Beef is the biggest mass consumed culprit. I think mutten might be worse, but it isn’t eaten nearly as much.
My point is, if you struggle to reduce meat consumption, just reducing beef consumption would make a big difference. Next time you are out, get a chicken sandwich instead of a burger. It’s that simple.
Just 12% of Americans - mostly men between age 50 and 65 - are responsible for half the beef consumption in America
This is the actual reason I default to chicken and sometimes opt for fish. And oat milk. It’s not everything, but it’s a hell of a lot better than eating beef five nights a week and barely required any effort on my part.
Next time you are out, get a chicken sandwich instead of a burger. It’s that simple.
I wish it was that simple, but it isn’t. If consumers replace chicken with beef, chicken will get more expensive and beef will get less expensive. Maybe some factory farmers and slaughterhouses will change species and ranchers will hire a PR firm to start a “eat more beef” add campaign. A new equilibrium will be reached with no significant impact on animal welfare or the climate, because the meat industry is well aware that consumer preferences shift over time and is happy to accommodate those shifts as long as consumers keep eating meat.
What sends a message is vegetarianism or veganism. And, to a lesser extent, buying your meat from a local cooperative or raising your own. Taking money out of the pockets of the factory farm industry as a whole saves animals and sends a message. Just eating less beef doesn’t.
Ideally, more people would eat way less meat.
I stand by it being that simple. Beef production has more than 3 times the emissions per pound than other meats.
It isn’t about sending a message, it is about reducing GHG emissions.
As far as prices, maybe. I don’t know the ins and outs of raising animals for food. I don’t think meat prices are entirely supply and demand due to different costs in raising different animals.
your link is new to me, so i dug through it a bit, checked some references, and i’ve decided the methodology is bad, and the authors either know this or they should have known this. the primary source for the LCA comparisons says, in plain english, in the introduction that LCA’s should not be used for comparisons due to a lack of control for the data gathering procedures. the actual paper’s purpose was to, i shit you not, ignore this guidance, average every datapoint they could find for any food type, and then stock them together in one paper… to let you compare LCAs. this is shoddy work.
i didn’t bother to go digging into the tertiary sources on which your link relies, but i will say i did some of the reading into the sources for other papers on the impacts of animal agriculture, and i have yet to find any investigation that doesn’t attribute to livestock all of the impacts of everything in their diet. that seems reasonable: if a cow eats it, then it should be counted. but that falls apart under scrutiny. my primary example is that, in the united states, many cattle are fed cottonseed. cottonis not a food crop, though. it’s a textile. the cottonseed is a byproduct, and whether we feed it to cattle or press it for oil, any such use is actually reclaiming resources. how should that be counted? it’s not as though cottonseed is an essential part of cattle diets, it’s only through the happenstance of its availability and relative price point that it’s in there at all.
and this just points at a larger problem: everything in our agricultural sector is so intertwined and interdependent that the impact of anything is a mercurial notion, that changes on a seasonal basis dependent on the weather, technology, and people’s feelings.
i don’t believe beef can’t be raised sustainably (which is to say, indefinitely on a given plot of land, given sufficient sun and rainfall). i’m open to data about this, but cattle were among the first domesticated animals, and we’ve seen all kinds of climate change since then, so cattle can’t be the problem in-and-of themselves.
living vegan has never been easier!
I just stopped eating all together. I’ve never had as much disposable income in my
Some people unfortunately do not have access to good vegan options. That being said, people can reduce their consumption of red meat significantly and make an impact.
Don’t let perfect be the enemy of good.
vegan options? like produce, grains, and legumes? are you in a food desert yourself?
the “vegan options” you’re referring to are at the supermarket, and they are the cheapest items in there.
I have plenty of friends who are vegans. I also have a few who tried it and failed because it’s not a switch you just turn off.
Giving the advice “just go vegan” is bad advice and counterproductive. There should be research into what it means and how to eat healthy vegan meals. You don’t just turn off the meat, which is what a lot of people assume they should do.
As a matter of fact I’d give the advice “go vegetarian, keep the milk eggs and fish, and if you like it and want to go further look into replacing those with some good vegan options.” It should be a process. Unless you start buying Soylent (the product not the movie), but that’s disgusting.
@hansl @ElcaineVolta most people have access to beans, rice, and canned vegetables. If you can find nutritional yeast, then you’re really in business
Vegan food is not some special, hard-to-access category of food, it’s just food without animals. A lot of what you already eat is probably accidentally vegan: https://www.reddit.com/r/accidentallyvegan
Plant based for the environment, vegan for the animals🖖
So many good reasons to eat less meat.
Eat…Rich…Eat the rich! Ok!