As someone who tries earnestly to be a better citizen of the planet (car-sharing, cloth grocery bags, no printing stuff unless it’s required, turning off faucet when brushing teeth/sudsing hands, obsessive recycling, impressive amounts of reusing, not so good on the “reducing”…sorry), I tend to fume at SUV-drivers and not bat an eyelash at my carnivorous and omnivorous peers, even though I am well aware of all the statistics which Esprit, Sting and other organizations drilled in to me in the 90s regarding how many acres or gallons of water beef requires blah blah blah.
Well, apparently I can’t give H3s dirty looks any more.
Via The New York Times:
EVER since “An Inconvenient Truth,†Al Gore has been the darling of environmentalists, but that movie hardly endeared him to the animal rights folks. According to them, the most inconvenient truth of all is that raising animals for meat contributes more to global warming than all the sport utility vehicles combined.
The biggest animal rights groups do not always overlap in their missions, but now they have coalesced around a message that eating meat is worse for the environment than driving. They and smaller groups have started advertising campaigns that try to equate vegetarianism with curbing greenhouse gases.
Oy, I don’t see this going over well with the public at all. Amurricans love their flesh. They like to eat meat, too.
Some backlash against this position is inevitable, the groups acknowledge, but they do have scientific ammunition. In late November, the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization issued a report stating that the livestock business generates more greenhouse gas emissions than all forms of transportation combined.
That sound you heard was my mind being blown. I knew raising animals was less than ideal, I never realized that it was worse than driving, let alone all types of transportation combined! SWEET. I can go back to having naughty dreams about the Veyron, sans shame or guilt. Anyone know how to type that sound Homer makes when he’s contemplating donuts or other yummy things? Because I’m totally doing that right now.
When that report came out, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals and other groups expected their environmental counterparts to immediately hop on the “Go Veggie!†bandwagon, but that did not happen. “Environmentalists are still pointing their fingers at Hummers and S.U.V.’s when they should be pointing at the dinner plate,†said Matt A. Prescott, manager of vegan campaigns for PETA.
In a move which makes me feel confused and anxious, PETA has decided to drum up awareness by plastering a banner festooned with this new, urgent, “Meat is (Earth’s) Murder”-message on a Hummer, which will tool around my town, complete with a chicken in the cockpit. Well, it’s a driver in a chicken suit who will be in the cockpit, and not an actual specimen of poultry, but what I want to know is, why not a Rooster suit? Why don’t men get any respect?
“You just cannot be a meat-eating environmentalist,†said Mr. Prescott, whose group also plans to send billboard-toting trucks to the Colorado Convention Center in Denver when Mr. Gore lectures there on Oct. 2. The billboards will feature a cartoon image of Mr. Gore eating a drumstick next to the tagline: “Too Chicken to Go Vegetarian? Meat Is the No. 1 Cause of Global Warming.â€
The Humane Society is also on board, since it worries about polar bears as well as puppies:
On its Web page and in its literature, the Humane Society has also been highlighting other scientific studies — notably, one that recently came out of the University of Chicago — that, in essence, show that “switching to a plant-based diet does more to curb global warming than switching from an S.U.V. to a Camry,†said Paul Shapiro, senior director of the factory farming campaign for the Humane Society…“Our mission is to protect animals, and global warming has become an animal welfare issue,†he said.
And switching from a Camry to a MINI will do more to curb boredom. Bow down before the mighty Cooper S, I say!
Let’s hear from a spokesperson for Gore:
Chris Song, his deputy press secretary, simply noted that a suggestion to “modify your diet to include less meat†appears on Page 317 of Mr. Gore’s book version of “An Inconvenient Truth.â€
He did not address Mr. Gore’s personal food choices.
An activist quoted in the article rightly mentions that “it’s a lot easier to ask people to put in a fluorescent light bulb than to learn to cook with tofu”, and to that I say, uh…yeah. Tofu scares the Madagascar out of the picky and unadventurous (read: me). It IS easier to swap a bulb for a more energy-efficient one, take metro instead of a car or use one of the handy cloth bags which are now all over Whole Foods or Trader Joe’s, for groceries.
