Are you verbing carnivore? 
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I accidentally slipped into icanhascheezburger speak in my head.
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Unrefrigerated raw meat lasts indefinitely alive and on the hoof. It’ll even even multiply, if conditions are right.
It’s also available when there are no fruits and veg, which is one of the reasons we evolved to eat it.
But realistically, unrefrigerated storage of meat, veg and fruit is a fully solved problem. We can salt, smoke, freeze-dry, &etc., there are any number of techniques that an educated person can make use of.
But the carbon costs of food shipped from more than a hundred miles away will make all other considerations moot. You eat those chilean grapes in winter, guess what, the ship that brought them probably burnt bunker fuel. That’s why you can afford them. 20 ships burning #6 bunker fuel produces more pollution than all the cars in the world put together, and that’s what you are sponsoring when you buy super cheap imported products.
Where our food came from, and how it got to us, is vastly more important of an issue than whether you eat meat or not. If we’re subsidizing unsustainable polluting transports and anti-human corporations, that outweighs all other factors.
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This article appears to contradict that idea.
From the intro:
An analysis of the environmental toll of food production concludes that transportation is a mere drop in the carbon bucket. Foods such as beef and dairy make a far deeper impression on a consumer’s carbon footprint.
Is this article right? Beats me.
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Too lazy to do it, but NPR had a thing on that, and I distinctly remember the phrasing of “peak abattoir” being used. Basically, everyone WANTS locally sourced beef, because “living next to cows is awesome,” but then shipping to and from has to happen because no one wants to live next to the slaughter house.
The article says right in the beginning that it’s cherrypicking data (and I approve of the disclosure, that’s not a critcism!)
If you have a certain type of diet that’s indicative of the American average, you’re not going to do that much for climate while eating locally,” says Christopher Weber, a researcher at Carnegie Mellon University
The gist of the presentation is the claim (certainly true for many people) that red meat is not available locally.
But I have it gamboling in my yard, eating the hastas.
Maybe I’m misunderstanding the article. It doesn’t say that red meat is bad in terms of its carbon footprint because it’s not likely to be local.
It says it’s “bad” regardless of whether it’s available locally. (Or rather, regardless of where the cows live and where the consumers live, it’s not actually “local.”)
His analysis included emissions such as transporting and producing fertiliser for crops, methane gas emitted by livestock, and food’s journey to market. All told, that final step added up to just 4% of a food’s greenhouse emissions, on average.
[…]
Final delivery “food-miles” make up just 1% of the greenhouse emissions of red meat, and 11% for fruits and vegetables.
To drive his point home, Weber calculated that a completely local diet would reduce a household’s greenhouse emissions by an amount equivalent to driving a car 1600 km fewer per year. He assumed the car travels 10.6 km per litre of petrol (25 mpg). Switching from red meat to veggies just one day per week would spare 1860 km of driving.
“The differences between eating habits are very, very striking,” Weber says.
Again, I (obviously?) can’t vouch for the article or the research it’s describing, but it does appear to say that (when it comes to meat produced the way most meat is produced in America) it’s the meat, not the miles.
I’m sure if you’re talking about a nationwide network of backyard butchers slaughtering cows that are completely grass fed, you’d have very different calculations. But it’s impossible to produce meat on our current scale that way.
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Unless you lived in a city. Then you would be lucky if you ate enough to meet basic nutritional needs. Between horrific factory conditions, child labor, and overall lack of concern by the powers that be, the 19th Century was not particularly good time to be urban working class.
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Note this quote:
Food travelled an average of 1640 km in its final trip to the grocery store, out of total of 6760 km on the road for the raw ingredients. But some foods log more kilometres than others. Red meat averaged 20,400 km – just 1800 of those from final delivery.
Accounting for greenhouse gas emissions made those contrasts even starker. Final delivery “food-miles” make up just 1% of the greenhouse emissions of red meat, and 11% for fruits and vegetables.
To drive his point home, Weber calculated that a completely local diet would reduce a household’s greenhouse emissions by an amount equivalent to driving a car 1600 km fewer per year. He assumed the car travels 10.6 km per litre of petrol (25 mpg). Switching from red meat to veggies just one day per week would spare 1860 km of driving.
His calculations use feedlot beef transported huge distances, mostly over land. Now, while that does describe a typical urban beef eater, it doesn’t begin to describe me - so I contend that the problems he’s illustrating, whilst valid, are not problems caused by carnivory. If I predicate my study of diet on the idea that vegetarians eat too much bleached flour, I can probably find the average values will support that idea - but it isn’t valid for me to proclaim that ills caused by bleached flour are actually caused by vegetarianism.
But I confess I haven’t gone over the article’s methods and sources, in fact I barely skimmed it. So, meh, don’t ascribe too much to this one critique.
I can buy grassfed beef and bison from my local area, which is smack dab in the middle of the Boston/Atlanta megalopolis. And I have deer in my suburban yard every day; despite hunting, some of them starve every winter. There’s no shortage of sustainably grown meat around here; articles that base their logic on averages are wrong everywhere, because we don’t all have 2.5 children.
