To think we should all eat less meat & dairy

[grumiosmum]

... because of the climate crisis (as well as our health)

Important new report out today: www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-49238749

.

OP you are completely right. I could give up meat (in fact I don't eat red meat anyway).

Dairy is hard though. I would find it really difficult to live without cheese or milk. I always think when people give up things for Lent that giving up chocolate or sweets is easy, giving up milk would not be.

I know there are milk alternatives and will have to try them. I don't think you can have oat cheese though can you

As for the dogs and cats, hopefully people will start to consider the eco issues before they get pets.

I do think though that local meat is better for the environment than some vegan alternative flown in from goodness knows where.

Its really easy to cut down on meat and dairy, theres already lots of greta alternatives. Ive switched to soya milk because I personally cant tell in my coffee. And I also didnt even realsie when I ate vegan chicken nuggets.
If we all started making small easy choices they would all add up.

beefandlamb.ahdb.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/p_cp_down_to_earth300112.pdf

I've been trying to buy more local produce, but I guess it depends where you live. The farm shop is more expensive for meat, but I'll only really have a chicken a week so its still affordable. The Greengrocers only sells fruit and veg grown within 20 miles and the prices are weirdly comparable with the supermarket; obviously no avacados etc but not a fan anyway so that hasn't been a hardship. I used to buy bread at the baker's but it has risen in price too sharply for me. I do buy staples such as rice, oats etc in the supermarket though- but I do what I can. In honesty it started off as a health thing for me, and I've been surprised how much better I feel and how reasonably priced it has been. I know not everyone is as fortunate though to have such a local provision.

So if I give up rearing my grass fed sheep I won't be able to convert to arable and I will probably sell the land for housing. That means that four events won't be able to use my fields for car parking. If I rewild it then you can walk your carnivore pets through it.

How about we all stop having loads of kids

Did you see the news a few days ago? The birth rate in the UK is the lowest it's ever been.

And who is 'we all?' do you want a time to come when only the elite have the privilege of passing their genes down another generation? These sorts of arguments have the potential to result in great harm.

Lets say for eg., that people either through social pressure or some high handed legislation only have a child each. No doubt they will want greater power over what their 'one' child will be. I would. Are we happy to become a society where routine screening becomes a thing to prevent having a girl in prference to a boy, or a disabled child?

We really have to think about the consequences of these things and not just shout about what's trendy.

I agree however the cost of dairy free alternatives for low income families just isn't doable. For example i only like Koko milk as a dairy alternative which is £1.50 per litre I'd get through about 4 cartons a week so that's £6 for that where as my 2 bottles of cravendale are 2 for £3.50 and last a week if not more if i don't drink it by the glass. Same goes for yogurt i use plain Greek yogurt in most of my breakfasts and recipes the dairy free alternative works out much more expensive. I also suffer from deficiencies so loosing Iron and protien from meat and calcium from Dairy would impact my health massively!
In an ideal world it would be plausible but for the majority its undoable because of the costs id switch over in an instant if i could afford to and im already making the conscious effort to not feed my DC1 much meat or dairy i think its easier for them to not have it from the start than wean them off it

We should all do a shit load more than just eating less meat and dairy. We could all do that shit load more and the planet will still be fucked. Big business has no interest in doing what needs to be done. Profit is king. Planet is bottom of the pile.

We could all do with eating more venison. Deer are a dangerous pest around here, causing frequent road accidents and eating the habitats of other species. They are low in saturated fat and if shot by people who know what they’re doing, have a far more humane death than many beef cattle.

Wow, so much whataboutery on this thread.

It IS possible to eat less meat and dairy AND buy local produce free from plastic packaging, or make other ethical choices in your shop, you know. Yes - there is vegan convenience food in plastic using ethically-dubious produce. But there's a hell of a lot more non vegan convenience food in plastic using using ethically-dubious produce.

To the people mentioning the cows and sheep freely grazing the land which are suited to the British landscape, ok perhaps we should keep eating those.

But there's no chickens or pigs freely roaming and grazing, really, are there? Mostly intensively farmed. As are dairy cows.

How many people in this country regularly eat grass-fed beef and lamb? A tiny fraction, not least because everyone would have to drastically reduce their meat consumption if we as a nation only relied on that... Which is EXACTLY what the OP is suggesting, funnily enough.

There's no point in telling the consumers. If it's there then people will buy and eat it. It needs to be sorted at source. Putting prices up will be the only way to make people cut down

Global population is predicted to naturally level off as people have greater access to healthcare and education, and so have smaller families.

worldpopulationhistory.org/projecting-global-population/

The overall issue is consumption - it drives all of the environmental problems we have. We are trashing the world to sustain the society we have created, which is shaped by the human instinct to gather as many resources as effortlessly as possible. We need to be better than our instinct, as it is no longer needed in the world we live in.