Aside: those of you who scored this are on my “I’m so jealous”-list. I will console myself by marinating in haterade, since the bags aren’t made of anything organic, weren’t fair trade and obviously used icky, poo-ey airline miles to get to us from China. Ha! You may have the bag, but I have my obnoxious, envy-tinged righteousness. 😉
Off-aside: food is very personal, and I’m not sure how successful these efforts will be, but I don’t think there’s any harm in educating people about the impact our diets have on our bodies and on the world.
I’ve adopted a “100 foot” macrobiotic diet. I only eat what I can find within 100 feet of my apartment. Dog milk and garden snails aren’t really all that bad
But it wasn’t! It was a base insinuation.
I use the heat generated by the exhaust of my SUV to grill the vegetables I grow in my kitchen garden. I am only doing it for my grandchildren. And the polar bears.
Reasoner you are funny
Annuh, would you care to put your real name out here? You call readers pansies for not standing up to Anna , yet you are the one hiding behind a fake name. What a loser.
annuh, what’s wrong with you?
My god the world is full of angry, little people. [no disrespect meant to actual little people]
Pravin, I actually completely judge people who drive SUVs. I do think that, as a whole, if we’re going to try to live sustainably it would help if people think along wider time horizons. I think the environmental quandary is like smoking — you know it’s bad for you, but because you’re not going to develop lung cancer overnight you do it anyway. I’m a little less judgmental when it comes to people’s food choices just because there are a lot of factors that govern people’s options (e.g. class/money, regional location, types of food production, cultural norms/mores, etc).
promotion of violence through de-sensitization to slaughter
Unless you live on a farm and slaughter animals, you are probably buying your meat from a grocery store or eating out and will probably never actually see a live slaughter.
.” 90% of athletes and models, the cream of human physiology, do not eat meat.” well, I’d like to see the source for that stat. Somehow I don’t think most of the NBA are veggies, but I could wrong. As far as “models” being the “cream” (an ironic term for the skinnies you are describing), they are unhealthy in the opposite way of fat. There is such a thing as being too thin, though too fat is usually worse. The fashion for anorexic models is fairly recent. In the first half of the 20th century, it was only required that they be reasonably slim, and taller than average, to show off the clothes.
i just read that once you go above 65 mph, your fuel usage doubles…
camille, some SUVs have better fuel mileage and greenhouse gas emissions than some sedans or non-SUVs, so knee-jerk reactions aren’t always accurate
ak, I know you’re right — I’m just ‘fessing up to my own limitations as a judgmental person 🙂
this is really insensitive. There can be lurkers (or commenters) with body issues or medical problems. calling someone a “fat skank” doesnt do anyone any good. I dont even think a lot of this is factually correct. i think most atheletes eat meat.
no worries – secretly, i want a range rover but would never spend the money or the gas to buy it. when i told my parents that there’s a hybrid version of their suv, they completely slammed down the idea – apparently, it’s ‘too much vork’ and ‘ve are too old to be doing those things.’
Two things: 1. I know that there are plenty of smaller farms that now trap the methane from their cows and convert it to electricity, often times putting electricity back on the grid, thereby supplying electricity to their neighbors, and reducing overall production at coal plants. There’s no reason this couldn’t be expanded and reduce the methane production at a much larger scale.
And a question that’s bother me for a long time and I’ve never gotten a satisfactory answer for: 2. I don’t think PETA, or a lot of vegetarians have given thought to what would happen if we all stopped eating meat and started acting “humanely” to all the animals. What natural predators do the cows and pigs have anymore? What’s to stop them from breeding in large quantities and exploding their populations (oh and then adding to the problem of increased methane in the air)? Are we going to go around and spay and neuter every piece of livestock in the world? Or are we just going to euthanize them and throw away the carcasses? Turn them in compost? Nothing you could spread them on, you don’t use meat products in compost. Burn them? That’s a no-no. Bury them? You’d contaminate the water supply? So I ask you committed vegetarians who want everyone to give up meat-eating now. What do we do with the animals we’ve got now if we’re not going to eat them?
well, stopping eating meat could happen in phases. the consumption of meat could be wound down. the current anumals would be consumed, but no new ones raised. it doesnt have to happen overnight (although this is all pie in the sky).
