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As a real vegan (not a meme about vegans that you saw from meat eaters) I can confidently tell you that "animals are alive and they have feelings and senses, we

As a real vegan (not a meme about vegans that you saw from meat eaters) I can confidently tell you that "animals are alive and they have feelings and senses, we abuse them for food" is not my biggest line of defense. My biggest lines of defense are: * Dr. Kim Williams, former president of the American College of Cardiology, said "there are two kinds of cardiologists, vegans, and those who haven't read the data" * Animal agriculture is responsible for 20-33% of all freshwater consumption globally * Mass cultivation of animals increases the chances of pandemic * 41% of mainland USA is used for grazing livestock, yet meat only provides 18% of our calories; feeding the world on a vegan diet could reduce farmland use by 75% or more * Going plant-based for two-thirds of meals could reduce food-related carbon emissions by 60% (the way we produce, distribute, and refrigerate food is a huge contributor of global emissions) * 70-75% of soybeans grown globally are for livestock, only 6% are used for human food products (meat eaters often try to claim that soy production is terrible for the environment; surprise, surprise, meat consumption is the main driver)

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
nitrogen 6y ago
meat only provides 18% of our calories But what percentage of our protein?
- lkbm 6y ago
  I'm not finding a lot of people answering this question from a cursory search, but I found one source saying 33% globally[0]. (This may include eggs and dairy.) Personally, I eat more protein than I did when I ate meat, though to be fair I still eat eggs. It's not hard at all to get adequate protein. [0] https://healthyeating.sfgate.com/worlds-main-sources-protein-7395.html https://healthyeating.sfgate.com/worlds-main-sources-protein...
- kaycebasques 6y ago
  I don't know but I think I can anticipate your concern. It's very viable to meet your protein needs on a vegan diet. That stuff about vegans not being able to get complete proteins is meat industry propaganda. Furthermore, the World Health Organization said that only 10 to 15% of daily calories need to come from protein. I believe I've also read that there's no proven benefit to all of the extra protein that Americans eat daily (I haven't looked into that claim in-depth, though).
  - chordalkeyboard 6y ago
    I disagree. I was vegetarian for 2 years for ethical reasons. Animal-based protein is much easier to digest. And your average person perhaps doesn't need much protein...because your average person has no concept of exercise or fitness except as something other people do. Then your average person falls victim to metabolic syndrome and other western lifestyle related diseases. Once you set fitness goals your nutrition perspective changes. There are very few vegan/vegetarian athletes. I agree with the perspective on limiting animal suffering and I buy pastured meat. I agree with the vegan perspective on many things but I think its limited and fails to consider other aspects of the human condition. I oppose the widespread mockery and lack of respect that vegans get. The health issues associated with an ethical commitment to avoiding animal products makes it more worthy of respect.
    - kaycebasques 6y ago
      No disrespect but I see this "I'm an athlete, I need more protein" thing all the time. It's yet another meme that has spread that has the convenient side effect (or main effect) of shutting people off from considering the effects of their food choices. There are an abundance of plant-based protein supplements for hitting your nutrition targets. I don't know if you're talking about the broader community of people who self-identify as athletes but I'll restrict the discussion to professional athletes for the sake of clarity. Here's a few household-name professional vegan athletes: * Venus Williams * Lewis Hamilton * Colin Kaepernick * Kyrie Irving * Tia Blanco * Meagan Duhamel Veganism isn't very popular in general so I'm not sure if this "if professional athletes don't do it, then it must be bad" argument holds. I'm also not even sure if that claim is true. If we could compile a list of all professional athletes, find the vegan population, and then compare that to the general population, I would wager that veganism might have a higher percentage in the athlete population than the general population. Pure speculation, though, and obviously I'm biased. But I follow lots of vegan channels and they're very proud and vocal about vegan athletes and it's the kind of news that I think you won't be exposed to unless you're inside the vegan community. In other words we should both acknowledge that there's a lot of selection bias / echo chamber at play here and I don't think either of us can definitively say whether veganism is more popular or less popular among professional athletes.
- bananabreakfast 6y ago
