If everyone were vegan, only a quarter of current farmland would be needed | Hacker News Reader

If everyone were vegan, only a quarter of current farmland would be needed

economist.com

81 pointsSwizec142 comments

A magazine called The Economist should understand why we use almost all of our arable land for farming. It's because that's the cheapest way to do it.

We could grow all of our food in greenhouses and return 99.9% of our farmland to nature. We don't do that because that would be more expensive and cheaper alternatives make growing wheat & corn in greenhouses highly unprofitable.

Conversely, if suddenly 75% of the arable land came onto the market, it would drive the price of land down dramatically, making it profitable to farm it less intensively (aka more cheaply). In other words, we'd still farm about the same amount of land, but we'd use less fertilizer and herbicide and the price of food would go down. Those are awesome results, but land usage would not be significantly different.

If our government subsidizes investment in greenhouse, would that be sustainable?

I don’t think so. Subsidies are good when they get a market over a small initial cost. They pull you out of a local minimum. Greenhouses will never be cheaper than using the Earth as well always have.

> Greenhouses will never be cheaper than using the Earth as well always have.

This needs to be tested. There are a lot of expenses in bare field farming including transportation, pest control, low yield from weather, etc.

Obviously, greenhouse makes sense, but only for relatively high value crops.

My question was merely about the government not going bankrupt through large scale subsidization. But maybe I should consider research & development too.

I wonder if there are other things we'd do with land if the price of land came down

Maybe we'd see more communes (or charter cities)? I know for a fact there are people constantly looking for places to buy and if things were cheap enough they'd jump on it.

There are still swaths of cheap land, even in California. They also sometimes have water issues and often have a rather disagreeable climate to many. Plus meth and illegal marijuana grow ops, the latter of which are so endemic and use so much water that local authorities have just removed fire hydrants from entire areas.

Available land is not the limiting factor on new cities or communes. Look at the chart in the article and compare the amount of land used for urban development.

Starting a new city or commune is the same as starting a new social media platform, why should I move from my current platform/city to your new one? How do you get your first 1000 subscribers/residents? What do you offer that other places don't already have 10x of? I'm not going to move to your commune/app unless all of my friends and family do too. etc.

This gets at a question in my mind about what it'd be like if we were all rich enough to be able to afford that - growing all of our food in greenhouses or something like that.

What's the point? Even if we were richer why would we waste resources by growing staple crops in greenhouses? It's tough to drive a big tractor or combine harvester through a greenhouse.

Yields aren’t going to suddenly drop 75% simply because land is cheaper and less inputs are used.

On my father-in-law's land a normal wheat crop is 50 bu/acre and the neighboring organic farm averages about 10.

Even more relevantly, it wasn't long ago that 25 bu/acre was a good crop. But the price of wheat and the price of land have gone up a lot in the last 25 years, so farmers have responded by using a lot more inputs.

You definitely know more about wheat farming than I do so I’ll defer to you on that.

However, the graphic shows at that the principle reduction would be in rangeland, not crop land. Is any of that land suitable for growing wheat if it’s not longer being used for cattle?

A good chunk of rangeland is quite arable, but in traditional cattle country most of it is marginal.

If you're willing to destroy the marginal land and willing to accept a high risk of crop failure, then most if it can grow wheat. In other words, sort of but not really.

It should be noted, as displayed in the graphic, that the difference is primarily due to a reduction in pasture lands, not crop land, and those two are not fungible.

Still a laudable achievement.

Pasture soil is very often of such low quality (relative to farm soil - nutrients, grade, drainage) that removing cattle from those soils would not open them up to farming.

But how much of the cows actually graze on open fields? Or much of their food doesn't come from plants like soy which is pretty edible for humans too...

Most cows grow up on pasture land before being moved to feed lots for bulking up before slaughter. My sense is that the US could sustain about half of its current beef production just with pasture grazing.

I think this depends on the area.

Back home in Slovenia, you see cows grazing all summer up in the alps where no sane person would ever farm. I wouldn’t even call it “agricultural land”. Cows roam free on the mountains among hikers and tourists.

Here in California, any rolling grassy hill you see has cows on it year round. Cows everywhere. Doesn’t look like anyone’s interested in building housing on that land and you rarely see any crop fields in those areas. Whether that’s because letting cows graze is cheaper or the land is unsuitable for crops, I don’t know.

But there are also feedlots where cows are “finished” before slaughter. How much grain and soy they eat there to be fattened up … probably a lot. I’ve heard of feedlots that stretch horizon to horizon in the midwest

In the United States, in most states, agricultural usage, such as grazing cattle, is the basis for an agricultural exemption on property tax. Here in Florida, it's about 90%.

Much of the land being used is crop land to make animal feed, certainly not most but a considerable amount is. This is also assuming that the only goal is getting more farmland, when it would also be useful for things like conservation efforts.

The same land is used to make human food. We get the grains, they get the hay.

Still, the way energy is circulating in the food chain, you need a lot more land and water for raising X calories of cattle than for the same calories of plants.