Evolutionary my dear Watson! (disregard this as a real answer, I just felt like saying it)
I am selfish, cant think of future generations, meat eater, SUV owner (trading it in for a V8 soon). I actually dont care.
The fact that an individual’s resource usage is a spectrum, and not an on/off switch, often seems to get lost in these discussions. An omnivore uses more resources in getting his calories than a vegan does, since energy is lost in each step of the cycle, from when the farm animal is raised until it is served and eaten. Clearly the vegan’s diet cuts several steps from this process, as others have mentioned.
But it’s a question of how much meat you eat, and how many animal products you use, not just if you do! If you eat meat at every meal, that is quite different from eating it it once a day! The poor in many countries eat meat whenever they can – but since that’s often only once a month, their (food-based) environmental footprint is that much smaller.
In answer to why meat-eating rivals car use in greenhouse gas effects – methane has 20 times more global warming potential than CO2.
Finally, a shameless plug for an article I’ve written on how to reduce our environmental impact without damaging the economy.
“I know that there are plenty of smaller farms that now trap the methane from their cows and convert it to electricity, often times putting electricity back on the grid, thereby supplying electricity to their neighbors, and reducing overall production at coal plants.”
Those poor cows.
Damn … those cows are violated in all possible ways …
:((((
Here’s a radio news bit on New Zealand doing its part to deal with the methane gas problem due to cows and sheep – as there are more cows and sheep than factories there.
Are you serious?! these cows and pigs are farmed, its not the growth rate they would have if in the wild.
Kind of surprised by arguments like this,
whatever happened to the grains consumed by livestock in the equation? and does soybean emit methane?!!
lol. Elite athletes generally try to consume more than 1 gram of protein per pound of bodyweight. This is almost impossible to get from a vegan diet, without increasing your carb intake to unacceptable levels.
If you consider eggs and milk products as acceptable then it is doable. But from an environmental perspective factory farming chickens for eggs, and cows for milk is just as bad as eating meat.
“That’s not a rebuttal. Its called escaping.” Indian vegetables are not eaten raw, spinach is always boiled while cooking which reduces the chances. On the other hand, culling…? can’t escape that.
“but there is an easier way” Infact promoting balanced veg diet is easier in india since many folks are religiously bound.
“well, stopping eating meat could happen in phases. the consumption of meat could be wound down. the current animals would be consumed, but no new ones raised. it doesnt have to happen overnight” Totally agree, nobody argues that you give up meat now, but if you can, then you certainly can.
http://www.indiacurry.com/health/proteinvegetarianindia.htm http://www.bk.com/#menu=3,1,-1
KarmaByte, it takes energy and water to grow soybeans. When comparing greenhouse gas reduction you have to look at the increased waste from energy production and irrigation from soybean growth vs. livestock. I’m sure this is less than the waste from factory farming, but depending on the region it might not be as large of an offset as people would expect.
I think also there’s a little conflation happening here over which diet is “better” — vegan, vegetarian, or an omnivore’s diet (I have no idea how to turn that last word into an adjective — omnivorous?). One is not intrinsically better or less energy-consuming than the other depending on the context in which food/ag production takes place more broadly. Like many have brought up, dairy/egg production can also be hugely environmentally detrimental, but I personally don’t think veganism is a “solution” per se.
actually they don’t…..only the alonzo mourning’s do….the ones who want kidney failure…..about 70-75% of protein/bodyweight will suffice, and that is easily available in the much purer form of isolated why protein powder…..meat makes athletes slow and lethargic, and they are told to avoid that poison at all costs.
Ok, this is just plain untrue. What meat are you talking about?
Whey Isolate -> Milk (+ lots of energy wasted in processing costs to isolate the protein) -> Cow -> Methane.