  Americans consume protein like its the only nutrient that matters and that not getting the maximum amount possible will make you lose all of your muscle and become emaciated. Frankly, this is certainly helped by general marketing campaigns from the meat and dairy industry where they basically claim that protein makes you stronger. The truth is pretty far from that and most people with a regular omnivore diet get enough protein just through the plants they eat without even considering the meat. The human body burns protein and most excess protein just ends up getting burned along with carbs and fat. So while animals may take up a large percentage of protein intake, our irrationally high collective protein intake is hardly a good reason to chose meat over plants. Eating meat is really all about calorie density.
gautamdivgi 6y ago
Yours is probably the first comment I've seen that takes a rather logical approach. I'm an omnivore but always buy everything pasture raised and mostly local. Where not local, I order from farms listed on eatwild.com. The obvious hit is cost, but that means I eat less of it. Eventually, humanity will have to accept that going vegan is the only sustainable method.
- jl6 6y ago
  Yep, plant based diets aren’t a dogmatic all-or-nothing thing. You can still get a good portion of the benefits (health, ethical, and environmental) by cutting down on animal products even if you don’t cut them out completely. No need to let perfect be the enemy of good.
sparrc 6y ago
Great list, I have another to add about ocean plastic :) * most plastic in the ocean is made up of abandoned fishing gear (see https://www.nationalgeographic.com/news/2018/03/great-pacific-garbage-patch-plastics-environment/ https://www.nationalgeographic.com/news/2018/03/great-pacifi...)
finnh 6y ago
These are all reasons why I consider going vegetarian. I'd still eat honey, though, so not vegan.
thelastwave 6y ago
How does the way we distribute meat create that much more carbon emission than distributing a comparable amount of plant based food?
- cies 6y ago
  Cooled storage/transport, waste (a lot of meat is wasted due to limited shelf life and the following regulations), distribution of feed, water usage, methane (like 4x worse than CO2 i believe), more plastic used in packaging.
belorn 6y ago
Animal agriculture has its list of problem but so does crop agriculture. There are no free lunches here. One can argue about which problems are more harmful than the other, and its pretty clear that there exist some horrible practices in Animal agriculture. However when faced with a list of only the harms from the animal agriculture, I feel forced to mention a bit more facts about the whole picture. For example, freshwater consumption is important in regions which lacks freshwater. Crop agriculture is however the most common source for water pollution, occurs in all regions, and is not only a major environmental problem but also harms the supply of fresh water even if its not responsible for the primary consumption. Fertilizers and pesticides being the main culprits here. Sadly there is very little food in stores that do not have a direct link to fertilizers and pesticides except for wild fish, shellfish and seaweed. In quite a few times I have seen studies showing that the lowest carbon emission in any food group would be either shellfish, seaweed, or insects. No fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides, minimal land usage and sustainable. Vegan would exclude two of those, and seaweed is pretty rare in non-asian diets. In general I try to look for marks of sustainability when buying food. Small producers, non-factory farm operations, local, crops that are in season, and so on. The article here focus on the issue of sex determining the eggs, but my primary priority is the area that the hen has. In EU you can have 16 hens located in a small box the size of 0.2m². That is plain cruelty and so I choose eggs under the mark that require 4m², a requirement for outside area, always access to natural lighting, and given crops grown without chemical fertilizers, pesticides or herbicides. Is it perfect? No. Not using fertilizers, pesticides, and herbicides is still being debated and researched if they are better for the environment or worse since land usage increases from it, but since I regularly dive in the Baltic sea I am constantly reminded by the harm done already by the revolution of chemical fertilizers produced primarily by natural gas.
- kaycebasques 6y ago
  > In quite a few times I have seen studies showing that the lowest carbon emission in any food group would be either shellfish, seaweed, or insects… Vegan would exclude two of those… There's a whole strand of veganism called bivalveganism which supports the usual vegan diet + eating bi-valve creatures like mussles precisely because their cultivation seems to have a lot of positive environmental benefits (or at least, it's one of the least harmful, as you mentioned) and because they seem to rank pretty low in terms of sentience / capacity-to-feel-pain. > Crop agriculture is however the most common source for water pollution Again I think the most compelling rebuttal is the fact that dairy/meat is the primary driver of crop agriculture today. We can feed the world on literally a fraction of the crop agriculture that we currently do. The vast majority of that crop agriculture goes towards feeding the animals we use for dairy or meat. So in terms of thinking about the whole picture, as you mention, any problems with crop agriculture are exacerbated by meat/dairy reliance.