Not to mention transportation, anti-biotics, cold chain management, packaging, transmissible diseases, waste management, etc. are all a much higher concern for animal based food. In fact, even pesticides are worse on cattle, because any non food product tends to concentrate in the animal after a life of consuming it.

Meat is a luxury, like plane transportation.

Cattle mostly eat what humans can’t digest — grasses, not grains. That energy would go to “waste” otherwise. And the water consumption stats often include rain water (“green water”).

Cattle do eat grains as a supplement to grazing, a drought ration, or in lot feeding.

And since lands with grass is limited by space, and seasonality, we also do grow a lot of food for them.

E.G: UK stats for 2015/16 of soy imports (3.1 million tonnes) break down:

    - 1.1 million tonnes for livestock
    - 1.42 million tones for human food
    - 0.58 for non-foo products

That 35% of the imported soy, just for the livestock food.

I don't know why you base your statement on the assumption that the industrial highly concentrated and unhealthy (for the animals definitely) style is the basis such a discussion should be based on. You lower your bar for your side of arguments substantially by pretending the line is there.

You even do it without the shadow of a hint that the base you use is entirely artificial and unnatural. No, animals should indeed not be raised like that. But I find such arguments dishonest at best.

I have yet to find a discussion where any significant (or really any, but let's assume difficult people exist everywhere) number of meat eating people argue that the current state of how animals are raised in industrial-style facilities using what you mention is how it should be.

If they let cows roam free - like what indeed happens in plenty of places in the world - then they use free energy stored in grass. Which is the much better food for them anyway.

It's almost like a lot of people completely forgot that North America once had tens of millions of big grass feeding animals roam what now is the US (https://medium.com/@davbunnell/once-there-were-50-to-100-mil...). I'm not saying that could happen again at that scale, but it is always (and I'm not exaggerating by using that word) missing from the argument of the "anti meat" side, whose arguments read as if having a lot of grazing animals is something unnatural and can only occur because we raise them artificially and that getting rid of them is necessary to help the climate. If that simplistic argument were true Buffalo Bill did something for the environment by killing the huge herds - which I don't is not what people mean.

I agree, but you won't get 10% of our current meat production with free range meat.

In fact, we are cutting forest to meet demands for lands to grow cattle because it's still not enough.

If suddenly all meat would come from free range animal, the debate would be different, and I would use different arguments.

But I would actually be very pleased if we already just did that.

It's more realistic than expecting everyone to decide my diet is for them too, and it would already do a lot of good.

Less meat and/or more expensive meat is an entirely different argument than the one made. If the people posting against meat consumption, including the one I responded to, would raise that message I would have no reason to argue. But it is not the argument made. The one made pretty much always is an extremist one that just like this one above leaves out a lot and makes its argument based on extreme assumptions of a system nobody wants to defend (well, maybe those making money in it).

I myself could no longer eat even a modest size steak, even top quality. I eat mostly plants, and some meat. So cutting back on meat substantially is certainly something I can get behind. But the extreme messages I have to read make it hard.

> and it would already do a lot of good.

I think your kind of arguments don't do any good for anyone. It's just polarization but not based on any facts, but based on the tone. If you did base it on facts and reason it would be so much better. Maybe the 24/7 news sites prefer such texts, it sure creates a lot of "engagement" and clicks, but that hardly translates to the assumption that the outcome of such practices will be anything good.

Argue against the truly insane industrial "meat production" practices and we may actually get somewhere. Crates a lot less clicks and discussion because it's not nearly (or atz all) controversial though.

> In fact, we are cutting forest to meet demands for lands to grow cattle because it's still not enough.

That's not true. "We" are not cutting down forests. It's the Americans who do. It's Americans, both South and North Americans, who consume almost double the amount of beef as in any other place in the world:

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/per-capita-meat-type?coun...

(Annual beef consumption per capita: Argentina - 42kg, US - 37kg, Brazil - 37kg. Next largest amount: Portugal - 18kg).

In truth, the most common meat produced and consumed the world over is chicken and pork:

https://ourworldindata.org/meat-production#meat-production-b...

(million tonnes of meat by livestock type, 2018: poultry - 127.31, pigmeat - 120.88, beef and buffalo - 71.61)

It's the Americans who cut down forest and rainforest to plant soy and corn to feed (or at least "finish") their cows. The rest of the world can do fine without the extravagant, inhumane and destructive factory farming of cows. We already do.

I think it's important to think of us as a specie. We share the responsibility of this, since we consume the meat that drives this, and maintain an economic system that gives the incentive such behavior.

> Still, the way energy is circulating in the food chain, you need a lot more land and water for raising X calories of cattle than for the same calories of plants.

We need more than calories from food. As is well known, some micronutrients that we need cannot be obtained from plants alone and so a plant-based diet must be supplemented either with fish, eggs, meat or dairy, or with artificial supplements.

Which means a) meat, or at least animal food products, is not a luxury, rather it's a necessity and b) for everyone on the entire Earth to go vegan we must make sure that everyone on Earth can take at the very least B12 supplements, and probably supplements for other nutrients also.

