I looked at it for five seconds and I figured this doesnt work like this at all
oversimplification. letting out a lot of questions. leaving out why all of this is benificial at all. leaving out that science is really divided about vegan diet and its effects on health. lumping every climate, culture, agrarcultural practice in one pot.
there is no easy answers for complicated questions.
there can’t be when the question isn’t even clear in the first place.
take water, for example: people always talk about how farms and fields use up water. but, is that really true? water goes in a cycle. it never gets used up. if there is no pasture or field, water gets used up anyway. or do you go there to collect it? yes, its bad to taint your water soils with chemicals. but, then just don’t use them?
its plants, factories, chemical industry and cities that use up the water. because thats the water you have to recycle really hard.
or, take fischeries: they are not mentioned here, not on the graphs. but they destroy our planet as well, by ships, debris from nets, overfisching, crude oil that gets disposed of in the sae, and fish and shellfish farms are the tainting your water really really bad,
or take biogas farms: they use so much land for corn that it would make your head explode, corn gets used for all kinds of chemicals, it would not help if people ate vegan, since its use is in chemical industry and energy production, so the graph doesnt mention that either.
the whole thing is oversimplification.
Its about encouraging people to make better decisions, thats what the whole point of this type of research is. Its to entice people to head in that direction and see if we are right or not, because continuing the path we have been on is diasterous at best.
It shouldnt be so hard to see the goal of this type of graphic is to stoke conversation not to force everyone into a specific viewpoint. 50 years from now veganism might be considered abusive.
Its important to move forward, because doing nothing is moving backwards. There is no such this as neutral.
I’ve been avoiding poultry for fucking nothing? I’m gonna go eat a thousand chicken nuggies
I like how poultry-inclusive diets get us 95% of the way there.
I think things would be markedly better with eating only fish and eggs, although I think the fishing is out of hand already, and egg chickens can be kept in just as horrible of conditions as meat chickens.
that’s conflating ideas though… climate change may very well be an extinction level event… animal cruelty is upsetting, but by far the lesser of 2 issues here
They go hand in hand, the meat industry is so polluting because of the commercial scale which is also why its so inhumane.
I think many would settle for just a much smaller meat industry. Maybe a more careful one.
Think of all the parking lots we could build with that land!
this is based on poore-nemecek 2018, a paper so fraught with methodological faux pas as to be a warning to anyone trying to do a metastudy.
Following the trail of your comment: https://ourworldindata.org/land-use-diets does indeed cite https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aaq0216, but I’d love it if you could provide more details on your criticisms of methodology.
this paper is over half a decade old, and i’ve been whining about it pretty much that whole time, but i don’t recall the last time i actually dug into the methodology. to my recollection, they call it a metastudy and they compare LCAs from disparate studies, but LCAs themselves are not transferable between studies. that’s just one point.
if i recall correctly, they also used some california water study as the basis of their water use claims, but the water use included things like cottonseed, which is not grown for cattle feed, and using it in cattle feed is actually a conservation of resources. cotton is a notoriously light and water-demanding crop, so using the heavy byproduct to add to the water use of california dairies is, to me, dishonest.
i have no doubt that if i were to slice up this paper citation-by-citation, every one of them would have some misrepresented facts or methodology being repackaged as, i don’t say this lightly, vegan propaganda.
Do you often feel attacked by vegans? What exactly is vegan propaganda? Everyone uses studies on both sides, that’s how unsettled science works. Are most of them wrong? Of course, because again its not settled.
Seems convenient to discount the other viewpoints studies as propaganda when the opposing side is funded just as precariously.
So what’s a better study or metastudy? The actual results, aside from poultry being weirdly low-resource, seem about right when you consider the way energy usually moves through food webs.
That’s “Life Cycle Assessment”, for anyone else that’s wondering.
Dug up the paper in question for anyone curious: https://sci-hub.se/https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aaq0216. At a cursory glance, I’m not seeing any of the referenced concerns. But, y’know, down vote away I guess.