kelnos 6y ago
Thank you for these references; it's great to see some logical arguments here rather than knee-jerk responses. But I do question how much of some the things you reference are actually problems. We have plenty of fresh water. Distribution is often our problem when it comes to getting that water to humans everywhere, but stopping livestock production will not fix that. Does it really matter how much of the USA is used for livestock grazing? Are we missing out on using that land for other things that are important to us? I have no opinion on soybean production, but, again, does it matter that the lion's share of soybean production goes toward feeding livestock? And if soybean cultivation really is that bad for the environment, are there other things we could be feeding livestock that don't have such bad effects? The carbon emissions suck, but are there ways to reduce these through better process? I don't think any of these problems are unsolvable, but likely they're expensive, and there's no political will to tax the bad behavior to the point that it becomes financially better to do the right thing. Getting around that is likely easier than getting a significant chunk of the world to go vegan. And that's the issue I have with most logical arguments around veganism. Meat production and consumption has a lot of problems, certainly, but vegans seem to believe that the only way to fix those problems is to throw the baby out with the bathwater, when there are almost certainly solutions or at least mitigations to those problems. I get that as an individual, you aren't going to fix those problems, so personally going vegan is a way for people to avoid being a part of the problem. That is a satisfying route for some people, but not for everyone.
- distances 6y ago
  Freed agricultural land can and should be returned to wild. Most of farmland that was freed in EU after discontinuing unproductive farming is now forested. Sorry I don't have a link, forgot where I read about this. Cattle raising and soy production (for animal feed) are major contributors to the continued loss of Amazon.
curveaway 6y ago
For an alternative perspective that refutes a bit of this, maybe meat is actually the more environmentally healthy and human healthy way of going about things? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MxW-JKLeu1k https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MxW-JKLeu1k Blog version w/ reference links: https://www.sapien.org/blog/why-we-should-be-eating-more-meat-not-less https://www.sapien.org/blog/why-we-should-be-eating-more-mea...
nec4b 6y ago
"* Dr. Kim Williams, former president of the American College of Cardiology, said "there are two kinds of cardiologists, vegans, and those who haven't read the data"" An appeal to authority. I'm mean surgeon general once called for not wearing masks until he changed his mind completely. "* Animal agriculture is responsible for 20-33% of all freshwater consumption globally" Why would that be problematic? There is no shortage of water where they raise animals. On the other hand there is a shortage of water in California where they grow crops on a massive scale. "* Mass cultivation of animals increases the chances of pandemic" That is a true, but the same can be said of large fields of monoculture crops where disease can quickly spread and destroy everything resulting in hunger. "* 41% of mainland USA is used for grazing livestock, yet meat only provides 18% of our calories; feeding the world on a vegan diet could reduce farmland use by 75% or more" Only if that 41% of mainland is suitable for plowing and you don't mind destroying other habitats for food production. Live stock can graze, humans cannot. Plus we don't need pesticides and insecticides on grasslands which are destroying our fresh water supplies. "* Going plant-based for two-thirds of meals could reduce food-related carbon emissions by 60% (the way we produce, distribute, and refrigerate food is a huge contributor of global emissions)" That is already true for vast majority of people on this planet. Think of the food pyramid. "* 70-75% of soybeans grown globally are for livestock, only 6% are used for human food products (meat eaters often try to claim that soy production is terrible for the environment; surprise, surprise, meat consumption is the main driver) " I don't know how real the numbers are, regardless it is not an ideal situation and we should strive towards less monulture.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