I have not seen any study of the costs of supplementing everyone at a planetary level with B12 and whatever other micronutrients are missing from a vegan diet.

I'm not vegan, so I never had a trouble with b12. As a vegetarian though, I do find that the omega 3/6 balance is harder to get right than when I ate meat.

On the other hand, most meat eaters I know have heavy deficient in many key nutrients because the average western diet is terrible, meat or not.

All in all, I think we have to put it in the context of trying to be vegetarian in a society that is optimized for meat eaters. It we go more plant base, I think there are plenty of solutions that will suddenly become more common, such as yeast, algae, etc.

Currently, it's logistically less convenient, and often way less tasty than just eat cheese or eggs for me. But that's because we made it that way:

- it's available everywhere

- the economy is based on it

- we are used to the taste, and our flora has adapted to it

It doesn't mean it can't go fine if we organize for it.

> On the other hand, most meat eaters I know have heavy deficient in many key nutrients because the average western diet is terrible, meat or not.

"Key nutrients"? And "heavy" deficiencies? Are you sure? This is the first time I hear this. Can you explain? Which key nutrients are those? What kind of diets "most meat eaters" you know have that causes deficiency in those key nutrients?

Thank you in advance for the reply and sorry for sounding incrdulous, but really that's the first time I hear that.

My doctor told me years ago magnesium is one of the most common deficiency, no matter the diet. The second would be d vitamin, but that's linked to sun exposure, not diet.

Right, so you say that deficiencies in magnesium and vitamin D can happen regardless of diet, if I understand correctly.

So which are the key nutrients that you say most meat eaters you know are heavily deficient in because of their diet?

I said the average western diet. Veggie or not. I did not imply causation between meet consumption and deficiencies, but rather pointed out than eating meat didn't save people from them.

So you're saying that eating meat doesn't stop people from being deficient in "key nutrients"? I understand that.

What I don't understand is that you said that "most meat eaters I know have heavy deficient in many key nutrients". If that's true then most of the meat eaters you know should be severely sick, disabled, in hospitals, etc. Is that the case, or were you maybe exaggerating? I'm trying to understand what you're trying to say.

>If everyone were vegan, only a quarter of current farmland would be needed.

Yeah. We would just let it return to nature and become a (small) carbon sink instead of a methane source.

Resident vegan here. Would love if everyone gave it a shot, it substantially improved my cholesterol and aligns with my ethics.

This site is a fun one (not affiliated) if you have one of the more common questions: https://yourveganfallacyis.com/en

I did give it a shot when I was living with vegan roommates... turns out my health declines noticeably when I try. I do hope vegans and people like myself can find common cause around shifting away from factory farming of all types rather than trying to solve the problem by shifting diets alone.

Not all vegan diets are alike. What yours like, out of curiousity?

I don't remember the particulars any more, I know I was eating more peanut and nutritional yeast than before but I couldn't give you a detailed breakdown of my diet at the time.

I hate to admit it but this is the exact reason I stopped being vegan too. I'd just start feeling weirdly faint like I was about to pass out randomly. You know when you're in an elevator and there's a slight gravity shift when it stops at a floor? It was like that every now and then

Fully loaded up on the multivitamins and as far as I knew I was getting in everything I needed to get in food wise. I do realise that it's on me to make sure that I'm actually eating the right food to not die, it's not something for other vegans to have to fix for me, but I just couldn't figure it out quickly enough myself and had no resources to reference

I'm down to about ~10% meat but I'm just going to accept that I'm sitting in the moral wrong on this until the nutritional alternatives ramp up in options and down in price

e: I really should note that I'm allergic to most types of beans, which took out a fair chunk of the vegan diet on its own. I couldn't see anything that only beans provided when I tried to fix it though. Gave it a good 6 months overall but not for me (yet?)

RE: your edit.

It’s going to be very difficult to sustain a vegan diet without having a substantial level of bean consumption, due to the poor quality of protein you’d be getting from the rest of your diet. Another possible issue could have been iron. You noted taking a multivitamin, but mineral consumption would just as likely been your main issue.

> I hate to admit it but this is the exact reason I stopped being vegan too. I'd just start feeling weirdly faint like I was about to pass out randomly. You know when you're in an elevator and there's a slight gravity shift when it stops at a floor? It was like that every now and then

I just posted my own anecdote about this before I saw your comment, but just to reiterate, my ex encountered the exact same symptoms while on a vegan diet.

My wife and I have been eating vegan food during weekdays and then non-vegan during the weekends. I've found that for me that has been the best balance. The reason we started was for health reasons: All things equal, the normal amount of vegetables that we ate before was pretty small. We got a couple of easy vegan cookbooks and it has been quite good.

Another advantage for us is that, as a nutritionist friend told me, sometimes people eating Vegan find it difficult to consume their required daily calories. So, it translates in to having to eat "a lot" of vegan food, to get into the 1600 daily calorie intake for me. I've lost several Kilos since we started around 4 months ago.

My total daily energy expenditure averages around 2900 kcal. It's hard to imagine how I could eat that much on a vegan diet without making myself sick.

