I hate that this used to be me.
Personal growth :)
:)
It’s especially ironic considering I’ve gone vegan this year.
Personal growth++
I’m a vegetarian.
I was, and still am, surprised by how often people will go into a long rant justifying why they eat meat to me as soon as they find out I’m vegetarian. All the while I’m just sat there, not saying anything, because I literally do not care whether or not they eat meat.
Me being a vegetarian is a personal choice for me and myself only. You do you. I don’t care. You don’t need to explain yourself to me. It makes me feel so awkward.
People will often ask me why I’m a vegetarian too. But it feels like a very personal and heavy question to ask someone immediately after finding out they’re vegetarian… I don’t especially want to talk about animals dying all the time and how it makes me sad especially to strangers.
Edit/Addition: It feels like a lot of focus is brought on how vegetarians/vegans force their views onto other people but my experience personally is non-vegetarians/vegans trying to force me into conversations about this topic.
While the initial reasoning is respectable, veganism is t without it’s flaws, several plants are not ethically sourced and either cause a lot of pollution, destroy habitats to be grown, or are grown via slavery, or a combo of all 3. The real issue is the systems that are in place across the food industry, plant and animal based.
That being said, they still come out ahead in comparison to animal-based foods due to the fact that you need to grow massive amounts of feed crops to raise other creatures. It turns out that pretty much every environmental metric comes out ahead
Transitioning to plant-based diets (PBDs) has the potential to reduce diet-related land use by 76%, diet-related greenhouse gas emissions by 49%, eutrophication by 49%, and green and blue water use by 21% and 14%, respectively, whilst garnering substantial health co-benefits
[…]
Plant-based foods have a significantly smaller footprint on the environment than animal-based foods. Even the least sustainable vegetables and cereals cause less environmental harm than the lowest impact meat and dairy products [9].
https://www.mdpi.com/2072-6643/14/8/1614/htm
In terms of workers, the meat industry is arguably worse on that front. It’s one of the most dangerous industries anywhere for workers
US meat workers are already three times more likely to suffer serious injury than the average American worker, and pork and beef workers nearly seven times more likely to suffer repetitive strain injuries
[…]
Amputations happen on average twice a week, according to the data
And there’s great risk of PTSD from the workers that you don’t see for harvesting crops
There is evidence that slaughterhouse employment is associated with lower levels of psychological well-being. SHWs [slaughterhouse workers] have described suffering from trauma, intense shock, paranoia, anxiety, guilt and shame (Victor & Barnard, 2016), and stress (Kristensen, 1991). There was evidence of higher rates of depression (Emhan et al., 2012; Horton & Lipscomb, 2011; Hutz et al., 2013; Lander et al., 2016; Lipscomb et al., 2007), anxiety (Emhan et al., 2012; Hutz et al., 2013; Leibler et al., 2017), psychosis (Emhan et al., 2012), and feelings of lower self-worth at work (Baran et al., 2016). Of particular note was that the symptomatology appeared to vary by job role. Employees working directly with the animals (e.g., on the kill floor or handling the carcasses) were those who showed the highest prevalence rates of aggression, anxiety, and depression (Hutz et al., 2013; Richards et al., 2013). https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/15248380211030243
Almonds are a big one that I know of. The vast majority of the world’s almonds are grown in California, a state that has been facing severe drought for years now (though maybe not so much this year), but somehow still finds hundreds of billions of gallons of water yearly to keep almond farms irrigated.
And eating almonds is one thing, but processing them into milk is an order of magnitude more wasteful. It takes about 400 almonds to make a half gallon of almond milk, and each one of those almonds requires a gallon of water to produce. So that’s 400 gallons of water spent to produce a half gallon of almond milk. A single almond tree can make about 30 gallons of almond milk per harvest, so we’re looking at 24,000 gallons of water consumed per tree, which yields a full shelf of Almond Breeze at a single grocery store.
And as farms keep expanding and conditions become drier and drier over time, it’s going to destroy the ecosystems of the state. And all so that people can have a decent milk alternative to have with their morning coffee and cereal.
got nothing against vegans it’s just when they try to force it into others
Very few will force it on others, though. Anyway, I find it hilarious how people can get riled up about the idea of a person not eating meat or any animal products. I’ve seen it often that they take it personally for some reason and will “compensate by eating extra bacon/steak/chicken”. It’s bonkers.