But for those of us that aren't middle class and cannot afford farmers markets?

Or those of us who cannot stand most veg?

Or those of us who see a plate of mung beans and weep?

I find veggy food quite frankly depressing, so I'll stick to my moo, quack and oink. Thank you.

You can think what you like, that's not unreasonable. Not unreasonable to disagree with you, though. Plenty of low income people are probably soon to have food shortages foisted on them in the even of no deal Brexit or even with a deal as it's likely to be a shitty one and drive up prices as it is.

We do but if you saw our menu you might not realise because we are not having vegetarian meals. However everything we cook is bulked out by lots of vegetables. One 500g pack of mince for example gets us 8 meal portions. We freeze all surplus and use at a later date. Some weeks we hardly have to cook from scratch. Very little food waste.

It's not the cow, it's the HOW

sustainabledish.com/its-not-the-cow-its-the-how-new-study-shows-grass-fed-beef-can-be-a-carbon-sink/

Grassfed pastured ruminants are a net benefit for the environment, they sequester carbon (tons per acre per year), they encourage deep root structures in the grass, which hold nutrients and water, minimising runoff and flooding. They can help reverse desertification... see Allan Savory's TED talk.

www.ted.com/talks/allan_savory_how_to_green_the_world_s_deserts_and_reverse_climate_change?language=en

The key thing is that they do not displace nature and other creatures, like what happens with tillage agriculture. Agriculture is ecocide. Basically, you take a piece of land, you clear every living thing off it, whether it was a forest or a prairie, down to the microscopic bugs in the soil. You spray it with herbicides, fungicides, insecticides, fossil fuel fertiliser. All of those have huge ecological impacts. Even just the act of breaking the soil with the plough puts tons of carbon into the atmosphere.

Obviously, if you first grow grains/soy and feed them to cattle, it amplifies the already bad effects of agriculture, you also get very sick animals who are not eating their natural diet and require large amounts of veterinary medicines and antibiotics. Grain fed animals are the farters and belchers, grassfed ones are a net negative effect on carbon levels, ie they help sequester more carbon into the soil than they emit.

Compare that with the management of livestock and nature at the Knepp Estate in Sussex. Wildlife is flourishing there. Cranes have recently returned. Read this article and Wilding by Isabella Tree

www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/jun/15/the-magical-wilderness-farm-raising-cows-among-the-weeds-at-knepp

Also read the Vegetarian Myth by Lierre Keith, it turned me from an annoying radical vegan, to an ethical, deep ecological, grassfed meat omnivore.

www.amazon.co.uk/Vegetarian-Myth-Lierre-Keith/dp/1604860804/?tag=mumsnetforu03-21

Yawn, more agriculture bashing.

There is so much in the media right now about the environmental impacts of farming, mainly red meat, however it is only one side of the story.

As has already been said, our landscape is suited to mixed farming - think of all the hills particularly in the Highlands of Scotland, which are only suited to sheep grazing.

Feel free to eat/drink only local, seasonal, plant based produce, however at some points in the year I feel you may be rather hungry depending where you live.

Everyone has the right to a choice but it becomes a problem when you start waving it around in everyone else's face.

Should we? Probably. Will I? No. My diet is already limited. I can't lose anything else.

That said, I think the government needs to crack down on these companies and force them to be more eco friendly.

Boat being a more environmentally friendly form of travel is bogus from wiki

Not according to the horizon programme the other week about shops telling lies/the truth

Interesting take on this from George Monbiot:

www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/aug/08/ipcc-land-climate-report-carbon-cost-meat-dairy?CMP=share_btn_tw

George says: "One kilo of beef protein has a carbon opportunity cost of 1,250kg: that, incredibly, is roughly equal to driving a new car for a year, or to one passenger flying from London to New York and back."

If we had proper carbon pricing burgers would become unaffordable.

Fatted you don't need to eat a diet high in meat - or any other high protein food - to not be fat. It's perfectly possible to lose and maintain a healthy weight on a traditional diet of a small amount of protein, lots of vegetables and some food high in carbohydrate - bread, potatoes, rice, etc.
I stopped eating actual meat 23 years ago , still eat fish once or twice a week and some dairy products. I'm not sure if I could do without cheese.

People get so defensive about this OP. But you are definitely right. The science is all there. People like @Saddler may declare they will eat whatever they want and no one will tell them otherwise, but we have only 11years to avert this disaster, if we don’t act, none of us will have a choice what we eat, or indeed if we eat.
We will be dealing with crop failures, droughts, flooding, food and water shortages, people starving, mass migration due to sea levels rising. But yet these defensive people don’t even want to engage in the discussion. This crisis isn’t in the distant future, it’s already happening and time is running out to act.

It's always fun to advance search someone who comes in saying "Stop doing x to help save the planet"...😁
Because it's guaranteed they are doing plenty of other "bad" things.