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I became a (aspiring ) almost exclusively to contribute to reduce animal .

With time, I realised that the other reasons to avoid animal-based foods are surprisingly strong, too.

🧵

1️⃣ Land usage:

Crops for human consumption make up only 23% of all agricultural land worldwide, and yet they provide 83% of all calories.

Plant-based calories (and proteins) are much more efficient and require way less land and water than meat and dairy.

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2️⃣ Carbon emissions:

Think you can stick to your steaks and omelettes and at the same time manage to significantly reduce your carbon footprint by “eating locally”? Actually, transport accounts for a very small fraction of carbon released in food production (be it plant- or animal-based).

Also,

“most food internationally comes by ship. And, actually shipping is very carbon efficient. You’re going to emit 10 to 20 times less CO₂ than trucks per kilometre and 50 times less than flying. Most of your soy or your avocados are nearly always coming by ship and shipping actually has a very, very small carbon footprint.”

Hannah Ritchie

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3️⃣ Number of animals affected:

You could reduce quite a lot your carbon footprint by replacing all your beef and lamb with chicken and fish (big mammals emit far more CO₂ per kg of protein than poultry and fish). The problem is, then you would be indirectly responsible for many, many more individual animals raised in industrial farms and killed in slaughterhouses.

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@tripu Comparatively, how much could the richest 1% of humans reduce our footprint by not using private jets and similar debauchery?

@tripu I hope you get my drift here - how much of this is victim blaming, how much are we actually doing wrong - much more powerful if it is true and well thought out!

@admitsWrongIfProven

For the sake of argumentation, let’s restrict my call to veganism to the richest 10% of the world only.

I refuse any accusation of victim-blaming, because someone that rich is not a victim.

Besides: a victim of… what, exactly? The main victims of these issues (animal suffering, climate change, deforestation, water usage, antibiotic resistance, etc) are animals themselves. Human beings are secondary victims only, and although you can argue that rich humans will always cope better with all those problems than poor humans, it’s a flimsy defence to say that you are a “victim” and that those advocating for more ethical and sustainable lifestyles are “blaming” you.

@tripu Well, there is not little push towards unethical food.
I am not speaking of me as a victim in this regard, because i could, on my salary, afford to eat ethical and healthy. My problem lies elsewhere.

What i mean by victim blaming is telling everyone, and by extension those that have very little money. I am speaking about the people trying to make ends meet - for them, ethical and nutritionally complete (not necessarily healthy) would be mutually exclusive i think.

A good part of what choices one has lies in the hands of the owners of the companies producing our food.
Nut prices, for example, have dramatically increased. From what i hear, nuts are an important part of a nutritionally complete vegan diet. Meat has those nutrients, and is still availble very cheap. Not ethical, not healthy i guess, but cheap.

What i would support 100% would be telling the producers that the choices they offer are unethical. So the answer is: victims of choices available.

@admitsWrongIfProven

“I am speaking about the people trying to make ends meet - for them, ethical and nutritionally complete (not necessarily healthy) would be mutually exclusive i think.”

Definitely so. I’m happy to cushion my personal exhortations towards (what I think are) more ethical habits (don’t lie; don’t use violence; obey the law by default; favour walking, cycling and public transport over cars; boycott animal products; encrypt; boycott big tech; etc) between all necessary caveats (do all that if you’re in dire straits, oppressed, starving, etc).

“What i would support 100% would be telling the producers that the choices they offer are unethical.”

Point taken. And, at the same time, support 100% reminding consumers (ie, absolutely everybody) that producers make, cheaper in and larger amounts, exactly what we collectively buy and use — and zero of what nobody wants.

@tripu I see your point, but i remain sceptical of any sustainable results from reminding consumers.

The picture in my mind is to better unload guns than to shoot at armoured targets (people).

In the long run, i see producers that want to maximize profits getting better at manipulating people. Decisions are not always (or rather, rarely) rational, ads do work, and not by using rational arguments.

So “exactly what we buy and use” has a weak point: “we” consists of many stressed people. “we” can be manipulated and is manipulated currently.

So to me, stopping the actual perpetrators makes much more sense, and just that they are hard to reach does not mean we should fall back on reminding consumers as the only thing we do.

So i can go this far: reminding consumers is fine as long as it is not the only thing. Including “so we can force producers to do better” would be a good first step, since we do not have any other channel how to reach them.