Yeah when I was a vegetarian kid a decade and a bit ago I was relatively quiet about it because I got sick of meat-eaters throwing bacon at me or trying to “gotcha” me with the classic desert island meme.
People take it personally because deep down everyone knows it is wrong to keep something as cruel as the meat and dairy industry alive, plus the huge environmental impacts on multiple fronts. So they get super defensive instead of confronting or accepting the fact that they’re doing the wrong thing for selfish reasons.
Eh, I don’t care what you eat. But I find very offensive, naive, and just plain wrong the idea that it’s impossible to sustainably raise animals for meat, eggs, dairy, etc as many vegans will try to insist.
Does it cost more? Yes. Can we raise as many as we do today using conventional farming techniques? No. Will/should we all cut back on our meat, dairy, etc? Yes. But, then again being more mindful of what we all eat is going to be required regardless, if we’re going to manage to feed everyone.
Claiming that something is on its whole sustainable is rather loosely defined (i.e what level of impact is considered sustainable and on what metrics), so let’s look a little closer. What many are saying there is that process is still going to inherently be much more inefficient compared to growing plants directly for human consumption
It turns out to be the case that the worst-case production of any plants-based production comes out ahead compared to best-case production of meat, dairy, etc. on virtually all environmental metrics
If I source my beef or lamb from low-impact producers, could they have a lower footprint than plant-based alternatives? The evidence suggests, no: plant-based foods emit fewer greenhouse gases than meat and dairy, regardless of how they are produced.
[…]
Plant-based protein sources – tofu, beans, peas and nuts – have the lowest carbon footprint. This is certainly true when you compare average emissions. But it’s still true when you compare the extremes: there’s not much overlap in emissions between the worst producers of plant proteins, and the best producers of meat and dairy.
https://ourworldindata.org/less-meat-or-sustainable-meat
Plant-based foods have a significantly smaller footprint on the environment than animal-based foods. Even the least sustainable vegetables and cereals cause less environmental harm than the lowest impact meat and dairy products [9].
https://www.mdpi.com/2072-6643/14/8/1614/htm
Even true of synthetic fertilizer usage compared to the best case of animal manure
Thus, shifting from animal to plant sources of protein can substantially reduce fertilizer requirements, even with maximal use of animal manure
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0921344922006528
In terms of biodiversity
Livestock farmers often claim that their grazing systems “mimic nature”. If so, the mimicry is a crude caricature. A review of evidence from over 100 studies found that when livestock are removed from the land, the abundance and diversity of almost all groups of wild animals increases
If we compare more typical production rather than best to worst, the differences are even more apparent
To produce 1 kg of protein from kidney beans required approximately eighteen times less land, ten times less water, nine times less fuel, twelve times less fertilizer and ten times less pesticide in comparison to producing 1 kg of protein from beef
Holy shit massive wall of text lol
Because I see quite a lot of misinformation in this area, I created a doc of sources where I put relevant quotes as I look into things. It’s now 28 pages. You’ll probably see more walls of text from me on that front :)
To be fair. There is much debate around whether livestock is indirectly carbon neutral with very valid studies on both sides
Please link any study on livestock being CO2-neutral. I’m very skeptical, but would love to read your source first.
The key is to farm or graze using regenerative methods. Current factory farming methods are detrimental to the soil and the rest of the environemnt in many ways. Bear in mind, however, that the largest contributor to greenhouse gasses is the healthcare sector, and that’s going to be a tough nut to crack.
got any reading on that ? legit never heard that before
See my comment further down the thread going into detail about how this is not the case https://lemmy.ml/comment/646750
Check out the “sodcasts” of Peter Ballerstedt on his YouTube channel. He’s a forage agronomist with a lot of knowledge. You may not like his conclusions, but he gives you the data to check them out.
I looked on google scholar to see any of their papers. Most of what I could find doesn’t seem to be exactly peer-reviewed articles nor are most really cited by any other papers. At that they are making rather bold claims with rather weak evidence
