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.

@LadyWhistledownsQuill There is an argument for rewilding areas. Rewilding still needs livestock to graze areas and humans need to cull them because their natural predators have been removed.

Rewilding without livestock would be devoid of any biodiversity.

But I rather get the impression that the point has whooshed over your head - which is that how much water goes into a product isn't really the main point. Nor are rather primitive addings up of what calories are produced/used.

In your rudeness, I think the point has soared past yours. Which is, as I noted in my follow up, that looking at this from the ‘perfect farm/farming system, single input’ point of view is utterly pointless from a societal impact point of view. Our consumption systems simply do not work in that way and are not currently set up for the majority to be able to access consumption in that way. And therefore absolute statements about x is always better than y are both as pointless and counterproductive as only talking about water inputs in terms of ‘what the cows drink on x farm.’ But that doesn’t mean that looking at this at a societal and whole of system level isn’t useful.

The fact is that in the UK chicken is the most consumed meat by a very long chalk. Most of that chicken is fed on imported soy. And the global demand for soy is not only displacing other food crops it’s displacing even beef in the contest for land in South America and the deforestation there that we’re paying for when we buy meat.

This is why it's stupid to compare a standard vegan diet to a standard western diet. They are both environmentally destructive, based on factoryy production and monocultures, and the worst ways to eat.

I don’t disagree but that doesn’t mean that one isn’t more destructive on a whole of system level than the other by quite a long chalk.

@Pumperthepumper
Except the reason farm animals are so intensively farmed is for food ie raised for slaughter. There’s no argument to mass cull every wild animal.

So what that some animals become food in the end? And yes wild animals are constantly culled by predators, disease, lack of food or water, hunting and fishing.

[quote 21Flora]@LadyWhistledownsQuill There is an argument for rewilding areas. Rewilding still needs livestock to graze areas and humans need to cull them because their natural predators have been removed.

Rewilding without livestock would be devoid of any biodiversity.[/quote]
A good example of that would be the goats in the Avon Gorge - though I don't think it's a breeding population there. The number of animals per square mile is much lower than agriculture and the breeds used are different too.

But we digress.

[quote PlanDeRaccordement]@Pumperthepumper
Except the reason farm animals are so intensively farmed is for food ie raised for slaughter. There’s no argument to mass cull every wild animal.

So what that some animals become food in the end? And yes wild animals are constantly culled by predators, disease, lack of food or water, hunting and fishing.[/quote]
If you can’t see the difference between animals intensively farmed and solely raised for slaughter and wild animals following their natural instincts, I’m not really sure how much further we can take this conversation.

I think it’s a truth universally acknowledged that eating red meat, specially beef, is absolutely horrendous for the environment. If everyone in the world stopped eating red meat tomorrow our carbon footprint would plummet.

I’m on the fence a bit about Veganism but any diet that doesn’t include red meat is a wholly positive thing.

If you can’t see the difference between animals intensively farmed and solely raised for slaughter and wild animals following their natural instincts, I’m not really sure how much further we can take this conversation.

Animals humanely farmed live happier lives than those in the wild. Their life isn’t one long scrabble for survival ended brutally by being eaten alive by a predator or lingering in pain for weeks due to starvation or disease.

@PlanDeRaccordement

If you can’t see the difference between animals intensively farmed and solely raised for slaughter and wild animals following their natural instincts, I’m not really sure how much further we can take this conversation.

Animals humanely farmed live happier lives than those in the wild. Their life isn’t one long scrabble for survival ended brutally by being eaten alive by a predator or lingering in pain for weeks due to starvation or disease.

But they’re born solely for slaughter. So it’s pretty irrelevant how lovely their very short lives are if their parents have been used to breed massively out of their natural cycles, unable to raise their own offspring or allowed to follow any natural behaviour.

@PlanDeRaccordement

If you can’t see the difference between animals intensively farmed and solely raised for slaughter and wild animals following their natural instincts, I’m not really sure how much further we can take this conversation.

Animals humanely farmed live happier lives than those in the wild. Their life isn’t one long scrabble for survival ended brutally by being eaten alive by a predator or lingering in pain for weeks due to starvation or disease.

Also not sure how you’ve measured ‘happiness’ of wild animals compared to farmed ones.

We are in such a different place when it comes to consumption patterns and what the market demands (and the market then feeds to the consumer) than even twenty years ago.

