To say that being a vegan is no better for the environment than being a meat eater?

[OnlyInYourDreams]

Unless you eat only home grown, locally sourced products?

Obviously some people are vegan because they don’t like the idea of using any kind of animal products. But all too often people say that they’re vegan because “it’s better for the environment when this is categorically not the case.

Lots of fruit/veg have to be imported which is actually worse for the environment because it involves pumping man-made substances into the environment.

Products like almond milk are terrible for the environment because e.g. it takes 1600l of water to produce 1l of almond milk. Coca-Cola is practically a green product in comparison…

If people want to be vegan, why not just say you want to be vegan. Coming up with reasons such as “it’s better for the environment” which are just rubbish and laughable is only going to increase the amount of people who don’t take vegans seriously.

@BellaTheDog absolutely spot on! !

@BellaTheDog I’m not horrible to vegans but I do think people that harp on about it after watching cowspiracy once badly misinformed.

Unless you are growing produce yourself, nothing will be truly vegan. Animals and insects are harmed in all food production.

I’d really recommend a book called Wilding: The Return of Nature to a British Farm. The author has written a great article for the guardian too called ‘If you want to save the world veganism is the answer.’

I don’t really care what people eat but I do think it is important to ensure people know all the facts. Things like cowspiracy don’t tell the whole story. Great for shock value though.

‘... veganism isn’t the answer’

@21Flora sounds interesting, I will look it up, thanks!

I do think the main problem is that people are disconnected from what they eat. Disconnected with nature and the land. People want everything and they want it now. Holidays. Cars. Fast fashion.

Going to a local butcher occasionally seems to be the meat lovers get out of jail / guilt free card

Meat eaters don't feel guilty for trying to stay nourished and healthy. So no need for a 'guilt free' card at all. There is no guilt. Stop preaching

So it's more about persuading the population to slowly reduce, reduce, reduce the demand thus reducing breeding, bringing populations down until they're at a low sustainable level like they used to be when some people are meat once a week

Stop trying to persuade. Stop the Gretas. Stop instigating the western world to become ill and malnourished.

I can't bloody believe I'm standing up for the vegans, I'm not even one, but some of you are pretty overinvested in what other people eat. Can't you just eat what you want and let them do the same?

No, it's the vegans who appear to be militant about what others eat. I don't usually see meat eaters preaching and virtue signalling. People are tired of being bullied and told what to do or think.

@mustlovegin you clearly have no understanding of the very basics of nutrition. Meat is not good for you. Dairy is not good for you. Eggs are not good for you. Processed meat is a carcinogen in the same category as cigarettes and asbestos.

I suggest you go away and do some research then come back and join the debate.

you clearly have no understanding of the very basics of nutrition

I have done plenty of research backed up by empirical evidence based on my own lab results over 10 years. Is that enough for you?

And I'm worried about younger people and girls who may be gullible, misinformed and who could seriously damage their health by listening and blindly following this very pervasive activism.

@mustlovegin I am sorry, but I don’t believe you. It is a well established fact that a plant-based diet is far healthier than a meat-based one.

@BellaTheDog

I think people are nasty towards vegans because they secretly feel bad about the animal cruelty and environmental devastation their food choices are causing.

I don't think I'm nasty to vegans. I get a bit tetchy at times when faced by inaccurate evangelising propaganda. The whole 'cruelty free, for the animals' line is particularly annoying, as whatever form of agriculture you rely on, animals die (at best, you can cover an area with greenhouses, exclude all wildlife so it has zero habitat and thus never gets born, and now and then have to kill off insect pests). Open field crop agriculture (cereals, veg, fruit) relies on killing things. It's not at all unusual for an East Anglian arable farm (barley, wheat, rape seed, maybe some peas or carrots) to cull >1,000 pigeons in a single spring. Then you have rabbits. And people out after deer. And earthworms chopped up during tillage, fieldmice ditto during harvest, the control of birds and rodents for stored crops in barns and silos. That's before we get to insecticides.