I was specifically referring to the few thousand years prior to that, but sure.
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http://pubs.acs.org/doi/full/10.1021/es702969f
"Despite significant recent public concern and media attention to the environmental impacts of food, few studies in the United States have systematically compared the life-cycle greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions associated with food production against long-distance distribution, aka “food-miles.” We find that although food is transported long distances in general (1640 km delivery and 6760 km life-cycle supply chain on average) the GHG emissions associated with food are dominated by the production phase, contributing 83% of the average U.S. household’s 8.1 t CO2e/yr footprint for food consumption. Transportation as a whole represents only 11% of life-cycle GHG emissions, and final delivery from producer to retail contributes only 4%. Different food groups exhibit a large range in GHG-intensity; on average, red meat is around 150% more GHG-intensive than chicken or fish. Thus, we suggest that dietary shift can be a more effective means of lowering an average household’s food-related climate footprint than “buying local.” Shifting less than one day per week’s worth of calories from red meat and dairy products to chicken, fish, eggs, or a vegetable-based diet achieves more GHG reduction than buying all locally sourced food.
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Absurd, sorry. You need to get over the term “corn-fed”. It means grain-finished.
“grass-fed” is a term that means eats grass for the first year or two, like all beef cows, then grass finished - never having grains.
You know, do yourself a favor and Google it yourself. I just did. There a zillion sources from all over this issue and they all agree with one another - Cows. Eat. Grass. They eat grass for 12 - 18 months. Then they are finished-fed for 3 to 6 months. “Grass fed” cows are finished on grasses and certain allowed forages. “Corn (or grain)-finished” are fed corn and soy forages, alfalfa, distillers grain for finishing.
So, yeah, it is pretty simple. You just got it wrong.
I’m literally saying the same thing you are: that many cows are fed grass and then finished on grain.
Others are fed grass their entire lives with no grain involved.
Others are fed mostly grain (i.e., corn) with some grass as filler.
It depends on the breed and the muscle-to-fat result that the farmers are going for. And the flavor; cows fed mostly corn and grain are thought to have a nuttier, more traditionally beefy flavor than grass-fed. There’s a steakhouse near me that delineates all of their steaks by the ratio of corn to grass, which is kinda crazy, but there it is.
Your original post said that “grass is what ALL beef cows eat to make most of their bodies”, which is incorrect.
I grew up in 4-H cow/corn country, which I would hope is better than Google.
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What, I was responding with some practical advice to someone saying a Vegan lifestyle is income dependent. I could use India as an example, or talk about my own life experience.
What will really bake your noodle, cigarettes are expensive, but rolling papers are cheap. Hotel butt cans are a great free source of tobacco, since they are usually out of the rain, and people often only finish half a cigarette.
I was never technically homeless, since I always had a car, at least. Cooking can be a challenge at those times, since no stove, making nicotine especially important for appetite suppression. That’s a time for another poverty tip, restaurant night part-time gigs are great to supplement calories. Vegan dishes can totally be made from leftover vegetable cuts the cooks would otherwise throw out. Work hard and let the staff know your poverty, and you totally can get free calories.
Saying Veganism is a luxury of the rich is a bad argument against it.
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For sure. Eating that way can be a lot cheaper than a meaty diet.
I guess I’m just glad to be lucky enough to not need appetite suppressants, tobacco or otherwise.
More power (and free calories) to ya.
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Great charts.
I figure that by not having flown anywhere in the last four years, and by driving < 7000 miles per year in a car that gets a solid 30+ mpg, I have stacked up enough personal carbon credits to do this 2-3 times a week:
Cooked over charcoal, too.
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Meat consumption causes “more problems related to plowing”??
Factory farming is not = to meat eating. We eat meat at most meals, and practically none of it comes from factory farms. There is no plowing involved. And very little corn or wheat.
If there was an apocalypse tomorrow, and we were left with only the barns filled with the hay and feed we have for the livestock, we would starve to death. We cannot digest it.In the case of grassland, it is much less efficient to try to eat it ourselves, because we would likely die of gastrointestinal distress. It would also be pretty unsound to try to grow veggies there, because it would need to be plowed, irrigated and fertilized, Then protected from insects, varmints, and grazing animals. The irrigation part is the real deal breaker, as far as technical difficulty.
The argument of worst case of vegan agriculture Vs best case of omnivore agriculture has already been raised here. You seem to be doing the reverse. Neither comparison seems fair.
I think we should be talking about sustainable and ecologically sound farming practices vs the unsound and unsustainable ones. Whether you are producing soybeans or beef, you can do it either way.
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I wonder where there is some easy place to find the raw data that would let you keep accurate carbon scores. Particularly if you could factor in acres of grassland and forest. And probably add for all the crap we order on Amazon Prime with air shipping. But it would be interesting.