nitrogen 6y ago

meat only provides 18% of our calories But what percentage of our protein?

lkbm 6y ago
I'm not finding a lot of people answering this question from a cursory search, but I found one source saying 33% globally[0]. (This may include eggs and dairy.) Personally, I eat more protein than I did when I ate meat, though to be fair I still eat eggs. It's not hard at all to get adequate protein. [0] https://healthyeating.sfgate.com/worlds-main-sources-protein-7395.html https://healthyeating.sfgate.com/worlds-main-sources-protein...
kaycebasques 6y ago
I don't know but I think I can anticipate your concern. It's very viable to meet your protein needs on a vegan diet. That stuff about vegans not being able to get complete proteins is meat industry propaganda. Furthermore, the World Health Organization said that only 10 to 15% of daily calories need to come from protein. I believe I've also read that there's no proven benefit to all of the extra protein that Americans eat daily (I haven't looked into that claim in-depth, though).
- chordalkeyboard 6y ago
  I disagree. I was vegetarian for 2 years for ethical reasons. Animal-based protein is much easier to digest. And your average person perhaps doesn't need much protein...because your average person has no concept of exercise or fitness except as something other people do. Then your average person falls victim to metabolic syndrome and other western lifestyle related diseases. Once you set fitness goals your nutrition perspective changes. There are very few vegan/vegetarian athletes. I agree with the perspective on limiting animal suffering and I buy pastured meat. I agree with the vegan perspective on many things but I think its limited and fails to consider other aspects of the human condition. I oppose the widespread mockery and lack of respect that vegans get. The health issues associated with an ethical commitment to avoiding animal products makes it more worthy of respect.
  - kaycebasques 6y ago
    No disrespect but I see this "I'm an athlete, I need more protein" thing all the time. It's yet another meme that has spread that has the convenient side effect (or main effect) of shutting people off from considering the effects of their food choices. There are an abundance of plant-based protein supplements for hitting your nutrition targets. I don't know if you're talking about the broader community of people who self-identify as athletes but I'll restrict the discussion to professional athletes for the sake of clarity. Here's a few household-name professional vegan athletes: * Venus Williams * Lewis Hamilton * Colin Kaepernick * Kyrie Irving * Tia Blanco * Meagan Duhamel Veganism isn't very popular in general so I'm not sure if this "if professional athletes don't do it, then it must be bad" argument holds. I'm also not even sure if that claim is true. If we could compile a list of all professional athletes, find the vegan population, and then compare that to the general population, I would wager that veganism might have a higher percentage in the athlete population than the general population. Pure speculation, though, and obviously I'm biased. But I follow lots of vegan channels and they're very proud and vocal about vegan athletes and it's the kind of news that I think you won't be exposed to unless you're inside the vegan community. In other words we should both acknowledge that there's a lot of selection bias / echo chamber at play here and I don't think either of us can definitively say whether veganism is more popular or less popular among professional athletes.
bananabreakfast 6y ago
Americans consume protein like its the only nutrient that matters and that not getting the maximum amount possible will make you lose all of your muscle and become emaciated. Frankly, this is certainly helped by general marketing campaigns from the meat and dairy industry where they basically claim that protein makes you stronger. The truth is pretty far from that and most people with a regular omnivore diet get enough protein just through the plants they eat without even considering the meat. The human body burns protein and most excess protein just ends up getting burned along with carbs and fat. So while animals may take up a large percentage of protein intake, our irrationally high collective protein intake is hardly a good reason to chose meat over plants. Eating meat is really all about calorie density.

gautamdivgi 6y ago

Yours is probably the first comment I've seen that takes a rather logical approach. I'm an omnivore but always buy everything pasture raised and mostly local. Where not local, I order from farms listed on eatwild.com. The obvious hit is cost, but that means I eat less of it. Eventually, humanity will have to accept that going vegan is the only sustainable method.

jl6 6y ago
Yep, plant based diets aren’t a dogmatic all-or-nothing thing. You can still get a good portion of the benefits (health, ethical, and environmental) by cutting down on animal products even if you don’t cut them out completely. No need to let perfect be the enemy of good.

sparrc 6y ago

Great list, I have another to add about ocean plastic :) * most plastic in the ocean is made up of abandoned fishing gear (see https://www.nationalgeographic.com/news/2018/03/great-pacific-garbage-patch-plastics-environment/ https://www.nationalgeographic.com/news/2018/03/great-pacifi...)

finnh 6y ago

These are all reasons why I consider going vegetarian. I'd still eat honey, though, so not vegan.

thelastwave 6y ago

How does the way we distribute meat create that much more carbon emission than distributing a comparable amount of plant based food?

cies 6y ago
Cooled storage/transport, waste (a lot of meat is wasted due to limited shelf life and the following regulations), distribution of feed, water usage, methane (like 4x worse than CO2 i believe), more plastic used in packaging.

belorn 6y ago

Animal agriculture has its list of problem but so does crop agriculture. There are no free lunches here. One can argue about which problems are more harmful than the other, and its pretty clear that there exist some horrible practices in Animal agriculture. However when faced with a list of only the harms from the animal agriculture, I feel forced to mention a bit more facts about the whole picture. For example, freshwater consumption is important in regions which lacks freshwater. Crop agriculture is however the most common source for water pollution, occurs in all regions, and is not only a major environmental problem but also harms the supply of fresh water even if its not responsible for the primary consumption. Fertilizers and pesticides being the main culprits here. Sadly there is very little food in stores that do not have a direct link to fertilizers and pesticides except for wild fish, shellfish and seaweed. In quite a few times I have seen studies showing that the lowest carbon emission in any food group would be either shellfish, seaweed, or insects. No fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides, minimal land usage and sustainable. Vegan would exclude two of those, and seaweed is pretty rare in non-asian diets. In general I try to look for marks of sustainability when buying food. Small producers, non-factory farm operations, local, crops that are in season, and so on. The article here focus on the issue of sex determining the eggs, but my primary priority is the area that the hen has. In EU you can have 16 hens located in a small box the size of 0.2m². That is plain cruelty and so I choose eggs under the mark that require 4m², a requirement for outside area, always access to natural lighting, and given crops grown without chemical fertilizers, pesticides or herbicides. Is it perfect? No. Not using fertilizers, pesticides, and herbicides is still being debated and researched if they are better for the environment or worse since land usage increases from it, but since I regularly dive in the Baltic sea I am constantly reminded by the harm done already by the revolution of chemical fertilizers produced primarily by natural gas.

