- cross-posted to:
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- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
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This is a very important mindset. I grew up eating meat and I don’t think I ever would have changed without realizing the fruitlessness of an all or nothing mindset. My wife grew up vegetarian and the past decade has been a slow walk towards me reducing my meat consumption gradually until now where I’m practically a vegetarian for environmental reasons. First I was eating vegetarian meats in our dinners. Then I started using it in my lunches I made for work. Then I started ordering it at restaurants when it was an option. Now I’ve been doing things like using oat milk instead of regular milk. It doesn’t need to be 0 to 100. You can take baby steps and if everybody took even one baby step it would make a huge difference. Imagine if everyone ate even half the meat they do right now in the US. It wouldn’t be perfect, but it would be better.
I myself eat less meat and plan to finally reduce it to zero. And I think it matters both for the environment and the animals.
But how does plant-based diet reduce waste (as the diagram seems to imply)?
I’m more familiar with the climate effects related to meat consumption. I can’t speak as much to the waste associated with the meat industry. I’m willing to bet there’s a good amount of meat waste though, given that meat doesn’t tend to last as long as other goods and since meat has more steps in production. As in you need to feed livestock, so you have the waste associated with growing feed for those animals, the water waste associated with hydrating them, and then also the meat waste itself. More steps would mean more waste in my mind. But that’s speculation. I don’t have any numbers. I don’t think meat packaging is particularly more wasteful than the packaging used for most plant based foods, so I’m not sure about that. Can anybody else here speak to this?
There’s a lot of wastefulness in animal agriculture that we don’t see. For literal, physical waste, there is the problem of what to do with the huge amount of animal excrement. We generate far more than we could ever use as fertilizer, and much of what is leftover sits in “lagoons” and leeches into waterways. It’s super eutrophying too, which means it kills off a lot of what’s in rivers and leads to algae blooms.
Then in the non-physical category, it’s a wasteful way to create calories because animals require so much input feed to create one calorie of meat or other product. Eating plants directly is more efficient.
I like the diagram/picture with the two ladders.