My family have been farming beef cattle in one part of Australia for generations. Proper 'droughts and flooding rains' country. The changes from the way my grandfather farmed when I was a kid, when our cattle fed mainly on lucerne and cotton seed we harvested from our own paddocks to today, when the market pressures have changed so radically as well as the weather patterns, with climate change. Feed has to be bought in more often rather than (mostly) being able to grow enough to ride out the lean months - and it's now usually better business to buy in the feed rather than give over whole fields to it.

We have chickens on supermarket shelves for £5. Those sorts of rock bottom prices are only achievable by cutting the cost of all the inputs as far as possible, and that almost invariably means they're worse for the environment (fed on deforested soy), worse for the animals (poorer welfare) or bad for our health - or a combination of all of those.

Even getting away from the active environmental destruction caused by soy-fed animals would drive up feed prices, which would drive up meat prices, which would ultimately result in less of the product being consumed - which would be good all around for the environment. A chicken used to be a treat, not a daily staple. But that's not something that any part of the system is going to do unless governments force them to do it. And what government wants to be the one that made chicken unaffordable?

That's the system we're operating in. There are individually sustainable farming systems but they are invisible to the overwhelming majority of consumers in the UK, who buy their meat at supermarkets - most of which are competing primarily on price, and very few have values or sustainable provenance as a competitive factor alongside price value.

And in that system, is meat (on average) more environmentally damaging than plant-based products? Yes, by a long shot. Does it need to be? Probably not to the same degree, but there are elements that it's almost impossible to engineer out given global population pressures, water scarcity in many parts of the world and places where crops for local people are being displaced by crops for faraway livestock.

I’d hazard a guess that most (all?) vegans believe an animal dying a natural death of any of the ways in your post is better than the extensive, hormone-pumped, overbreeding programmes cows are forced to take part in.

I’m not vegan, I’m not even vegetarian, but I can completely see the difference between a wild animal and your average farmed pig

Possibly, but I think you will find that most also believe any animal raised for meat is inhumane, even if they are slaughtered carefully where they liv. That's why they are vegans rather than just avoiding factory farmed meat.

I've heard quite a few argue that wild animals live a good natural life to an old age, compared to farm animals slaughtered cruelly and early. Which is crazy.

.

@JassyRadlett

But I rather get the impression that the point has whooshed over your head - which is that how much water goes into a product isn't really the main point. Nor are rather primitive addings up of what calories are produced/used.

In your rudeness, I think the point has soared past yours. Which is, as I noted in my follow up, that looking at this from the ‘perfect farm/farming system, single input’ point of view is utterly pointless from a societal impact point of view. Our consumption systems simply do not work in that way and are not currently set up for the majority to be able to access consumption in that way. And therefore absolute statements about x is always better than y are both as pointless and counterproductive as only talking about water inputs in terms of ‘what the cows drink on x farm.’ But that doesn’t mean that looking at this at a societal and whole of system level isn’t useful.

The fact is that in the UK chicken is the most consumed meat by a very long chalk. Most of that chicken is fed on imported soy. And the global demand for soy is not only displacing other food crops it’s displacing even beef in the contest for land in South America and the deforestation there that we’re paying for when we buy meat.

This is why it's stupid to compare a standard vegan diet to a standard western diet. They are both environmentally destructive, based on factoryy production and monocultures, and the worst ways to eat.

I don’t disagree but that doesn’t mean that one isn’t more destructive on a whole of system level than the other by quite a long chalk.

If you look at the whole system level, vegans are eating factory farmed foods with all the problems of factory farmed foods. And choosing to be vegan will mean that fairly often they will be making a choice to eat plant matter grown far away in a monoculture over an animal raised sustainably closer to home.

For example, I bought a pig raised up the road this year, including the fat, which has been useful. Because I don't have easy access to non-factory farmed plant fats, and there aren't a lot in my climate anyway.

If you are being pragmatic, then it makes no sense to be ideological about veganism, you should make the best choices you can with what is available to you and in your budget.

If you want to look at whole systems, veganism isn't the most sustainable or efficient either, even if you aren't talking about factory production.

Psychologically, the focus on veganism as the answer tends to obscure the fact that the real problem is factory production and that applies to plants as well as animals. People think they ave the answer but don't realise that factory farming also means plant foods.

It’s starting to really irritate me that people are still saying ‘ahh, but have the vegans thought of THIS’ as some kind of gotcha. The bottom line is, people who don’t eat meat or dairy are doing what they think is best to live a more ethically conscious life. That’s it!

