I became a #vegetarian (aspiring #vegan) almost exclusively to contribute to reduce animal #suffering.
With time, I realised that the other reasons to avoid animal-based foods are surprisingly strong, too.
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1️⃣ Land usage:
Plant-based calories (and proteins) are much more efficient and require way less land and water than meat and dairy.
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.”
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.
@tripu Comparatively, how much could the richest 1% of humans reduce our footprint by not using private jets and similar debauchery?
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.