As I said before…
Also there is no evidence that high protein diets (1 – 1.5 g/lbs ) are not bad for young people with normal, healthy renal functions. Older folks and those who have pre-existing kidney conditions on the other hand would be well advised to reduce their intake to decrease the stress on their kidneys.
right on. It is really is all dependent on your genetic heritage–some people can eat less than 1gram of protein per pound of body weight and maintain muscle mass (the best preventative measure for sports-related injuries–in moderation), or even grow with the proper lifting program. Some people, myself included, can only grow with the crazy sounding 2-2.5 grams per pound of bodyweight.
Also, whey is not king, nor does it only come as isolate–you can choose the concentrate (with more fractions), aforementioned isolate or hydrolyzed isolate (easiest to process, fewest fractions). If you want to benefit the most, as a veggie or even a vegan, from supplementing, you’ll need to mix it up with casein.
I dont ask vegans to stop consuming anything wasteful such as beer or travel on a cruise which leads to nothing. I like meat. Meat tastes good! The only reason to limit meat in my diet is to improve my heealth.
Camille, I ask again are you saying that the corn (and other) that feed the livestock grow without any substantial expense of energy and water?!! in other words
resources for livestock farms + resources for livestock feed + other =~ resources for soybean (or other substitutes) + other ?
This is off topic but related
In the long run I don’t think the current rate of meat consumption is viable. Meat prices are bound to go up.
“Also there is no evidence that high protein diets (1 – 1.5 g/lbs ) are not bad for young people with normal, healthy renal functions. Older folks and those who have pre-existing kidney conditions on the other hand would be well advised to reduce their intake to decrease the stress on their kidneys”…………………………………..
that’s some hilarious shit…..why do you need all this protein to begin with? do you think it makes you stronger? big muscles=power? that’s some hilarious shit…..zab judah at 145 lbs could beat the living crap out of (ie. knock out cold with one punch) 99% of the population regardless of their weight and bernard hopkins at 160 could beat the crap out of 100% of the population. everyone’s body is different, so obviously there are people of all sizes. one thing all people have in common is that if they add too much mass, be it by weightlifting and ingesting excessive protein, or just getting fat, they get slow and useless. the reason judah and hopkins can take people out 50 or 100 pounds heavier than them is because they are in 100% control of their bodies; nothing escessive holding them back….it is fact undeniable, as much as carnivores would like to deny it on grounds of “common knowledge”, that all meat is unnecessary and makes you slow and useless……….i love it how indian people think fat is good. i guess this is the starving-third world in them……..as for people who say it tastes good: i’m sure white people said the same thing, “shitting all over those indian people is my birthright–i’m white, it makes me feel good”, when they colonially raped india for all those years…………….no being has the right to cause harm or parttake in the harm of another…………if you’re even an ounce indian you know what karma and reincarnation are…………….people ask me all the time, “why are you vegetarian?” i tell them that ALL real indian people are vegetarians………lastly, you can deny it all you want, but there is a new york times article right in front of you that states the facts of the evils of killing animals.
24/7,
Uh oh…then I must be an imaginary Indian …no wonder life has recently taken on this dream-like quality 🙂
Er..you mean unreal Indians right?
Take a chill pill lest you be labelled a veggie-nazi
“Er..you mean unreal Indians right?”…………………nothing like a healthy pedantic strain to uphold that super-nerd status……………..hahahahahahaahhahahahah…”veggie-nazi”…..that’s a good one…..nazis kill innocent creatures for no reason….that really sounds like what vegetarians do; they have concentration camps for vegetables and grains……as opposed to kind hearted pig, cow, chicken, turkey, dog, cat, horse eaters, who are paragons of good will and justice.
Murali:Is using a hired tractor a shortcut? If so – yeah I have been guilty of engaging in that to help the family.
Harbeer – my comments were not about agriculture – it was about subsistence agriculture in India. I claim no first hand knowledge on US agriculture beyond driving past one. However, I do wish to make a strong claim on first hand knowledge on agriculture in India.
To me the report does make sense.
If we are talking about Industrial Farming of animals, as I understand the animals are fed the food, which humans can consume. So basically you use land to grow feed and then use more land to house the animals and feed them. This is wasting the land resource (ironically the more humane you treat animals by giving them more space, more wasteful you are). Animals also eat during their life time more food than the weight of meat they produce. So this is inefficient use of food. Then there is using of water while processing animals. So leaving all common things aside like transportation, refrigeration etc., meat is more inefficient use of land resources and has a greater impact on environment.