Tons of info and bodybuilders in here https://reddit.com/r/VeganFitness/best

I wish that was the case for me! I gained weight by going vegan, all those cashews and coconut milk add up. I’m definitely an outlier though.

I'm not an expert but that sounds like a lack of calories to me. Vegan food can be very low in calories and you might have to eat more volume.

I'm lacoto-ovo vegetarian and I have to take specifically an iron supplement to keep my levels up. Multivitamins weren't enough. I also have a genetic condition that interferes with iron absorption, so YMMV.

>I'm down to about ~10% meat but I'm just going to accept that I'm sitting in the moral wrong on this until the nutritional alternatives ramp up in options and down in price

Don't sweat it too much, perfect is the enemy of good; everyone can only do their best. I'd ideally be vegan, and I was one for about a year, but right now lacoto-ovo is what works for me... (it's been 20 years since I ate meat.)

My ex was vegan (most of the time; she would switch back and forth between vegan and vegetarian often) and she would go through times when she would experience extreme fatigue, nausea, faintness, etc.

Eventually I noticed this coincided in particular with the times she would be full vegan for a week or two at a time (though it still happened less frequently otherwise).

I did some research and discovered there are several key vitamins / minerals that you get from meat and dairy very easily but is almost (or totally?) impossible to get without supplementation if you’re vegan. So I bought her a multivitamin and the symptoms subsided substantially, though not ever completely.

Just going on gut instinct here but I personally refuse to undergo a diet that without external supplementation does not properly nourish the body with everything it needs. If our ancestors were vegan, I’m not sure we’d all be here today - and if we were I’m not sure we’d like the state we were in, especially if other societies moved away from the vegan diet.

(I’ve noticed most vegans tend to be… not very robust, shall we say. I think the world notices this too fortunately, which is why vegan will remain a fringe diet.)

You realized that most of the vitamins we get from a meat-based diet are in the food because we feed the multivitamins to the animals? It is just an unnecessary layer of indirection added.

It turns out that people who earn a living with producing meat are just a lot better to making sure their livestock gets everything they need (nutrition wise) than people who just eat stuff when they are hungry. If some professionals would create proper vegan diets and force feed it to us you can be sure there would be no deficits.

> You realized that most of the vitamins we get from a meat-based diet are in the food because we feed the multivitamins to the animals? It is just an unnecessary layer of indirection added.

How does that work, I wonder? Did ancient humans first start feeding their domestic animals multivitamins because they realised there weren't enough in meat? Do modern sub-saharan pastoral nomads feed their domestic animals multivitamins to avoid deficits?

Or is yours a statement that only applies to a restricted geographical locality and practice of meat production? What do you think?

I am of course talking about the meat you and I eat. Ancient cultures did have different bodies, different food source access, higher quality food probably, or, you know, most probably not the healthiest bodies of all time. After all they died at like 30 years old.

The _average_ life expectancy was 30 but that's because loads of children died at a young age. If you made it past your teens your life expectancy was that way higher.

> I am of course talking about the meat you and I eat.

Are you? How do you know what meat I eat? For example, I don't live in the US and I don't eat beef (I find it tasteless and I prefer mutton which is also traditional to my local cuisine). As far as I can tell, the animals I eat aren't given multivitamins and I don't even understand why that would be necessary.

I think you're generalising from your experience with meat in your country to the rest of the world without really being very well aware of what goes on in the rest of the world: how people eat and how they raise their animals. Perhaps that's something to think about before talking of what "we" do.

There is a lot of planet Earth outside the place you live, you know?

My understanding is that land used for livestock is often not suitable for crops, water is mostly rainwater, and animals are fed the grain deemed not suitable for human consumption?

I think things like nut processing use much more resources overall than milk from a cow

Not at all. While animals can be pastured, most of the livestock in developed countries is reared in grain-fed CAFOs. These are, in most cases, grain that is suitable for human consumption or could be made so. Moreover, almond milk is still ecologically preferable to cows milk.

> almond milk

Life is already hard enough for people with nut allergies (which is apparently more common than I thought), so let's just make that oat milk and call it a day. A lot better for the environment too :)

Variety is good. People can also be allergic to oat.

https://www.healthline.com/health/oat-allergy

And oat milk preferable to almond milk.

This isn’t correct, all cows are raised on pasture, the only distinction is whether they are finished on pasture or in CAFOs.

"most of the livestock in developed countries is reared in grain-fed CAFOs"

That simply isn't true. It is very, very common in the US. I've not seen a trace of it in Norway: Farmers here seem a bit appalled. From what I understand, at least some aspects of this sort of farming have been outlawed in much of Europe, and Europe is full of so-called "developed countries".

> most of the livestock in developed countries is reared in grain-fed CAFOs.

In France the majority of what cows eat is grass, between 56% to 80%.

https://www.alsace-lait.com/de-quoi-est-constituee-lalimenta...

https://www.la-viande.fr/animal-elevage/boeuf/alimentation-b...

