Veganism might make you feel better, but it won't save our asses

boing
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Living in the “Great White North” is pretty carbon intensive without even considering how you source your food.

We’re not asking “what do cows eat?”, we’re asking “is producing meat more or less good for the environment than only producing plants?”

The following study suggests that in the US, about 40% of a cow’s meat comes from grain (so you’re technically correct that most comes from grass, but it’s not nearly so dramatic a difference as you seem to imply) at a ratio of 2.5 lbs of grain to each lb of meat produced.

However, that doesn’t take into account the fact that cows produce high quality fertilizer from eating grass, or that the act of grazing itself improves soil quality. But it also doesn’t take into account the following:

  1. CO2 emissions from mechanization of beef production and additional grain production
  2. CO2 emissions from transportation of the finished product
  3. Methane emissions from the cows themselves

This is at least a like-to-like comparison, though, since we’re comparing factory-farmed beef to factory-farmed produce. The article under discussion is comparing sustainably-farmed meat to factory-farmed produce, which seems unreasonable to me.

Sustainably-farmed produce seems to be less land intensive but more labor intensive than factory-farmed from what I’m able to gather. This means that it will be more expensive than factory-farmed, but it also means that more land could be set aside for pasture and that ultimately more sustainably-farmed meat could be produced.

I don’t understand why the article being discussed takes an adversarial view of plant-based diets. It seems to me that more people eating plant-based diets is a very viable part of a solution, and that it is complementary with rather than opposed to sustainable ranching practices.

it’s great that you guys are eating mostly sustainably-sourced meat, but questions of scalability are still very valid. Could the amount of meat currently consumed in the US be produced sustainably at similar prices? That seems absurd to me.

Sustainable production of food definitely means:

  1. people eat less meat (including fewer people eating meat at all)
  2. food costs more
  3. everyone has less disposable income due to (2)

That’s a hard sell! But there are two more important points that go into this:

  1. food is currently as cheap as it is because we’re using up value that is stored in the form of soil quality to produce it
  2. labor-intensive, expensive sustainable food is usually better food, so you’re paying more for higher quality
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Yes and no.

Here’s a reasonably nuanced look at some of the issues surrounding beef flavor, customer preferences, and the cruel and environmentally damaging practice of corn-finishing beef.

It seems most people in the USA have been conditioned to accept the flavor of corn-fattened beef as normal and desirable, and find sustainably produced beef less palatable (some people like it better, but most prefer the familiar).

But if we switched to native ruminants (such as Bison) instead of exotic European hybridized aurochs (cattle) it could be done. The number of American bison the continent can support is amazing and they taste very good.

Right now, since the short term economic advantages of feedlots are so extreme, bison and grass-finished locally produced cattle are a specialty market, commanding high prices from people willing to vote with their wallets. Obviously the poor cannot afford these prices, reinforcing the economies of scale the feedlots enjoy.

A strongly regulated market economy would penalize feedlots for the damage they do to the local environment (and, perhaps, for their cruelty) and incentivize repopulating America’s native bison herds. A laissez faire market, of course, is a cruel and unsustainable market, and rewards pure amorality.

Since the USA is closer to laissez faire than to a well regulated capitalism, the answer to your question in the current economic environment is “no.” Beef producers can externalize the cost of the damage to the environment that they do, so that those costs are hidden from the consumer/taxpayer/citizen in the form of medical bills and soil exhaustion and such.

However, we have many reasons to want to have better market regulation, and sustainability is one. If we fix our markets and regulatory environment, then bison sustainably produced can provide for American meat eaters.

First step is probably for those who can afford it to switch to locally farmed bison. So, that’s what I did.

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  1. The statistics on CO2, methane, NO2 emissions of beef and finished product are included in the EPA GHG stats. Not sure about the WRI stats. The EPA puts beef at about 2.3% of U.S. GHG emissions.

  2. The EPA assigns zero CO2 emissions to beef cows.

  3. The definition of “grain” is important.

  4. Let’s assume that all that “grain” is food that could actually be eaten by humans. (It’s not, but let’s assume). First of all, that grain is taking no food out of the mouths of people. The U.S., and the world produces enough food to feed everybody. Is there a lot of hunger world-wide? Yes. We have a food distribution problem.

