnivores who have evolved to eat other animals as well as fruits and nuts. You deny this if you like and go graze on some green pasture like a cow, but I won't be following you in this foolish pursuit.

By the way, you are wrong about "the world's livestock industry contributes more to GW than does transport!". Here is why:

Transportation creates an estimated 26 percent of all greenhouse gas emissions in the U.S., whereas raising cattle and pigs for food accounts for about 3 percent, he said. Mitloehner says confusion over meat and milk's role in climate change stems from a small section printed in the executive summary of a 2006 United Nations report, "Livestock's Long Shadow."... he faults the methodology of "Livestock's Long Shadow," contending that numbers for the livestock sector were calculated differently from transportation. In the report, the livestock emissions included gases produced by growing animal feed; animals' digestive emissions; and processing meat and milk into foods. But the transportation analysis factored in only emissions from fossil fuels burned while driving and not all other transport lifecycle related factors.

"The point is that raising meat DOES cost more, because the food grown to feed them (which reduces down to produce a smaller quantity of meat) could just as easily feed people."

You are proposing to feed people grass?

Why don't you give that a go and let us know how it goes.

He probably agreed cos they wrote God bless on the end. I'm waiting for op and her chums to go round and tell the farmers they don't know what they're doing and why not grow quorn burgers instead of graze sheep in the Welsh hills.
If op wants a look at why plant harvesting isn't better than meat, the Irish potatoe famine provides it. Too poor for anything notable as livestock so with no or little rotation they leached the land growing the same successful and cheap in all ways crops. Is that perhaps what we should be aiming for?

That comment was aimed at me cote because I suspect her farming knowledge led her to assume you could a) grow decent crops on a steep hillside and b) if you graze animals they are mostly eating grain. Therefore that remark was designed to be a scathing remark on my supposed foolish assumption grazing animals ate mainly grass or its harvest

YANBU. I eat meat but I am leaning more towards not doing for a couple of the reasons you cited in the OP. It's good to raise awareness.

This whole vegan thing has become rather Darwinian. I'm of the opinion that we should leave them with their smug, self-imposed malnutrition.

I have friends who don't give any milk or dairy products to their small children, against paediatrician's recommendations. It's sad, but what can you do? People will raise their children how they will, and those children will suffer the consequences of their choices.

I'm not arguing against veganism. If people choose not to eat animals on compassionate grounds fair enough. But the point I tried to make earlier (probably not very well) was in reponse to a pp who said that animal farming was killing the planet. All farming has a detrimental effect. Plantations don't occur naturally, all crops (including organic produce) use varying levels of pesticides and fungicides and the air/transport miles of much produce is considerable. To be vegan means you don't eat meat or animal produce, how much 'saving the planet' that entails is arguable.

I think my earlier post about the damaging impact things like soybean growth has on the environment has been overlooked..

Anyway, I will repeat my.point to agree with a few others on this thread.

Meat is not the problem. It is a problem. It is bad for the environment in its current form, as are many forms of food production.

It is not what we eat that matters, but how we are producing it. I would bet good money that most people on here ate something with hundreds, or thousands, of air miles today. Including me!

If everyone stopped eating meat tomorrow, it would not fix anything, because the problems are too rampant and entrenched. Eating meat is a red herring - reducing meat consumption would be a sticking plaster on an amputated limb. It might help briefly but it's not going to solve the problem.

What we truly need is a global paradigm shift in attitude and food culture.

Does this mean that we should carry on regardless? Hell no. But it's hard to take the environmental preaching RE meat from those whose consumption of things like soy and quinoa are decimating rainforest and local economies.

Perhaps if we worked together instead of sniping at each other over whose diets are superior we might actually accomplish something

Cote aren't you just talking about the US there though? There are plenty of literature reviews, analyses etc that show that the meat and dairy industry is the biggest threat to climate change. You really don't have to look far to find that.

First link I came across:

www.chathamhouse.org/sites/files/chathamhouse/field/field_document/20141203LivestockClimateChangeBaileyFroggattWellesley.pdf?dm_i=1TY5,30JL0,BHZILT,AUGSP,1

I have friends who don't give any milk or dairy products to their small children, against paediatrician's recommendations. It's sad, but what can you do? People will raise their children how they will, and those children will suffer the consequences of their choices.

Not sure about you on this one. My kids have never eaten dairy. No formula, no yogurt, no cheese or butter.
I lived in SE Asia for a while in a country where dairy is rarely eaten, even by children. Apart from the obvious need for milk for babies dairy is not an essential part of our diet.

I would rather like a product which doesn't exist, which is grass-fed beef. Apparently consumers prefer the marble white fat of grain-fed beef. Please let me have yellow fat from grass-fed. Also grass-fed milk (so not Holsteins). Again, not available in my supermarket.

The poorest 1/3 of humanity are protein & calorie deficient. They'll eat gorillas they find on the forest floor instead if they don't have cheap meat they raised themselves (fancy a dose of zoonosis anyone?).

"Cote aren't you just talking about the US there though?"

No.

"There are plenty of literature reviews, analyses etc that show that the meat and dairy industry is the biggest threat to climate change."

They all take their "meat & dairy is the biggest threat to climate change" line from the same 2006 United Nations report "Livestock's Long Shadow", which is by now shown to be based on faulty calculations & comparisons.

If you are so worried about cows farting, campaign for their feed to be adjusted to minimise methane emissions. That would be reasonable. What is not reasonable is to expect the world's dominant life form to renounce their place near the very top in the food chain because cows fart like many other animals, including people.

Does everyone here realise that people fart methane, too? And that one great way to reduce your own methane emissions is to stop eating grains and carbs that we can't digest without the help of bacteria in our intestines and eat only meat?

Tree-hugging veggies often trot out this "Stop eating meat to save our Mother Earth" line, which completely misses out the fact that all mammals and also most other animals including termites fart methane. Actually, termites are responsible for A LOT of methane emissions.

Funny I don't see any global warming activists campaigning against wiping out termites in large numbers. You'll have might vote if you do. (But try to stop me eating meat, eggs, yoghurt, and melted cheese on everything and You Will Fail).

"I lived in SE Asia for a while in a country where dairy is rarely eaten, even by children."

Ah yes, South East Asia - the bastion of optimum nutrition and health:

Overview of the Nutrition Situation in Seven Countries in Southeast Asia
Camila Chaparro, Lesley Oot, and Kavita Sethuraman
April 2014

Asia leads other world regions with not only the highest percentage of children under 5 who are underweight or wasted (21.9% and 11.2% respectively, as of 2011), but given the population density across the region, it is also home to the greatest total number of children under 5 who are stunted, wasted, or underweight (103.5 million, 39.2 million, and 76.6 million respectively, as of 20111) (Black et al. 2013)

• Of the five subregions in Asia, Southeast Asia has the second highest prevalence and total number of children who are stunted (29.4%, 15.6 million), wasted (9.4%, 5.0 million) and underweight (18.3%, 9.7 million) (Black et al. 2013).

YABU. I don't want to live in a world where pigs, sheep, cows, goats and poultry are only to be seen in history books.