The 'plants, eggs, fish' diet is almost the same impact as vegan, and probably much more acceptable to people.

IMHO, dairy will soon be man-made, we'll produce milk in factories with yeast, and fish will be indoor-farmed, so we just need to stop eating beef, pork, lamb.

Look up the requirements for produce standardization before we pitchfork about the needs of farming. If we could get more "ugly" food cheaply to stores than we could easily feed the ENTIRE WORLD with our current farming infrastructure.

Isn’t “ugly” produce just canned or used in manufactured foods like jarred sauces or jams? If that’s the case then it’s already on store shelves.

Sometimes. Other times, it just goes to waste in the fields and even if they give it away, no one seems to want to pay for hauling it away.

Well that’s unfortunate. Not even used as compost? That doesn’t seem very efficient.

"Ugly" produce out in a field needs to be picked, transported, and stored. Even if it's going to end up as compost it costs money to get it from the field to where it'll be composted. If it's just left in place it'll get composted when the field is turned over.

In the meantime it'll feed wild animals that will themselves feed other wild animals. It's not like it's a total waste, it just doesn't make it to store shelves. Note that produce might be "ugly" because of actual problems with that piece of produce. Unless you can examine every single piece to differentiate between a bruise, rot, or vermin it's probably best just to leave it in the field.

Is it even fair to characterize it as waste at all at that point? If it’s presently not economical to do anything else with it other than leave it in place, that doesn’t seem the worst given that it’ll break down into the soil and/or feed into the wild food chain.

Or is food that doesn’t go into feeding people somehow just considered “wasted” under industry nomenclature?

I'm much closer to "let's burn down capitalism" than "the market knows best", but I don't get food waste concerns. There's waste because it's very cheap. There'd be less waste if it were more expensive—but then poor people would suffer (more). That goes for waste in the field, waste in the kitchen, waste in the supply chain and at grocery stores, all of it. Most people don't save veggie scraps or chicken bones to make broth or stock or whatever, unless they really value the improved flavor over store-bought, because it's a really expensive (time-cost) and inconvenient (goes bad faster than store-bought stuff in a factory-sealed container) way to get broth, to pick one example. Same goes for waste at restaurants. A few good apples rot on the ground because you'd lose money saving them, because apples are so cheap. You want less waste, raise prices. Turns out almost no one wants less waste that bad.

> Or is food that doesn’t go into feeding people somehow just considered “wasted” under industry nomenclature?

I don't know if that's industry nomenclature but more "I want to complain about a topic without thinking about the economics" nomenclature.

Some people love to point out "waste" and then point out hungry people and imply that the "waste" could magically feed hungry people. All of the important details are glossed over or ignored.

The biggest is that actual waste does not pay. Farmers aren't going to throw away any portion of a crop if they can help it. Someone will usually buy all but the worst bits of produce. If it doesn't end up in the produce aisle it'll end up in prepared food of some type.

We can already feed the world with our current farming infrastructure. You glossed over the “getting the food to stores” which is the hard part. Fresh produce, meat and dairy is expensive to transport at the speeds and temperatures required to keep it fresh. So you get food deserts in areas where the baseline transport cost isn’t profitable. This is also why most of the food in grocery stores are canned goods, simple grains, cured meats and cheeses, or frozen. Every foodstuff manufacturer that can avoid spoilage cuts down on the bulk of their cost.

Unless saucyfox edited you're saying the same thing:

> If we could get more "ugly" food cheaply to stores than we could easily feed the ENTIRE WORLD with our current farming infrastructure.

compared to:

> We can already feed the world with our current farming infrastructure. Y̶o̶u̶ ̶g̶l̶o̶s̶s̶e̶d̶ ̶o̶v̶e̶r̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶ “getting the food to stores” which is the hard part.

I've found being vegan too difficult with IBS. Fruits and vegetable and grains are what cause symptoms, so I quite literally need to eat meat (and the other things in small quantities)

What if only resource-intensive livestock was phased out? Say, chicken and pork(?) was still eaten. One also wonders why there’s no name for a diet that permits the eating of fowl, similar to pescatarianism.

On the other hand, what happens to population nutrition if cow’s milk was eliminated from the food supply?

> On the other hand, what happens to population nutrition if cow’s milk was eliminated from the food supply?

It vastly improves as a result of lowered cholesterol, fat and hormone consumption.

Cholesterol consumed as next to no correlation with cholesterol in the blood, and fat isn't as bad for you as nutrition science used to believe.

Show me a source for this claim.

I would miss a lot my cheese. But I would hope some tasty vegan alternatives are in development, are they?

Cashew cheese is really really good. I’m vegetarian but not vegan and it’s still my goto mac and cheese casserole, nacho cheese, “chicken” dip, and queso base.

The downside is that you need a powerful blender to make it yourself since it’s effectively a flavored nut butter.

I have yet to find a vegan/vegetarian "cheese" that even resembles actual cheese. I'm not a cheese expert but even my unrefined pallet can tell the difference between "cheese" and cheese. It is ridiculous how bad some of that shit tastes.