@admitsWrongIfProven

I agree that messaging and choice of words are important from a strategic point of view: without ever lying, we can decide to stress one argument or another. And I admit my approach is not the one that would gain more supporters. But I have a tiny reach and PR is not my strength anyway; and I am only moderately confident about all this, so my interest is to gather counterarguments and spark discussion.

“So ‘exactly what we buy and use’ has a weak point: ‘we’ consists of many stressed people. ‘we’ can be manipulated and is manipulated currently. So to me, stopping the actual perpetrators makes much more sense.”

My problem with that is related to what I mentioned above about my not being completely sure about all this: I would not want all farms, fish farms, slaughterhouses, etc banned by law tomorrow. I very much prefer that consumers (and voters) push for them to become gradually irrelevant, extremely expensive, rare, frown upon.

@tripu That’s all anyone could reasonably expect about the messaging: awareness. Just by having that, the probability that future messaging gets better rises a lot.

And to your wish: i fully agree. Outlawing from today to tomorrow would have horrible consequences. Mass slaughter would be the best the existing animals could expect, since there are no suitable natural habitats left for the amount alive (both in your and my country).

@tripu Thinking of another angle:
Since producers use ads, one can assume that people can choose between your message and something that makes them feel good.
Considering that who does not see a problem with the current usage of animals is probably not a particularly critical thinker, emotions will probably play a major role here.

So i would suggest that any message that is perceived as “You are doing it wrong!” will have little positive effect, since there is a whole world of fantasy available as an alternative.
I am not asking you to join the ranks of manipulators, as that is unethical. But please consider the delivery, if you do agree that we should push back against the producers choices (not just animal products, also gadgets that are only bought due to ads, not out of necessity), then “We should push back against unethical offers.” is not manipulation. But it should be much more palatable.

If there were to form some kind of concerted action in this spirit, it might even help me overcome the problems i have with not consuming animal products.

@admitsWrongIfProven

That too.

But I’m in the richest 2% globally, know quite many people who are probably in the 1%, and none of them use private jets. The impact of that is at the very end of the tail of the distribution, perhaps a fraction of a fraction of the 1%.

I would absolutely tell a rich person to avoid flying private. But it’s way more cost-effective to have hundreds of millions of people switch to plant-based diets.

Both initiatives can (should) coexist.

@tripu This misses a very important point… While almost all land suitable for crops is also suitable for animals the reverse isnt true. In fact it is quite often the case animals are raised on land explicitly not suitable for crops. I dont know the exact breakdown, and that would be important to evaluate this fairly. But I know from my interaction with farmers that a great many of them raise their livestock on mountainous land not suited for crops and use fertile farmland mostly for crops.. Even when the land is flat and not mountainous it is often unsuitable for crops due to the makeup of the soil (too rocky, no good drainage, etc)

@freemo @tripu I would guess the real answer to this would be “we should try, but profits as a measure are preventing that”.
Measuring something is often a problem, but especially if those measuring are profiting from it.
Full disclosure: i am eating animals, and aware i am doing something wrong here.
I would like to improve, but everything feels like fighting windmills. If i recycle, how many rich people commission a ride to space for fun, rendering it useless? This is not the only thing i would critizise, but it is endemic at this stage.

@admitsWrongIfProven Yes, those profiting are going to be a bit bias in this regard for sure. But lets not forget the activaists trying to save the world, as desirable as their goal may be, are equally bias and going to produce bad numbers in the other direction (this very info-graphic is an example of that as I pointed out)…. in other words, the problem in getting accurate data is not one of profit so much as one of bias.

@freemo The problem i see is people oriented for profit are leading this, with no regard for the future.
Sometimes, there are great leaders, planning ahead. I do not see that right here, right now. Only those in power clinging to it.
If there was an inkling of an attempt, i would hold hope. I do not see that.

@freemo Dwelling a bit longer on this…
It is patently absurd that we are dwelling on who is right, when there is no actual attempt at improving our situation by anyone in power.
Trying and failing, that is human, and that cannot be helped.
Not trying and keeping others from a life worth living, that is vile.
That is all i wanted to say. Welcome to my ted talk.

@freemo And i sit here, and i wrote all the reasonable things i could think of. And i read what you wrote again. And i see you are trying to see the good in the world.

