20
votes
Is eating vegan really the best diet for the planet? I tried it for a month.
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- Title
- I went vegan for a month. Here's what I learnt
- Authors
- Nick Kilvert
- Published
- Nov 16 2018
- Word count
- 1852 words
Really great read. As someone who started to weight lifts for fun in the last four years, I have been keeping track of my diet in a much more precise way and it's made me re-examine if I should go back to being a vegetarian, or even go full bore in veganism. This is partially because I am a bit of a leftie, so I run into plenty of folks that do these diets for environmental and/or animal rights reasons. So, between my own regimented diet and talking with others, it's on my mind.
While I knew some of this stuff, the thing about the processed meats, wine, beer, etc being more ecologically demanding than poultry really blew my mind. I've been a teetotaler my entire life and never really thought about the environmental impact of it. This really doesn't take animal rights into account, something I feel like my son's generation is going to judge mine harshly for. But the environmental concerns of diet are just so much more complicated than anyone seems to think.
Thanks for sharing.
I've taken a harsh look at the environmental impact of some of the most ancillary foods I eat. Nuts and nut butters take so much water and land to produce. Coffee is pretty bad too, although shade grown coffee is starting to become the norm. I know some teas are pretty bad, and beer and wine take a lot of land and energy to grow and produce.
Having worked in the craft beer industry for years I can say that making beer is horrible for the environment. So much chemical byproduct and waste that just gets dumped down the drain.
It's great that the article considers supply chains and processing as parts of the energy/CO2 budget for any given foodstuff.
I also had no idea, for instance, that Australian pest species like camels and kangaroos, are often slaughtered and left to rot. Chickens and goats do an excellent job of turning forage that's useless for agriculture into protein.
I come from a place where human interference in natural predation has left starving deer to devastate the local ecosystems, and would have no problems whatever with culling that's both more humane, and sustainable.
I don't want to offer these things as excuses to do nothing about unsustainable practices and inhumane farming methods, though.
I like the taste of a great many foods which aren't efficiently, humanely, and sustainably produced, or even particularly heathy. [And I can make a delicious, spectacularly calorie-laden unsustainable vegan pizza just as easily as I can make a totally sustainable, locally-sourced egg frittata or catfish stir-fry.]
The best strategy is to treat many of these foods - beef, coffee, nuts, chocolate and so on, as if they're precious delicacies, to be consumed as rare treats instead of daily expectations. If my ancestors used a meat-containing dish as a once-weekly Sabbath meal, then I can certainly survive the same.
You'll see the collapse of Western civilization before this happens. Nuts, sure. Chocolate, doable. Beef, yeah, eventually. But coffee?
Very interesting, takes a very neutral view on the topic.
The main issue aren't the options or choice, it's the price and flavor. Animal based products just taste so good. This is a problem that won't be solved by informing people. It's somewhat undeniable that vegetable crops are generally better than animal crops in terms of their ecological impact, and even the fiercest deniers have to admit that the way we treat animals is very cruel. Even though most people know that vegetarian and vegan diets are generally better for the planet and more moral, they choose to eat meat.
There are many exciting products in the pipeline currently that could change all of this. I've had the Beyond Burger and it's not terrible, even though it doesn't quite reach the flavor of beef. It's about twice the price of ground beef. If they can lower that price, and it seems like they are have the momentum to make it happen, then it could sit on the shelf next to normal beef and most people wouldn't notice the difference.
I wonder what's the additional ecological impact from having 0.5L of milk a day in addition to plants. Other animal products aren't regular in my diet but milk is such a core product, without it many meals would take way longer to swallow, be less tasty, provide less protein and calcium, or the replacements would take longer to shop and also much more money. I hope currently living people still won't be considered morons for buying milk for the next few decades.
The studies he mentions compare tomatoes or salad to some kind of meat, that's not a fair comparison, tomato's are not acting as the substitute to chiken or bacon. Nothing stops you form eating bacon and tomatoes at the same time. It's much more relevant to compare the meats to beans, lentils or soy.
As another point if your making the switch to vegan just for environments reasons, you will shury be concious of eating with the season, avoiding summer crops in the midde of winter.