Second of all, meat is not the only thing that comes from cows. Dairy cows, a separate subject, obviously make milk which is used for all sorts of foods the word wants. All cows, however, are more than just meat. They provide leather, bone meal, pet foods, etc. Billions of pounds of secondary products that would have to be replaced, likely by many synthetic industrial processes which bring their own ills.

Thirdly - if we got rid of cows, what would happen to our grasslands? They would slowly become home to other grazers who would have a GHG profile, albeit likely not as bad as cows. And a lot more grass would naturally rot, producing methane and CO2 as by products.

Fourth - The grain we are talking about makes food. Not ethanol. Food that the world wants and is nutritious. Food that produces less GHG emissions than does the raising of food crops for humans, according to the EPA, at least in the U.S. We will always need food, and there will always be emissions associated with growing it.

Fifth - Exactly what is the so-called “grain” that beef cows are fattened up on? A lot of it is chaff from human foods - corn stalks, soy bean greens, distillery refuse. Some of it is actual corn kernels, soy beans.

Sixth - perspective is needed here. 95.5% of U.S. GHG emissions have absolutely nothing to do with the entire livestock industry. 97.7% have nothing to do with beef. 91% have nothing to do with U.S. food production. Our GHG emissions are almost entirely due to burning fossil fuels.

Even so, there are things we can do to reduce food and livestock emissions. Electrification of ag machines and the transportation sector. Rules eliminating aqueous manure cesspools and mandating spreading of dried manure onto and into soils. Improvements on the GHG emission profile of fertilizer production.

Seventh - every argument I make is (hopefully) valid today. It may not be valid in future. Our grasslands will become desertified. Our breadbaskets may well be wiped out by frequent droughts and our ancient aquifers may run dry. That is when the SWHTF, and we won’t be talking about the relative merits of beef vs tofu. We will all be starving.

And then is when we might have wished that, instead of obsessing about whether or not to eat meat, or limit meat, or ban meat when we actually have plenty of food for everyone, we had directed our attention and efforts to where 91% of our GHG emissions, which have an atmospheric lifespan of 10,000 years (unlike about 15 for methane) are coming from: the burning of oil, gas, and coal.

But Exxon and the Koch brothers, and now lots and lots of people agree: meat is the problem, right?

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It seems as though you didn’t actually read my comment. Most of your screed is irrelevant to the points I made, most of which didn’t even express disagreement with anything you have said.

There are a few exceptions:

The statistics on CO2, methane, NO2 emissions of beef and finished product are included in the EPA GHG stats. Not sure about the WRI stats. The EPA puts beef at about 2.3% of U.S. GHG emissions.

The grain we are talking about makes food. Not ethanol. Food that the world wants and is nutritious. Food that produces less GHG emissions than does the raising of food crops for humans, according to the EPA, at least in the U.S. We will always need food, and there will always be emissions associated with growing it.

The EPA puts overall agricultural emissions at 9%, so beef makes up >25% of agricultural GHG emissions. Does beef make up >25% of US caloric intake? If not, then it seems like it’s contributing disproportionately to GHG relative to other sources of calories using your own citations.

Let’s assume that all that “grain” is food that could actually be eaten by humans. (It’s not, but let’s assume). First of all, that grain is taking no food out of the mouths of people. The U.S., and the world produces enough food to feed everybody. Is there a lot of hunger world-wide? Yes. We have a food distribution problem.

  1. I never assumed that all “grain” is food that could actually be eaten by humans – I actually explicitly conceded otherwise.
  2. The quantity of food produced is simply not relevant to the question being discussed or to my comment. No one has argued that beef production is causing anyone to go hungry – just that it may have a worse ecological impact than the caloric equivalent of grains, pulses, and vegetables. (In other words, a vegan diet has less ecological impact than an omnivorous diet.)

But Exxon and the Koch brothers, and now lots and lots of people agree: meat is the problem, right?

Nowhere did I argue that “meat was the problem”. In fact, that is not the subject of the discussion in the first place.

What’s being discussed here is the article in the Guardian op-ed entitled “If you want to save the world, veganism isn’t the answer”. That article seems to want to argue that meat production is on balance good for the environment, though its actual contents seem to prove at best that meat production could be on balance good for the environment if it was done very differently from how it is actually done.

And I agree – meat production could be better overall for the environment if it was done more sustainably. But based on the EPA’s numbers, current beef production is not being done in a way that is net beneficial to the environment.