On the other hand the organic farms, where animals graze on the outside and depend more on feed that is inedible by humans (grass), would need lot more land to provide the feed for animals. again there is also need of water to process animals.
So either way you go there is no denial that eating animals is more hazardous to environment than eating plants and vegetables. The only exception that I could think where we have an exception is having chickens at home. They feed on left overs and bugs and turn them into meat. However, most people may not have space, time or willingness to do this and the meat you get is probably enough to have a meat dish once in a couple of weeks.
So why is the comment @#40 still there? I’m sure the moderators would be quick to delete any comment that used such a vile slur if it were racial in character. As a fat person, this hatred offends me. And as a vegan, this nonsense embarrasses me.
We never said we were perfect about nailing everything, all the time. If you’ve read the thread, you’ll notice that other people objected as you did and voiced their concerns, it’s not like everyone endorsed that person’s words. Far from it.
KarmaByte, I’ve actually explained this 3-4 times now and am tired of explaining it. I am not discounting that growing feed for animals is wasteful. What I’m saying is that converting from raising factory farm animals for slaughter is not intrisically less energy-intensive (or carbon-neutral) than forcing the growth of certain crops in the same area. I’m saying it DOES take more energy to raise animals, but the “waste” concern is largely connected to our system of agricultural production in the U.S., which is highly wasteful for both meat and vegetable production… which is why you would not necessarily see huge carbon offsets by substituting away from one industry to the other.
Look, humans are omnivores who can opt out of the meat/animal product option. It is possible to have sustainable meat production that is not environmentally damaging (it would just cost much more than what we pay right now in the U.S., and it would take a substantial reorganization of our eating patterns/habits). Decreasing one’s carbon footprint is not about driving everything to a zero-sum game, it’s about doing it sustainably, which is why I generally find the “go vegetarian because you’re killing the earth” argument uncompelling. If you’re eating other animal products (eggs/dairy), or practically anything in the U.S., your odds are that it was not grown in an very environmentally-friendly or sustainable way. The whole system is wack.
24/7,
Your holier than thou attitude makes me want to go out and sink my teeth into a nice , juicy double double from In – and -Out this afternoon.
Anyway, since we have established that I am imaginary it cannot cause any harm 🙂
Seriously, take a deep breath ,calm down and you may have a better shot at convincing people to turn vegetarian. All this name-calling and foaming at the mouth stuff is SO off-putting ,its doing your cause more harm than good.
who the h3ll are you to define who a “Real” indian person is. i think most people in india eat meat. are teh majority of indians not “real”? wtf?
“i think most people in india eat meat.”
I wanted to refute that, instead found this :
http://www.hindu.com/2006/08/14/stories/2006081403771200.htm
but still, go vegetarian ! 🙂
how does that link refute that? it seems to say that 60% of people eat meat. i.e., “most”
i know, thats why i used ‘instead’ & ‘but still’ !
Someone who eats meat once in two weeks, and someone who eats it once in two days are both non-vegetarians. But to look at the relative impact, frequency comes into play.
most people in india eat meat because they think it’s what advanced, cool people do. they think their white masters do it so they should do it too so they can be like them…..at home they don’t eat it, but when they go outside they get all rowdy and drink beer and eat meat……but no talking to girls, because sex is bad, but murder is a-ok……….it is so funny how they think there is a correlation between eating dead animals and getting strong……………as for runa, all i can say, sweetheart, is nice name.
i dont think thats true. there are some communities whose tradition is vegitarian. there are A LOT of communities who traditionally eat meat. meat eating wasnt introduced to indians by foreigners.
ah. got it.
24/7, everyone appreciates passion, but please tone it down, especially with the “all or nothing”/blanket statements.
You’re being combative, which doesn’t help the discussion- or your position on vegetarianism.
24/7 makes me want to go eat a steak…and also work out in the gym to get huge (something I try to do anyway). I hope my language diatribes don’t all make you guys go want to speak English with someone asap!