“The activists trying to see the good in the world”

Do you see how pathetic that is, for us as a species?
There are people trying to save us, with bad data and no weapons to speak of. Getting beat up, maybe killed. (yes, maybe killed. german police is not that much more delicate than american)

The other side is people with rank and entitlement, saying it is clear the activists are terrorists. If this did not come out clearly where you are, it is here. They are saying that.

I was told Noam Chomsky is a bad source lately. By someone purporting to be nice, not a maga weirdo.

It would not do to say that we are fucked, would it?

@admitsWrongIfProven

“I would like to improve, but everything feels like fighting windmills.”

When I was younger and more outspoken, I did what I could to encourage others to adopt a vegan diet. It seemed hopeless at the time, however, I’m pretty sure that I had a hand in Bill Clinton adopting a vegan diet many years later.

Today it is easy to have a vegan diet. Back then it was much harder; no options in restaurants, etc.

@freemo @tripu

@Pat @freemo @tripu That is both inspiring and disheartening.
On the one hand, success.
On the other, bigger evils lurk still.
A big thing i seek is proportionality. If i do a little nice thing, will it improve the world?
And i want to say: victim blaming is not cool. Not to you, pat, no connection. But we need to see that blaming people for small mistakes is not the right thing to do when there are greater evils.
Stop the most damaging problem first.

@admitsWrongIfProven

“I would like to improve, but everything feels like fighting windmills. If i recycle, how many rich people commission a ride to space for fun, rendering it useless?”

I encounter that line of reasoning very often and, respectfully, I think it is bogus.

A couple ways to see that:

  • When a billionaire wastes a gazillion dollars and tons of CO₂ to have a space walk, he is not “rendering your recycling useless”. Those things don’t cancel each other out. A world with wasteful space walks where @admitsWrongIfProven does not recycle what is sensible to recycle is worse than a world with wasteful space walks — full stop.
  • I bet you are “rich”. If you avoid your responsibility, you are providing excuses not to do their part to the next in line (mid-income people, not to mention poor people).
  • You would not dare use that argument when talking about big evils. You do not hit your spouse, steal money from your neighbour, throw chemical waste in a river, or torture lizzards — but you know for sure that there are lots and lots of serial killers, child molesters, criminals, war lords, genocidal rulers, etc. You do what is right, because it’s right. Why then should we accept that argument for little evils?

/cc @freemo

@tripu @freemo
You certainly are right that i am - on a global perspective - rich. It is also correct that others doing bad things does not mean one should follow suit.

But it is beside the point. I never argued that eating meat was ethical, merely that i was not able to stop so far.
Just that i am relatively rich does not mean i am without fault, it does not exempt me from struggles.

What i described with the sentence you cited was meant to show that i am struggling. Not in a fight-for-your-life way, but in a struggle-to-be-happy way.

It takes a lot more energy to get motivated to do something if everything around seems to fall apart. I do what i can, i have several things going that are good.

Easy pickings first, i never wanted to fly, i never did. Having a car was more effort than it was worth, car gone. Electronic devices? Used as long as possible, no replacements for status symbol reasons. “Things” in general, i am as practical as possible.

But that specific fault of mine about eating meat remains. Because i can’t find the energy to change.

Sure, others have it way worse. But that does not make it easier for me.

@freemo @tripu the madness starts when good meadows are plowed and used for crops, killing an important habitat (at least in middle europe), removing a CO2 sink and ruining the soil for a very long time as it’s prone to erosion. i’ve seen this being done to plan corn for bio-gas - of course they need artificial fertilized for it - total madness :)

it may certainly not “optimal” to have ruminants on green land, but they create food from plants humans never could consume. everyone talks about reducing climate impact.

it also doesn’t make sense to drop one of the most important local protein and fat sources in cold and moderate climates, instead transporting stuff around the globe.

one thing that should happen though is that livestock is again raised in more traditional ways, really grazing on meadows etc.

@freemo

“It is quite often the case animals are raised on land explicitly not suitable for crops.”

If 23% of agricultural land currently dedicated to crops provides 83% of necessary calories worldwide, we would need to “reclaim” only an additional 4.7% of land from livestock usage in order to feed everyone only with plants. Even looking at protein sources, only 11.3% of land would have to be reallocated from “animals” to “plants”.

So even if it were “often the case” that land used for animals can’t be used for plants, it looks like we could still do the switch.