I don't think "cheese" will get anywhere close to cheese until it's made from vat/lab grown milk. Then it'll just be real cheese just not coming from animals.

Dairy and eggs are what I'd struggle with if I tried to go vegan. I'd barely even notice meat missing—I love mushrooms, veggies, legumes, and tofu as the centerpieces of meals. Dairy and eggs are the part where I'd have to start making major modifications to how I cook and the sorts of things I can eat (or accept worse versions of the same thing). Eggs especially are hard to replace in a kitchen-chemistry sense, plus cheap, plus nutritionally valuable, plus store pretty well.

I mentioned dairy specifically because people tend to focus on the meat-avoiding aspect of veganism, but I don't think many think about the implications of the lack of milk and eggs for everything from being calcium and meatless protein sources, to its use in baking.

Though I also wonder if cattle was no longer used as a meat source, but exclusively for milk, that might reduce the amount of resources required.

>One also wonders why there’s no name for a diet that permits the eating of fowl, similar to pescatarianism.

There is, pollotarianism. Flexitarian might also apply, depending on the individual's diet.

Ah, thanks. I wonder why it’s not more widespread. Is there also a diet that permits white meat over red meat?

I wasn't able to read most of the article; is there a shortage of farmland that necessitates needing to consider our diets?

Maybe not yet, but with aquifers drying out, soil eroding, phosphate production slowing, increasing fuel prices, temperatures trending up, pollinators dying off, drought, blight, infestations- it's hard to imagine agriculture not being affected by at least one of those things in coming decades.

Or, we could return some of this farmland back to it's natural state, plant trees and build out our carbon sync capabilities.

I have chronic GI distress. One of the things that upsets it is vegetables. I can eat them if they have been cooked down enough, but I have a really hard time digesting them if they are in smoothies, salads, as vegetable spread etc. Because of this I'm careful about how I ingest them. I wish this wasn't the case

No need to go into the debate about veganism. 90% of Canada is unused and owned by the queen. Lets say we take even 10% more. The queen can keep 80%. That 10% is now going to be a giant vertical factory farm, fully automated. Our robot farmers produce more food than the earth can consume. World hunger ends and everyone who used to farm and such can go do something else. Perhaps those people learn to produce meats artificially. That gets automated and we're good. Every human on earth eats as much as they please and can go work on more important issues.

Right, 100 companies responsible for 70% of global emissions and yet we fight farms and plastic straws and farting animals.

According to the EPA [0], Agriculture, forestry, and other land uses make up 24% of global emissions, second only to electricity and heat production, suggesting trying to reduce emissions is going to take more than a single approach.

[0] https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/global-greenhouse-gas-emiss...

Globally yes. If you look at the United States it is 10%, of which less than half is animal related.

You could solve this without reducing consumption as well. Food additives exist which bring down methane emissions to practically nothing.

In the data you linked to, 24% of (all) greenhouse gas emissions come from what's known as "land-use change", which is what it sounds like, changes to land use from forests to cropland.

The emissions of the remaining categories in the pie chart (namely: Industry, Transportation, Buildings, Electricity and Heat Production and Other Energy) are primarily the byproduct of burning fossil fuels (and to a lesser extent from cement production).

If you take each of those categories on its own, you can compare them almost favorably to land use changes. But if you take them all together, they add up to 76%.

That is the percentage of greenhouse gas emissions that come from burning fossil fuels. Burning fossil fuels is the major contributor to anthropogenic climate change, in fact is is the cause of anthropogenic climate change.

Again: 76% of all emissions (only a small part of that is from cement production).

Note also that the economist article makes it clear that land use change would be only minimally reduced, at best, from everyone going vegan because the majority of reduction would be in the use of pasture, much of which is not possible to cultivate anyway. So we'd still have to use the same land for cultivating food for humans that we do now to grow feed for animals.

The conclusion to draw is that even if everyone on the planet went vegan, but we continued to burn fossil fuels the same as before, we would still not have done anything to stop climate change and we would only slow it down a little. To eliminate climate change we must radically reduce the amount of greenhouse gas emissions from burning fossil fuels.

I was responding to the above poster strictly on the idea that the majority of emissions is caused by 100 companies. That's strictly not true and equally irrelevant to the article.

But, to directly respond to your argument. Yes, eating less meat helps reduce greenhouse gas emissions.[0] Until you can find a reliable source that says that it doesn't, we can stop talking about your baseless speculation that it doesn't.

To your other argument that it's useless to go vegetarian or vegan because it's not the primary source of emissions, that's just an excuse not to do anything. If you want to look at any of the causes of emissions in isolation they all look like the minority and your argument works equally well. "We shouldn't focus on solar because power production is only 25% of emissions." "We shouldn't look at industrial emissions because they are smaller than electric and agriculture." "We shouldn't look at concrete because it's really only a small percentage." "We shouldn't look at vehicular emissions because they are dwarfed by electric emissions." If we can't act on any problem because it's a small subset of the issue, then we can't look at any of the sources of emissions.

[0] https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/13/17/9926/htm#:~:text=The%20....