If we want to look at environmental impact there won’t be a single person on this thread who couldn’t do more. We never, ever say to people ‘why do you recycle? Don’t you know about the supermarkets wasting 896,000 tonnes of plastic every year?!’

I think you're setting up a false binary between 'the least sustainable plant-based foods' and 'the most sustainable animal products' that isn't borne out by real-world consumption patterns.

If you look at the whole system level, vegans are eating factory farmed foods with all the problems of factory farmed foods. And choosing to be vegan will mean that fairly often they will be making a choice to eat plant matter grown far away in a monoculture over an animal raised sustainably closer to home.

Are they, though? Because often the choice is between plant matter grown far away and processed in a factory and animal matter grown far away (or fed on food grown far away) and processed in a factory.

Chicken is the majority of the meat we eat in the UK - and most the UK-farmed chicken we eat is fed on imported soy. 35% of the beef we consume is imported - more than two thirds from Ireland, which imports twice as much of its beef feedstocks as the UK does, most of which is maize and soya from the Americas. It's a similar percentage for sheepmeat, although most of that comes from New Zealand and Australia and so is more likely to be grassfed and then often finished on grain.

Not many people are buying their meat from a local butcher that has sourced it from the farm down the road that raised the animal entirely on locally-grown feed.

(I'm the omnivore daughter of a cattle farmer, it is absolutely in my best interests for a diet that includes lost of meat to be somehow more sustainable than a mainly plant-based diet. Sadly I've seen zero evidence that stacks up behind that position.)

A very very complex argument but largely yes, you are right OP. I have no issue with vegans. But vegans who drink almond milk, eat soya and tell me that my local grass fed beef is what’s harming the planet need to do their research.

I totally agree OP.

But let's remember, most vegans are only vegans for attention seeking reasons.

I'm no vegan, but I've read enough of the data to know that yes YABU.
It's not about the distance the veg or meat travelled, its the environmental impact of the meat industry that is the issue. Do some research if you want to learn about this - there's plenty of free infomation out there.

I think your largely wrong, ruminants are really bad for the environment but poultry and pork less so and pound for pound are better than palm oil but you’d never eat the same volume of palm oil as you would pork/poultry. I am a meat eater by the way but am aware of the facts I also agree loads of animals would become extinct if we didn’t farm them because the fields of sheep, cows and pigs you see are all female so couldn’t naturally sustain themselves. I make a choice to eat white meat locally sustainably produced, knowing I make really positive steps elsewhere (don’t fly, electric car, renewable heating at home etc etc).

I totally agree OP. But let's remember, most vegans are only vegans for attention seeking reasons.

@Doghead what an utterly stupid thing to say! I think all that processed meat is killing off your brain cells.

@Doghead

I totally agree OP.

But let's remember, most vegans are only vegans for attention seeking reasons.

What an attention seeking post.

Always ignored is the amount of carbon grass fields capture. It's estimated to be 1-2 tonnes per acre per year.
But hardly any cows are reared on grass!! Do you honestly think that the milk, cheese, etc you buy are from grass-fed cattle? Most of them are fed grain, particularly soya, which is often grown in huge monocultures in the Americas, including land which was formerly forest in Brazil
www.thecourtyarddairy.co.uk/blog/cheese-musings-and-tips/grass-fed-pasture-milk-cheese/

I'm not a vegan but of course YABU. There aren't any foods that are exclusively vegan e.g. I know plenty of meat eaters who eat almonds, soya, avocados, etc. It's ridiculous to assume that these are eaten by vegans instead of meat or that meat eaters don't eat air freighted foods. The main difference is meat, and we know that's environmentally damaging.

I don't think we have much need to worry about the extinction of livestock - it's not like the world is going to suddenly all turn vegan. I'm more worried about extinction of wild animals from land being cleared for agriculture.

I try to have a couple of vegan meals a week because I think we should all be trying to cut back on meat and dairy.

For example, I bought a pig raised up the road this year, including the fat, which has been useful.

That is not typical of meat eaters though. UK meat eaters are more likely to be eating pork from Denmark than the farm up the road. Same with lamb from NZ. Most are eating animals fed on plant matter grown far away in a monoculture over an animal raised sustainably closer to home.

Disagree with a vegan and they can't wait to jump on you 😂😂