/cc @bonifartius

@tripu @bonifartius

You are assuming the land reclaimed from animals would have the same caloric output per acre, thats a faulty assumption.

@freemo @tripu @bonifartius Would be interesting to see what stopping factory farming would do.
So hear me out: Stop factory farming(i.e. where animals are crammed in confined spaces), rededicate the lands farmed for animal food for those to produce human food. Leave the grazing grounds and animals there untouched and see if the meat output from those is needed.

I think we should really differentiate grazing and factory farmed animals. Both for climate (factory farming can be scaled a lot) and from an animal cruelty (obvious, yes?) perspective.

Edit: And if something can be scaled for profit, it will be in current societies.

@freemo

That’s true. I don’t have that information.

But note that we can’t assume that land reclaimed from animals would have lower caloric output, either.

What we do know is that one unit of land used for crops produces 16.3× as many calories and 6.8× as many proteins than one unit of land used for animals, on average.

Since we currently use more than three times as much land for animals than for plants, even assuming very conservative decreases in production, it seems the switch would be for better (less suffering, less land, less water, fewer antibiotics, less pollution, less CO₂).

I agree that if the vast majority of land used for animals now were pastures that are mostly useless for anything else, then the switch wouldn’t be feasible. But is that the case?

/cc @bonifartius

@tripu

But note that we can’t assume that land reclaimed from animals would have lower caloric output, either.

Actually we can. We know livestock can be raised on both land suitable for crops and land that isnt. We also know that a lot, and perhaps even the vast majority, are raised on rocky terrain where crops cant be grown. Therefore since anywhere from some to most of the land reclaimed from animals has 0 caloties per acre, on average we know for a fact such land will have less output than current land used for crops.

The only thing we dont know is exactly how much of the land is suitabke for crops, we just know its considerably less than 100%

All of the rest of your post ia moot since it assumes thibgs we dont know to be true about reclained land.
@bonifartius

@tripu

Another flaw is your assumption that the feed for livestock is taking away from land grown for humans. This too is not true. Generally livestock are fed the food waste from the part of the food we cant eat. So the edible parts go to us and the human inedible parts go to the livestock, either that or the graze on grasses on mou tainous land not suitable for crops.

So everythi g about your estimates are based on faulty assumptions.

@bonifartius

@freemo @tripu @bonifartius Huh, i thought that food waste was going to military rations, the more you know…

Joke aside, i heard of crops grown specifically for animal feed, so i highly doubt the assertion of yours that animals were only fed food waste.

A quick online search seems to confirm this, lots of results for “crops grown for animal feed”, for example:
vox.com/2014/8/21/6053187/crop
They even cite a source :-)

About those mountainous lands, the biggest climate killers (among non-humans) are cows from what i hear. Do they come with retrofit kits for mountainous areas?

@admitsWrongIfProven

Nothing is 100%. Only 14% of food stock for livestock is edible at all by humans. Even less so is palattable to humans. But yes very little is grown exclusively for livestock

@tripu @bonifartius

@freemo @tripu @bonifartius
Well, what is grown right now would of course need to be changed to crops that are palatable for humans. You didn’t think we want to redirect the animal feed to humans, right?

@admitsWrongIfProven

No your missing the point 14% is food suitabke to humans. 50% or so is grass (most of which on rocky or.mountainous land that cant grow crops). The overwhelming remainder are things like like stalks and leaves, the waste product of harvest. Yes we do sometimes have crops specifically to feed animals, but it isnt the bulk of it.

@tripu @bonifartius

@admitsWrongIfProven

To give specific numbers it is ….

14% edible (13% of which is grain)
46% grass (primarily land not suitable for crops)
19% residues from processing crops for humans
8% fodder crops (crops grown specific for animals)
5% from crop seeds
8% by products and other inedibly byproducts
@tripu @bonifartius

@freemo @tripu @bonifartius Hmm, the source of the link i provided says the following:
“3.1. Global crop allocations
We investigated crop allocations both in terms of calorie
content and protein content. We find that on a global basis,
crops grown for direct human consumption represent 67%
of global crop production (by mass), 55% of global calorie
production, and 40% of global plant protein production
(table 2). Feed crops represent 24% of global crop production
by mass. However since feed crops like maize, soybeans, and
oil seed meal are dense in both calories and protein content,
feed crops represent 36% of global calorie production and
53% of global plant protein production. “

So 24% versus 8%. Seems too large a gap to be explained by the age of my source (2013).

