I think the clip means vegan diet (though vegan means no animal products outside of food too), because the fossil fuel output for dairy and eggs is not great. You not only have to raise the animals (even without the extra grain to fatten them up for slaughter), but use machinery to get the goods and then store them - especially cheese which gets aged in massive cooled chambers. I’m pretty sure the SE Asian diet that is mostly fish and egg based protein (limited in use) is going to better than a vegetarian diet with a lot of dairy in the mix.
Well, that was a stupid waste of five minutes of effort by that author.
Effective satire needs to have an object in reality that its satiric exaggerations reflect. No such object in this case.
I read something a while back that rabbits and jellyfish were the farm-raised proteins of the future, but I’m holding out hope for vat-grown!
Thread that points out that the least harmful, most effective agriculture depends on the land.
The problem isn’t that we’re eating cows, the problem is that we’re using the wrong areas and methods to raise them. And the same can be said for a lot of our vegetables and fruits.
Could we (most of us) eat less meat? Sure. But plant based doesn’t automatically = better.
Feels like it’s pointing out the very significant differences between those corporate slurm-chutes.
You mean, makes you feel better about your decisions, right?
So just leave the land? Most of the crops that are grown go towards animals. If you stop raising animals, then you stop needing to use that land, and can divert some of it towards the increased demand from humans.
I’m sure that car has no way at all of going to a grocery store. And certainly, with all that rain falling nearby, there’s no way to have a garden to grow things at your home.
The photo was taken in January, and it had been subfreezing on the Plains for about two months. How much snow do you see there? The “rain” in the background is about 20 km away, and if you look closely you’ll see that very little of it reaches the ground.
However, as noted above, a couple of days away by horse you can get to the Rio Grande valley, where there are plenty of farms (total rainfall here averages 25 cm per year, although it’s been drier than that the past couple of decades.) The main crops are chiles and alfalfa.
Yep! I don’t care for either one, though.
Eh, no. I meant what I actually said.
I generally don’t look to the Internet for validation of my feelings about my decisions… I suspect that way lies madness.
My eyes started glazing over the rest halfway through the first paragraph. I slogged through it but yeah…ech. That piece was about as incisive as a brick.
The term ‘flexitarian’ still drives me nuts, though not as much as ‘oh, I’m vegetarian but I eat meat every now and then’. Simply saying ‘I don’t eat much meat’ is enough and it invites conversation around that decision rather than a detour into explaining neologisms like ‘flexitarian’.
The point is you can have your cake and eat it to (albiet much less “cake” than we currently eat).
We do clearly need to change the way we farm:
1- Don’t ranch or otherwise raise animals (with feedlots, etc.) on land suitable for growing plant based food suitable for human consumption*.
2- Stop excessive forest clearance for agriculture.
3- Ranch or graze on land where there is already natural pasture.
Do those three things and you can cut out a lot of the waste in our food chain, whilst decreasing greenhouse emissions from agriculture. Meat needn’t be cut out entirely, and instead it will continue to offer a valuable source of protein and food from lands otherwise unsuitable to feeding people.
*[edited to add:] unless this is symbiotic in nature and beneficial to the crops
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