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Considering how much arable land is used to produce animal feed (about 50%) there is quite a lot of room for improvement, especially considering how inefficient

by bjoli 7y ago

Considering how much arable land is used to produce animal feed (about 50%) there is quite a lot of room for improvement, especially considering how inefficient meat production is.

efnx 7y ago
The first and easiest thing we can each do, individually, is eat less meat (or better - no meat). My wife and I have been mostly vegan for a year for health reasons and it’s surprisingly easy. Throw on the eco benefit and it’s a very good feeling. Very worth it.
- godtoldmetodoit 7y ago
  My wife and I made the switch to vegetarian about 3 months ago, and it's been much easier then I expected. I love meat, but knowing both the health and ecological impacts I just couldn't justify my consumption anymore.
  - hkeide 7y ago
    What health effects specifically are you talking about? There is a lot of shaky science in the nutrition field.
- jeffdavis 7y ago
  My daughter is vegan and sometimes I worry about her diet. A diet is what you do eat, how much, when, etc.; but being vegan only tells you what you don't eat. Surprisingly little about vegan promotional stuff gives practical advice. It's mostly talking about how wasteful meat is and how foolish meat-eaters are. Where is practical material about daily eating habits? Like, what should an athletic teenager eat, how much, and how often? Preferably with pictures of actual normal daily food, not "here's an arcane recipe requiring twelve ingredients and ten steps that you will eat once and forget about". And preferably with approximate nutritional value. For adults it's probably pretty easy simply because adults don't need a lot of food to be healthy, and can skip meals without much downside. Adults are also in many ways less busy. A teenager needs food in the morning rushing to school, and probably needs to pack lunch also because there probably isn't a real vegan meal available at school to buy.
  - vzidex 7y ago
    I'm a young, vegetarian person who is working on going vegan - and making good progress. If you do a cursory search of vegan material, or only pay attention to stuff that pops up on your Facebook/Reddit/HackerNews/Twitter feed, you'll definitely get a lot of "meat = bad"-type material. However, if you put in a little more effort there's a lot of good material available - from recipes, to nutrition advice, to guides on what products are vegan/are not. Hint: I've found appending the term "vegan" to my Google searches for recipes tends to work quite well and yield healthy, reasonable, scalable meals. By putting in the work, I've gotten a bunch of YouTube channels, saved recipes I like, and nutrition advice.
    - jeffdavis 7y ago
      Looking for vegan recipes in google usually doesn't result in staple meals that you can have several times per week. More importantly, a recipe doesn't tell you how much or how often you should eat it in your diet.
  - simonsarris 7y ago