Can you please cite your source?

@admitsWrongIfProven

So first, i foubd a number on grazing. So cows that graze 67% of them graze on land not suitable for crops

fao.org/3/ar591e/ar591e.pdf

The source for the percentages in my last response is here:
sciencedirect.com/science/arti

@tripu @bonifartius

@freemo
Hmm, fao.org confuses me. I click on something about proposals for food stuff, i end up with articles about ukraine ^^

The sciencedirect link seems a bit broken. The conclusion ends with “The production of global feed requires 2.5 billion ha of land, which is…”
Funny? Purple? The powerhouse of the cell?

Not sure if i want to trust a source that cuts off in the middle of a sentence, or is that a preview of a payed article?

In any case, factory farmed animals don’t graze, so the grazing grounds not being farmable does not contradict the suggestion to shut those down.

@tripu @bonifartius

@admitsWrongIfProven

No but factory farms do still consume mostly food waste, converting inedible food into edible food. That is an argument against shutting it down.

@tripu @bonifartius

@freemo @tripu @bonifartius Hm well, the question is if that is true, could not find any numbers on that - trade secrets?

@admitsWrongIfProven

The study i provided addresses it with 86% of food stock being inedible for humans

@tripu @bonifartius

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@bonifartius

“The madness starts when good meadows are plowed and used for crops. […] I’ve seen this being done to plan corn for bio-gas.”

Agreed. I was referring to food only.

“It may certainly not ‘optimal’ to have ruminants on green land, but they create food from plants humans never could consume.”

But we don’t need to raise ruminants to transform inedible plants into meat and dairy. We can grow edible plants in the first place, using far less resources and polluting less, and still feed everyone with that. That is why the current situation is not optimal (as you admit).

“It also doesn’t make sense to drop one of the most important local protein and fat sources in cold and moderate climates, instead transporting stuff around the globe.”

It makes total sense if the net impact of growing elsewhere + transporting is smaller than growing locally — and that seems to be the case very often.

(Only disadvantage I can think of: food sovereignty, resilience against geopolitical turmoil.)

/cc @freemo

@freemo @bonifartius @tripu transporting is very expensive. I've been vegenarian for 30 years but I make tens times more than average wage over here. being vegetarian is crazy expensive in cold regions. I mean keeping normal health state, not eating noodeles and bread every day - such a diet kills people faster than cold. plus people cannot provide enough vitamins in vegan foods, some vitamins and important acids are not contained in plants. so it anyway needs an industry to produce these vitamins somehow and vitamins are expensive too.

@tripu

But we don’t need to raise ruminants to transform inedible plants into meat and dairy. We can grow edible plants in the first place, using far less resources and polluting less, and still feed everyone with that. That is why the current situation is not optimal (as you admit).

you have to distinguish growing food to feed it to ruminants and having ruminants grazing on meadows/eating hay from meadows when the weather is too harsh.

to grow edible plants on soil where there now are meadows requires heaps of fertilizer and is a loss of habitat. it doesn’t make any sense, especially not from an ecological perspective.

on the other hand having ruminants converting plant material from these soils into something human edible is almost free lunch.

It makes total sense if the net impact of growing elsewhere + transporting is smaller than growing locally — and that seems to be the case very often.

i think it is dangerous to view this only from the perspective of “impact”. for plant-only food you always need to fortify it with synthetic vitamins etc. which requires chemical industry requiring fossil fuels.

(Only disadvantage I can think of: food sovereignty, resilience against geopolitical turmoil.)

this is one of the reasons why there are food shortages in the 3rd world now, local traditional food gets replaced with imported cheap/free (aid) food produced on an industrial scale.

2ct personal semi-well reasoned opinion:
i think this is also one of the reasons why we have so many problems in the 1st world now: we replaced people with machinery in a sector which gave many relatively untrained people jobs which made deep sense - feeding others. now we have many relatively untrained people in the social systems with rotting brains due to bore out, ultra cheap food and farmers who barely can live despite all the upscaling due to industrialized agriculture. would make more sense to replace the industrialized agriculture with an ecological version also with more manual labor again. raising livestock has a place in there too, but it’ll be for the occasional roast on sunday and holidays, not cheap meat abundance of today.

@freemo

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