kaycebasques 6y ago
> In quite a few times I have seen studies showing that the lowest carbon emission in any food group would be either shellfish, seaweed, or insects… Vegan would exclude two of those… There's a whole strand of veganism called bivalveganism which supports the usual vegan diet + eating bi-valve creatures like mussles precisely because their cultivation seems to have a lot of positive environmental benefits (or at least, it's one of the least harmful, as you mentioned) and because they seem to rank pretty low in terms of sentience / capacity-to-feel-pain. > Crop agriculture is however the most common source for water pollution Again I think the most compelling rebuttal is the fact that dairy/meat is the primary driver of crop agriculture today. We can feed the world on literally a fraction of the crop agriculture that we currently do. The vast majority of that crop agriculture goes towards feeding the animals we use for dairy or meat. So in terms of thinking about the whole picture, as you mention, any problems with crop agriculture are exacerbated by meat/dairy reliance.

kelnos 6y ago

Thank you for these references; it's great to see some logical arguments here rather than knee-jerk responses. But I do question how much of some the things you reference are actually problems. We have plenty of fresh water. Distribution is often our problem when it comes to getting that water to humans everywhere, but stopping livestock production will not fix that. Does it really matter how much of the USA is used for livestock grazing? Are we missing out on using that land for other things that are important to us? I have no opinion on soybean production, but, again, does it matter that the lion's share of soybean production goes toward feeding livestock? And if soybean cultivation really is that bad for the environment, are there other things we could be feeding livestock that don't have such bad effects? The carbon emissions suck, but are there ways to reduce these through better process? I don't think any of these problems are unsolvable, but likely they're expensive, and there's no political will to tax the bad behavior to the point that it becomes financially better to do the right thing. Getting around that is likely easier than getting a significant chunk of the world to go vegan. And that's the issue I have with most logical arguments around veganism. Meat production and consumption has a lot of problems, certainly, but vegans seem to believe that the only way to fix those problems is to throw the baby out with the bathwater, when there are almost certainly solutions or at least mitigations to those problems. I get that as an individual, you aren't going to fix those problems, so personally going vegan is a way for people to avoid being a part of the problem. That is a satisfying route for some people, but not for everyone.

distances 6y ago
Freed agricultural land can and should be returned to wild. Most of farmland that was freed in EU after discontinuing unproductive farming is now forested. Sorry I don't have a link, forgot where I read about this. Cattle raising and soy production (for animal feed) are major contributors to the continued loss of Amazon.

curveaway 6y ago

For an alternative perspective that refutes a bit of this, maybe meat is actually the more environmentally healthy and human healthy way of going about things? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MxW-JKLeu1k https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MxW-JKLeu1k Blog version w/ reference links: https://www.sapien.org/blog/why-we-should-be-eating-more-meat-not-less https://www.sapien.org/blog/why-we-should-be-eating-more-mea...

nec4b 6y ago

"* Dr. Kim Williams, former president of the American College of Cardiology, said "there are two kinds of cardiologists, vegans, and those who haven't read the data"" An appeal to authority. I'm mean surgeon general once called for not wearing masks until he changed his mind completely. "* Animal agriculture is responsible for 20-33% of all freshwater consumption globally" Why would that be problematic? There is no shortage of water where they raise animals. On the other hand there is a shortage of water in California where they grow crops on a massive scale. "* Mass cultivation of animals increases the chances of pandemic" That is a true, but the same can be said of large fields of monoculture crops where disease can quickly spread and destroy everything resulting in hunger. "* 41% of mainland USA is used for grazing livestock, yet meat only provides 18% of our calories; feeding the world on a vegan diet could reduce farmland use by 75% or more" Only if that 41% of mainland is suitable for plowing and you don't mind destroying other habitats for food production. Live stock can graze, humans cannot. Plus we don't need pesticides and insecticides on grasslands which are destroying our fresh water supplies. "* Going plant-based for two-thirds of meals could reduce food-related carbon emissions by 60% (the way we produce, distribute, and refrigerate food is a huge contributor of global emissions)" That is already true for vast majority of people on this planet. Think of the food pyramid. "* 70-75% of soybeans grown globally are for livestock, only 6% are used for human food products (meat eaters often try to claim that soy production is terrible for the environment; surprise, surprise, meat consumption is the main driver) " I don't know how real the numbers are, regardless it is not an ideal situation and we should strive towards less monulture.