    I'd be very worried about brain development and health. I suspect they are making a big mistake, but its especially so for children. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/10408398.2018.1437024 https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/10408398.2018.1... > The present paper argues that the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics ignores or gives short shrift to direct and indirect evidence that vegetarianism may be associated with serious risks for brain and body development in fetuses and children. Regular supplementation with iron, zinc, and B12 will not mitigate all of these risks. Consequently, we cannot say decisively that vegetarianism or veganism is safe for children. I seriously recommend you read the entire review. I do not think it's something that can be trivially solved with supplementation. Eg: > The AND says that “[v]egans must regularly consume…B-12-fortified foods or B-12-containing supplements,” and “[m]ost vegetarians should” do the same (Melina, Craig, and Levin 2016). The results of Herrmann et al. (2003) suggest that even with supplementation vegans may still tend to cluster in the deficient-to-borderline-deficient range. Vegetarians can achieve adequate B12 levels with supplementation, but some are still in the deficient and borderline-deficient range. Whether it is realistic for vegetarians/vegans to maintain adequate B12 levels throughout their entire childhood via supplementation is an open question. > The consequences of B12 deficiency in childhood for brain and body development are extensive, severe, and can be irreversible. Potential consequences include (among many others) impaired cognitive development/school performance, depression, weakness, fatigue, nerve damage, and failure to thrive (Graham, Arvela, and Wise 1992; Rasmussen, Fernhoff, and Scanlon 2001). Breastfeeding infants whose mothers are vegetarian/vegan are also known to be at risk for B12 deficiency (Graham, Arvela, and Wise 1992; Kühne, Bubl, and Baumgartner 1991; Roschitz et al. 2005; von Schenck, Bender-Götze, and Koletzko 1997).
hkeide 7y ago
That's not true in the US. Less than 15% of the feed used for animals would be edible for humans, and much of the land in the US is not suitabe for growing crops other than grass. Most of the food given to animals are farm waste products and leaves etc. Using regenerative farming, cows can even be net carbon negative, meanwhile a lot of human feed uses artificial fertilizer which is a big contributor to carbon emissions. See White Oak Pastures for an example (verified by third parties): https://blog.whiteoakpastures.com/hubfs/WOP-LCA-Quantis-2019.pdf https://blog.whiteoakpastures.com/hubfs/WOP-LCA-Quantis-2019...
- gdubs 7y ago
  Oak Savanna and regenerative farming, in general, are great things. If we committed to only farming animals in these types of regenerative systems, it would _greatly_ reduce the supply. As a vegetarian, I’m all for that. As someone who really wants us to address climate change, I’m all for that. The fact is, our current system not only ignores the negative externalities of (animal intensive) agriculture — we subsidize it. That’s why I think a carbon tax is a good idea. It would mean meat would become more expensive. This angers a lot of people. But if we get serious about measuring the actual environmental effects of agriculture, it needs to be reflected in the cost. To me, if we solve this problem the world would eat a lot more plants, and the meat that is consumed would be produced by carbon negative, regenerative practices.
- bjoli 7y ago
  That is not what I said. I said that fodder production takes up a very large part of arable land. In my home country, animal feed and human food take up the same amount of area. That land is suitable for growing human food as well. I suspect that arable land use is about the same in the US. Land that is capable of storing carbon is generally great farmland since the process in carbon sinks is what leads to humus.