> Yes, eating less meat helps reduce greenhouse gas emissions.[0] Until you can find a reliable source that says that it doesn't, we can stop talking about your baseless speculation that it doesn't.

Can you show me where in my comment I made this baseless speculation?

Here you go:

> The conclusion to draw is that even if everyone on the planet went vegan, but we continued to burn fossil fuels the same as before, we would still not have done anything to stop climate change

Strictly speaking, eating less meat does something for climate change because it lowers greenhouse gas emissions. It can't be the only thing we do, but it does do something.

So that bit of my comment you quote is not where I made the baseless speculation that reducing meat doesn't help reduce greenhouse gas emissions. It's where you thought I made that baseless speculation.

Because I said that everyone going vegan would not do anything to stop climate change not that it doesn't help reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

Correct?

Stopping emissions stops climate change. If you aren't willing to admit that, why are you even talking about climate change.

Reducing the amount of meat we eat does not "stop emissions". It reduces emissions- but not enough to stop climate change.

Climate change can only be stopped (stopped from getting worse, that is) by eliminating or drastically reducing the amount of fossil fuels we burn. That is because 3/4s of greenhouse gas emissions come from burning fossil fuels and only a much smaller amount comes from raising animals for meat, and then not even all animals that we reais for meat are significant contributors to greenhouse gas emissions, only ruminants are.

I find it shocking that, in order to promote the animal rights agenda, the indisputable fact that anthropogenic climate change is caused by burning fossil fuels is sidelined and the weight is placed on meat production. That is dangerous propaganda and if you care about the climate you should not promote it.

I could be wrong, but some of those companies are probably agriculture companies. Those 100 companies produce those emissions in response to demand. No demand for coal? No coal emissions. No demand for farting cows? No fart emissions. I know that's a _little_ simplistic, but it's not so simplistic as to be useless.

Just a friendly reminder that this figure is only true if you attribute the emissions from those companies customers back to those companies. It doesn’t make sense to me that my emissions should be attributed to Shell or Exxon, but to each their own.

I agree the straw thing is silly and arguably even counterproductive. It makes people feel like they are doing something when in reality it makes very little material difference. "I sacrificed with a paper straw. Now excuse me as I go buy some clothes I'll only wear once".

But you almost certainly use things from those 100 companies. Which of their services and products should we deem worthy or not? Maybe a carbon tax is the way to go. But then which things should be more expensive (rarer, less available to the poor) and which ones should be cheap (common, available to the poor)? It's all tradeoffs and it's complex.

This is such a tired argument.

First, emissions are not the only issue related to climate change.

Second (and someone please correct me if I'm wrong), the common article[1] that people cite for this statistic indicates that this is "industrial" greenhouse gas emissions, which I am pretty sure does not include all emissions.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/2017/jul/10...

If everyone ..., we'd have world peace.

https://archive.fo/qgsTs

This is where the human species will have to go eventually but probably not in my lifetime.

I can't read this article but I've seen this data before and the argument that accompanies it, here:

https://ourworldindata.org/land-use-diets

But there's a bunch of problems with the argument. First, it's obvious from the graphs that we can save pretty much the same amount of land if everyone switched to a lacto-ovo-pescaterian diet, rather than a strict vegan diet. The difference in emission reductions between the two diets is 2%.

Second, as others have pointed out, most of the reduction in land use comes from pasture, which is not always useful for agriculture. This is not as clear cut as either side on this debate may think. On the one hand, much pastureland was created by humans in older times who deforested large areas precisely to raise their cattle. For example, this is the case in much of North-Western Europe. On the other hand there are vast areas of the Earth that are not naturally covered in forsts- think of the steppes, for instance. How much of that land should, or even can be returned to trees is not clear. Some part of it will remain whether we want it or not, simply because forests can't grow everywhere on Earth. There's no reason not to use such land for pasture.

Third, as the ourworldindata.org article makes it clear, it's not just calories and amount of proteins that matters in nutrition, but also the quality of protein, micronutrients and minerals. Some of these, namely B12 vitamin, cannot be obtained from plant sources and must be supplemented in the diets of anyone going vegan. So "if everyone were vegan, only a quareter of current farmland would be needed" plus many hundred times the current amount of supplements of B12 and other nutrients. The costs of supplementing the entire population of Earth with at the very least B12 is not often discussed but it is an important question: if everyone goes vegan what will be the cost of ensuring nobody goes malnourished as a result?

Yet another observation is that not all dairy production comes from cow milk. In large parts of the world, for example all around the Mediterrannean and in large swathes of Asia, dairy comes primarily from small ruminants, sheep and goats, and some of those places also happen to occupy natural pastureland (again, think of the steppes). There's no reason not to consume dairy from small ruminants raised on such pastureland.

There is a common misconception that I see in discussions like this, that emissions from farming come from "cow burps" (sometimes people say "cow farts"). As a matter of fact, cows, like all animals, cannot produce new carbon gasses, like CO₂ and methane. They can only return to the environment what they take from the environment: plants bind CO₂ from the atmosphere, animals take the CO₂ from plants and other animals and then they release it back to the atmosphere. So these emissions cannot add new carbon to the atmosphere, they are part of the natural atmospheric carbon cycle and they are not normally counted towards the increase in CO₂ and methane levels in the atmosphere.