So far as my own ethics go, I think it's such a small step from controlling animals numbers like that to rearing stock for slaughter that I have no problem with it. Ancestrally, we ate meat. The fact that a vegan diet needs to be supplemented indicates to me that it's not appropriate for humans.

Full disclosure of my food guilts:
Sometimes buying meat from intensive systems that are low-welfare and environmentally dodgy
Eating too much sugar

I agree with PP that disconnection from food production is a massive issue. It has an impact at many levels, from ignorance about how animal agriculture works in the UK (very, very few British cattle are finished in feed lots) to utter cluelessness about the countryside - the number of walkers and cyclists and day trippers who think it's okay to cut fences is bloody incredible, but that's another thread.

YABU saying it’s categorically not the case and is rubbish and laughable with no facts or studies to prove it and based purely on an opinion. Fruit and vegetables that have been transported are, on the whole, better for the environment than local animal products because most emissions are generated at the production stage not the transport stage.

It takes more water to produce dairy than it does to produce almond milk.

www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/10/181023110627.htm

“A new study provides a more comprehensive accounting of the greenhouse gas emissions from EU diets. It shows that meat and dairy products are responsible for the lion's share of greenhouse emissions from the EU diet.”

“The study found that meat and dairy account for more than 75% of the impact from EU diets. That's because meat and dairy production causes not only direct emissions from animal production, but also contributes to deforestation from cropland expansion for feed, which is often produced outside of the EU.”

“"People tend to think that consuming locally will be the solution to climate change, but it turns out that the type of product we eat is much more important for the overall impact," says IIASA researcher Hugo Valin, a study coauthor and Sandström's YSSP advisor. "Europeans are culturally attached to meat and dairy product consumption.”

YANBU, veganism is categorically and scientifically proven to be worse for the planet than meat eating is. That's before you even get into the moral argument. Eating plants is no more moral than eating meat, if anything it is worse because animals at least have a consciousness and therefore "live" a life, plants are largely defenceless and cannot attempt to evade capture/slaughter.

Processed meat is a carcinogen in the same category as cigarettes and asbestos
This is what I mean by vegan propaganda. IIRC, a portion of processed meat every day increases your odds of bowel cancer. Rather than a 94% change of never getting it, you have a 93% chance of never getting it. After a lot of processed meat - about 30kg a year over several decades.

Compare that to the 15 to 30 times increased risk of lung cancer that smokers face.

And if meat, eggs and dairy aren't good for us, I'd love to know how the fuck we managed to become (to its detriment) the most successful species on the planet.

For every person who turns vegan in the West, 10 will start eating meat in China.

Add to that the fact that the West grew rich on the back of emissions and now the RoW wants to achieve parity. They pay lip service to climate targets etc, but the reality is that their emissions are going to grow and grow at a far greater rate than Western emissions are going to fall.

Depressingly, I agree with you on those points.

What gives me small hope is most people’s desire to be fashionable (not talking about clothes specifically) - and these trends spread over the internet and all over the world - including China. The more fashionable cutting emissions, recycling, not using single-use-plastic, eating more sustainable food, changing the way we view clothing, etc, becomes, the more it will become ubiquitous.

Perhaps I’m being naive!

People are inherently selfish, though, so I’m really relying on it becoming trendy to be eco-conscious otherwise we’re all screwed.

The teenagers I know are all into vintage clothes, plant-based diets, no single-use-plastic. They’re our hope! As as I feel about influencers, they play a big part. Although I suspect a lot of companies will be green washing to make money (much like the aforementioned almond milk ).

I think it all depends on the comparison though?
If we compared an avocado eating high food miles vegan to a only eats grass fed local meat person the outcome is very different. In an ideal world animals would be kept in fields, with good quality food, and have natural lives. However very few people live at those extremes, most meat eaters aren't eating local meats, and most meat is fed with the the majority of that very same soy that people fret about being grown for vegans.