by bjoli 7y ago

Considering how much arable land is used to produce animal feed (about 50%) there is quite a lot of room for improvement, especially considering how inefficient meat production is.

efnx 7y ago

The first and easiest thing we can each do, individually, is eat less meat (or better - no meat). My wife and I have been mostly vegan for a year for health reasons and it’s surprisingly easy. Throw on the eco benefit and it’s a very good feeling. Very worth it.

godtoldmetodoit 7y ago
My wife and I made the switch to vegetarian about 3 months ago, and it's been much easier then I expected. I love meat, but knowing both the health and ecological impacts I just couldn't justify my consumption anymore.
- hkeide 7y ago
  What health effects specifically are you talking about? There is a lot of shaky science in the nutrition field.
jeffdavis 7y ago
My daughter is vegan and sometimes I worry about her diet. A diet is what you do eat, how much, when, etc.; but being vegan only tells you what you don't eat. Surprisingly little about vegan promotional stuff gives practical advice. It's mostly talking about how wasteful meat is and how foolish meat-eaters are. Where is practical material about daily eating habits? Like, what should an athletic teenager eat, how much, and how often? Preferably with pictures of actual normal daily food, not "here's an arcane recipe requiring twelve ingredients and ten steps that you will eat once and forget about". And preferably with approximate nutritional value. For adults it's probably pretty easy simply because adults don't need a lot of food to be healthy, and can skip meals without much downside. Adults are also in many ways less busy. A teenager needs food in the morning rushing to school, and probably needs to pack lunch also because there probably isn't a real vegan meal available at school to buy.
- vzidex 7y ago
  I'm a young, vegetarian person who is working on going vegan - and making good progress. If you do a cursory search of vegan material, or only pay attention to stuff that pops up on your Facebook/Reddit/HackerNews/Twitter feed, you'll definitely get a lot of "meat = bad"-type material. However, if you put in a little more effort there's a lot of good material available - from recipes, to nutrition advice, to guides on what products are vegan/are not. Hint: I've found appending the term "vegan" to my Google searches for recipes tends to work quite well and yield healthy, reasonable, scalable meals. By putting in the work, I've gotten a bunch of YouTube channels, saved recipes I like, and nutrition advice.
  - jeffdavis 7y ago
    Looking for vegan recipes in google usually doesn't result in staple meals that you can have several times per week. More importantly, a recipe doesn't tell you how much or how often you should eat it in your diet.
- simonsarris 7y ago
  I'd be very worried about brain development and health. I suspect they are making a big mistake, but its especially so for children. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/10408398.2018.1437024 https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/10408398.2018.1... > The present paper argues that the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics ignores or gives short shrift to direct and indirect evidence that vegetarianism may be associated with serious risks for brain and body development in fetuses and children. Regular supplementation with iron, zinc, and B12 will not mitigate all of these risks. Consequently, we cannot say decisively that vegetarianism or veganism is safe for children. I seriously recommend you read the entire review. I do not think it's something that can be trivially solved with supplementation. Eg: > The AND says that “[v]egans must regularly consume…B-12-fortified foods or B-12-containing supplements,” and “[m]ost vegetarians should” do the same (Melina, Craig, and Levin 2016). The results of Herrmann et al. (2003) suggest that even with supplementation vegans may still tend to cluster in the deficient-to-borderline-deficient range. Vegetarians can achieve adequate B12 levels with supplementation, but some are still in the deficient and borderline-deficient range. Whether it is realistic for vegetarians/vegans to maintain adequate B12 levels throughout their entire childhood via supplementation is an open question. > The consequences of B12 deficiency in childhood for brain and body development are extensive, severe, and can be irreversible. Potential consequences include (among many others) impaired cognitive development/school performance, depression, weakness, fatigue, nerve damage, and failure to thrive (Graham, Arvela, and Wise 1992; Rasmussen, Fernhoff, and Scanlon 2001). Breastfeeding infants whose mothers are vegetarian/vegan are also known to be at risk for B12 deficiency (Graham, Arvela, and Wise 1992; Kühne, Bubl, and Baumgartner 1991; Roschitz et al. 2005; von Schenck, Bender-Götze, and Koletzko 1997).

hkeide 7y ago

That's not true in the US. Less than 15% of the feed used for animals would be edible for humans, and much of the land in the US is not suitabe for growing crops other than grass. Most of the food given to animals are farm waste products and leaves etc. Using regenerative farming, cows can even be net carbon negative, meanwhile a lot of human feed uses artificial fertilizer which is a big contributor to carbon emissions. See White Oak Pastures for an example (verified by third parties): https://blog.whiteoakpastures.com/hubfs/WOP-LCA-Quantis-2019.pdf https://blog.whiteoakpastures.com/hubfs/WOP-LCA-Quantis-2019...

gdubs 7y ago
Oak Savanna and regenerative farming, in general, are great things. If we committed to only farming animals in these types of regenerative systems, it would _greatly_ reduce the supply. As a vegetarian, I’m all for that. As someone who really wants us to address climate change, I’m all for that. The fact is, our current system not only ignores the negative externalities of (animal intensive) agriculture — we subsidize it. That’s why I think a carbon tax is a good idea. It would mean meat would become more expensive. This angers a lot of people. But if we get serious about measuring the actual environmental effects of agriculture, it needs to be reflected in the cost. To me, if we solve this problem the world would eat a lot more plants, and the meat that is consumed would be produced by carbon negative, regenerative practices.
bjoli 7y ago
That is not what I said. I said that fodder production takes up a very large part of arable land. In my home country, animal feed and human food take up the same amount of area. That land is suitable for growing human food as well. I suspect that arable land use is about the same in the US. Land that is capable of storing carbon is generally great farmland since the process in carbon sinks is what leads to humus.