Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2018/07/23/watch-how-omnivore-and-plant-b.html
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Mercy For Animals is a group that advocates a plant-based diet
This will not be biased at all, I’m sure!
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What does bias mean in this context? Who would be unbiased?
I’m glad to hear somebody advocating reducing use of meat. Sometimes it feels like the binary choice is macrobiotic purity or eternal damnation. I occasionally cook vegetarian, if there’s a recipe I like, but I’ll add a pound of sausage to my chili. Is there a word for that? Impuritarian?
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everything; including the mirror
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Omnivore, I think.
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As always, these comparisons equate ‘meat’ with ‘beef’. All that extra water, grain, and land is going to cows, not chickens. Chicken’s carbon footprint is not substantially different from tofu’s.
I eat a beef-free but pork-and-poultry-heavy diet, and my food footprint is about a third of the average cow-eater’s. http://bogott.net/unspecified/?p=740
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the road surface will require a bit of cooking to get it tender enough to eat.
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“Joe will save the lives of tens of thousand of animals” Hardly, if we were all primary plant based eaters those animals wouldn’t be born!
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Without knowing exactly where this is I could safely say in western N. America there are plenty of wild onions, some tuber/root to fill the camas/potato/wapato spot in the stew pot, most likely a type of sorrel/lamb’s quarter. And in those foothills are bound to be tasty mushrooms and all sorts of nut/seed. All of which will make a lovely meal to go with the side of human-beef jerky made of the occupants of whatever vehicle it is taking the picture.
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Plains of San Agustin, New Mexico. Approximately 30 km from the nearest post office. There’s a little bit of wild garlic, but it’s not easy to find (too dry). Almost exclusively bunchgrass, and not a great deal of that. The foothills you mention rise about a thousand meters from the plains (note snow cover) and (again) are too dry for the kind of forest fungi you’re thinking of. The dominant nuts are piñon, and are at best a luxury food that takes more labor to collect and prepare than the calories it contains.
Attempting to live exclusively on plant foods in this area is another way to starve, and that’s not counting the lack of essential vitamins.
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One term I have been hearing is “flexitarian”
Any reduction in meat lightens the load on the planet.
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The video is targeted at urban dwellers who eat food they don’t hunt, gather or farm; it’s just recommending one corporate slurm-chute over another.
Being in direct contact with one’s means of food production wouldn’t be acceptable to people who can be persuaded to change their lifestyles by a chirpy, feel-good gloss on corporate farming.
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Despite my joke earlier, I agree with spatley above; any amount of meat reduction is a good thing – for your health, and for the planet. My (vegetarian, not vegan) daughter just got a degree in sustainable agriculture, and she’s enlightened me a bit on the subject … as you might imagine. 
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A kilogram of tofu sold in the Netherlands produces about two kilograms of carbon-dioxide equivalent (PDF) from the farm to the supermarket. That’s only a little less than Dutch chicken, at 3 kilograms of CO2-equivalent per kilogram of meat.
2:1 rather than 3:1 may be less difference than they expected but it by no means is insignificant.
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That’s fair. It strikes me as ‘relatively’ insignificant when compared to beef which is something like 16:1 but yeah, if we’re chasing every last pound then tofu is quite a bit better.
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If the omnivore dies 9.5 years earlier than the vegetarian, that offsets some of the lifetime difference in resource consumption–not just the resources consumed to produce the omnivore’s food, but also the resources consumed by all aspects of the omnivore’s lifestyle (transportation, electricity, etc.).
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There must be some kinds of mushrooms that could eventually handle it, rock-eaters that some are.
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