So what causes all the emissions from the agricultural sector? That's land use change. Which means, cutting down forest and replacing it with cropland, be it for human or animal feed. Because forests bind large amounts of carbon in plant tissues, when trees are cut down and not replaced with new trees, but crops that don't have the same capacity to bind carbon, a large amount of carbon ends up in the atmosphere with nowhere to go. And that is the principal contribution to greenhouse gas emissions by agriculture.

Finally, and lest we forget: emissions from agriculture are the minor contributor to climate change. The major contributor is burning fossil fuels. Three quarters of greenhouse gas emissions are caused by burning fossil fuels. Burning fossil fuels, not farming or agriculture, is the cause of climate change. Fossil fuels bind carbon over millions of years and we have released a gigantic amount of it within a mere 200 years. Reducing fossil fuel burning is the primary target for greenhouse gas emission reductions- not food.

https://ourworldindata.org/emissions-by-sector

Then you get 4x as many people eventually.

In the USA at least we have more farmland than we need.

So what? We have no shortage of farmland.

That's only true if you have no issue with habitat destruction to make more room for farmland, which is happening all the time.

We don't need anymore farm land now. We already grown enough food for everyone. We just stock pile it in weird places. Or we destroy habit because it's cheaper than farming properly. So just stop doing that.

Putting on some popcorn to watch this thread. HN loves discussions around veganism.

Yeah, surprised it's not flagged. I am vegan but arguing about it online just isn't worth it, so I'll grab some (vegan) popcorn with you.

The comments are already frustrating. I could boil the whole being vegan argument down to "less cattle in the world would be a quick and easy CO2 reduction win", and receive mind bogglingly silly arguments in return totally missing the point. Better not go there.

> less cattle in the world would be a quick and easy CO2 reduction win

Do you often find that taking away things that the majority of people like — and have firmly entrenched in their lifestyle — is “quick and easy”?

Quick and easy in the sense that the overall impact to society would be minimal. Contrast that to giving up fossile fuels in large scale for example. Or any other change that would have similar impact.

The whole point of making the argument for veganism is to make people understand that they can, and indeed should, make this change. Even if in small steps.

> so I'll grab some (vegan) popcorn with you

Now I'm curious about what non-vegan popcorn is supposed to be.

Popcorn that has butter comes to mind.

or cheesy popcorn, or caramel popcorn depending on how the caramel is made, or popcorn topped with ground beef

I only knew about popcorn with salt and popcorn with sugar. Is popcorn topped with ground beef really a thing?

Buttered.

I don't understand the thought process here on HN when people start punching the flagged button the second a controversial subject comes up. I would think the large portion of scientific minded people here would be thrilled to toss around different ideas, but it seems egos and hurt feeling take over and the thread is ultimately killed.

So unfortunate.

> I don't understand the thought process here on HN when people start punching the flagged button the second a controversial subject comes up. I would think the large portion of scientific minded people here would be thrilled to toss around different ideas

Take a look at comments on more controversial threads, I think you overestimate the userbase.

Few things are worth the destruction of our natural environment. Ice cream, leather, and surf and turf most definitely are though.

I was going to point out that coconut ice cream can be superior to its milky counterpart... but coconut farming itself is problematic. If we replaced all the world's ice cream with coconut ice cream, there would be no coconuts left. And it takes 4-10 years for new coconuts to mature. Our addiction to luxury may be the root problem.

I don’t know any vegan that still eats coconut ice cream…because it tastes like coconut. There are a huge variety of non-dairy ice cream made with oats, cashews, soy, peas, etc…

True, one must like coconut to arrive at my opinion that it's superior to cream. And it's only good for certain flavors: yes salted caramel, no not mint chocolate chip.

Vegan diets can only exist at a global scale by externalizing the negative costs related to shipping, storage, and manufacturing.

The Vegan diet didn't/can't appear in a vacuum, and it only became widespread as an option for everyone once global shipping emerged.

Veganism has its place, but it's not the holier-than-thou panacea its adherents make it out to be.

meat-containing diets can only exist at a global scale by externalizing the negative costs related to shipping, storage, and manufacturing.

The meat-containnig diet didn't/can't appear in a vacuum, and it only became widespread as an option for everyone once global shipping emerged.

meat has its place, but it's not the holier-than-thou panacea its adherents make it out to be.

Not true, I'm afraid. People have been eating meat for a long time. They just didn't eat as much as people eat now. Nowhere near what the average American eats. It was also produced in a different way. For example, in Britain it was traditional for families to keep a pig and feed it leftovers from the kitchen (swill). Essentially free food. But that's been illegal for a long time now.

Except your version is wrong. People were eating milk and meat long before shipping.

Meat-dominant diets, sure

In capitalism, all costs of production are externalized. What you said is not relevant to the the importance and possibility of veganism.

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