What veganism does highlight for me is the high presence of animal products in foods where there is zero ability to trace it and how cheaply it needs to be produced. Diet Pepsi for example has some kind of animal product? We tend to focus on the meat we eat at dinner, the eggs we eat whole and the milk in cartoons without realising the prevalence of it in most things we eat. For example No one i knows buys caged hen eggs any more but they all buy items where caged eggs are contained because there's no way of telling in most products where that egg is from. The sheer abundance of whey, milk, eggs in cheap foods (where people don't even realise it has animal products in) shows that how much pressure there is to keep items cheap.

This is what I mean by vegan propaganda.

It’s not propaganda, it’s a WHO definition.

human were designed to have the same diet as chimpanzee.. who mostly eat fruit and veg with meat featuring in there diet about once a month.

We are actually meant to mostly not eat meat. So your facts are very much incorrect

I totally agree with you here.

I know that people in the U.K. are culturally attached to eating cheap meat every single day.

Nobody is asking anybody to become vegan.

But: please eat less. It’s irresponsible to continue at this rate, and it’s also morally corrupt.

Eat LESS meat, dairy and fish. Just LESS. Once a week, maybe. It’s a life - a life should be expensive.

OnlyInYourDreams

all your arguments are the I'll just slam my head against a wall stuff that veggies and vegans get all the time, but make no sense whatsoever. The one about fake meat products!! Well. Obviously. If someone is vegan because of the environment or animals being killed that's not them saying they don't want to eat meat because they don't like meat. If they have the option to eat something vaguely similar but without animals being kills, why woudn't they?! That's no different than your similar argument about eating local/better meat - or choosing free range, or whatever. You're all trying to eat stuff you like, while not being part of something you disagree with. I wont even start on the extinct one. I'll just say if I had £1 for every time someone had said those things to me I'd be rich, and they still make absolutely no sense whatsoever.

The thing is, on threads like this, most of us mortals can only quote thing we've read in the papers, on social media or the odd scientific articl we might have covered so I don't think any of us can be informed (apols to anyone with better credentials than that). Personally I therefore trust people who work this out for an actual living, where generally the consensus is that veganism is "better" environmentally and in terms of animal welfare, but you should still be careful what you eat (i.e. yes milk uses way more water to produce than almond milk. But almond milk still takes a lot. So use oat! why not! It's also very local in comparison).

However, obviously not everyone is going to go vegan or veggie, which is also fine. So the people who aren't, eat your local meat (actually that's not always more environmentally friendly either ;-) but let's not overcomplicate things right now) and support those farms that do things in a more environmentally friendly or ethical way.

So we can all win that way, right? We don't have to put our beliefs on eachother and have these stupid arguments, we can all just take responsibility for our own actions.

Its the same as the palm oil difficulties. Are you comparing palm oil to no oil or the other oil alternatives? We all know that Palm oil is bad, however its replacements are often far worse. Lots of products might proudly say palm oil free but have switched to a replacement with far far worse environmental impact

No one is asking anyone to become vegan
Hahahaha.
Maybe not exactly, but much effort to guilt us into it.

Morally corrupt?

It's like being doorstepped by Jehovah's Witnesses.

@GrumpyMiddleAgedWoman

No one is asking anyone to become vegan Hahahaha. Maybe not exactly, but much effort to guilt us into it.

Morally corrupt?

It's like being doorstepped by Jehovah's Witnesses.

‘Guilt’ though - what is there to feel guilty about?

if people really wanted to make a difference to the environment as a whole, not just carbon emissions, but the environment they’d eat locally sourced, organic, seasonal produce.

The missing part of this is fed on locally grown feeds. Because the feed inputs for animals in particular absolutely dwarf the carbon impact of shipping finished products alone, let alone the other environmental inputs such as water, forest destruction, etc.

It’s kind of worrying the number of people who think their meat only eats the grass grown just outside its shed.

(Omnivore who understands the environmental impact of my choices and is trying to reduce them but not always doing well at it.)

No, it's the vegans who appear to be militant about what others eat

It was a non vegan who started this thread to belittle vegans.