Also discussed was your claim that most of a cow’s body mass is derived from grass. I produced a citation that confirms this, but points out that the split is on average about 60%/40%. Your comments seemed to imply that it was overwhelmingly grass, but this study seems to suggest otherwise.

As to the discussion you seem to want to have concerning fossil fuels, that is absolutely a good discussion to have – although a different one from the discussion we’re actually having. One important point that you have elided, though, is that a great deal more than 9% of our GHG emissions are related to our food systems, since a significant chunk of the 67% of GHG emissions produced for transportation, residential use, and electricity generation are used to get food from the fields to our bellies.

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No, but the same goes for vegetables. It is more cost and labor intensive to produce top quality foods of any sort. But it is not impossible to find some equilibrium, where the food is safe and delicious, but people can still afford to eat a couple of times a day.
Also, I think the discussion of bison is an interesting part of this, but also fabulously complicated. It would be fun to have that discussion sometime.

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So what?

Something is going have some disproportionate contribution. Does it matter? Vegetables already take up about 60% of Ag sector GHG emissions. Should we eat less vegetables? How about lettuce or Belgian endive? Huge water use. You really want to parse our eating habits according to your personal formula of righteous environmentalism, when :

a) we raise more food than we need already

b) We have yet to attend to the 91% of GHG emissions that are not needed for anything - burning fossil fuels. As I said - perspective, man, perspective.

c) You like vegetables. So do I. And most people like meat, and milk and cheese and ice cream; and leather, and bone meal, and manure, and dog food; and chicken and pork. The world does not want your calculus of purity and the world doesn’t need it. If we eliminate the burning of fossil fuels, we can all have the food we want and still see atmospheric [GHG] go down, because the Earth has carbon sinks.

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Actually, I addressed that. IIRC, the EPA, at least, includes transportation, slaughterhouse, etc GHG emissions in their tally of livestock emissions. Besides, if we can get our act together in time to avoid societal collapse, those emissions will be gone once we decarbonize our transportation and utility sector.

I believe I said that beef cows get about 1/2 to 3/4 of their body weight carbon from grass. Of course, every plant they eat is made of carbon scrubbed from the atmosphere in the first place, so they are sort of like a biofuel in that aspect. As I also said, that “study” - actually an essay by a beef association - simply used the term “grain”. And that is the cause of huge amounts of confusion.

There are literally hundreds of articles, and at least two movies, that spew complete garbage statistics about meat. And huge numbers of people quote them as if they are gospel, and come away with truly idiotic ideas like “the most important thing you can do for the environment is to give up meat”, or “Beef produces more GHG’s than the entire transportation sector”. I swear to God, I bet the Koch brothers are behind this crap.

Anyway, a lot of confusion comes from that word “grain”. In reality, it means “something which is not grass”. But most people think it means actual grain kernels of corn, of wheat, or soybeans. And sometimes it IS actual kernels of grain. But, a good portion of the time, we are NOT talking about grain kernels that people would eat - that is, food that you count against beef production vis a vis the environment. A lot of what beef cows are “grain-finished” on is feed. An industrial product that uses plant chaffs, true grains, sorghum and the like. Some of those true grains come from distilleries - true grains that have been used to make beer and booze.

So we are arguing over small percentages of small percentages of shit that means very very little in the large scheme of things.

When we could be talking about exciting things like blowing up refineries and Fox News offices, sorry, that’s a typo. I meant to say exciting things like whether targeted subsidies are the way to go, or whether any carbon tax has ever been shown to do anything beneficial in a properly-done study. Or why did the International Criminal Court recently add Environmental Crimes to the Crimes Against Humanity and does that mean they are begging the world to frog march the Koch brothers and Exxon CEOs to the Hague.

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Exactly. The argument sounds more like: “Besides going vegan, there are other ways that could also save us.”

The simple fact of the matter is that animals need to eat too. And eating animals that eat plants is simply less efficient than eating the plants directly. The only way eating meat can possibly compete with vegan, is when the meat comes from animals that don’t need to be fed. So hunting, fishing or maybe grazing in special pastures that nobody is using at the moment. Hunting for billions of people is simply not sustainable with our current meat consumption. Maybe if we can combine all three, but I still have my doubts.

(I’m not vegan, but my meat has to have had a decent life.)

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I couldn’t resist.

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“special pastures” ?? Like natural grasslands?

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From the article:

That seems to be about a lot more than grass, and not exactly your average field.

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Ok, I understand your comment now, thanks for the clarification.

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