Awwww, that was such a nice story! Read it today in one sitting. Good recommendation!
palimpsest
joined 2 months ago
This is just rage bait, no?
On soy usage: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/soybean-production-and-use
Awwww, that was such a nice story! Read it today in one sitting. Good recommendation!
This is just rage bait, no?
On soy usage: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/soybean-production-and-use
As a vegan I'm obviously biased from a moral standpoint, but I also found some of the given arguments kinda weak on some points, while others are true. I was mainly interested in going through the arguments for fun.
Nutritional argument/Game Changers part: This one I skipped mostly, as any argument that some particular kind of diet is more or less healthy depends on how the diet itself is structured and whether one takes it upon themselves to meet all the different macro- and micronutrients, be it with supplements or not. On B12, it's often supplemented into the feed of factory-farmed animals if I remember correctly, and EPA/DHA can be found in algae, as that's how fish get it in the first place.
Animal argument: There are 3 statements here: first, that if we all went vegan all the currently eaten animals like cows and pigs would vanish; second, that even a vegan diet uses so much land that it leads to the death of animals anyway; and third, that the mass production of meat is wrong and no one wants it. The first is true. There would be no cows, pigs or chickens, or at least not in their current numbers. But is this even bad? Most farm animals are overbred just to be better products, which leads to painful and miserable lives for them. So in my opinion, putting a stop to the artificial breeding of millions of them would be a worthwhile endeavor. In our current system, a good chunk of our land use goes to feed for farm animals, so living vegan would lead to a reduction in overall land use. The only true kernel here is that there is some land which isn't usable for growing crops but could be used for grazing animals or growing animal feed. But would this yield enough animal feed to sustain our current consumption? Nope. Which leads to the third point: if we want to consume as much meat as a society as we currently do, doing it in an industrial fashion is kinda the only realistic option, as free-roaming animals would need much more space.
The planet argument: These seem especially weak. First, natural vs. non-natural methane: obviously both are relevant, but stopping the methane from cows through a different diet is much simpler than attempting a worldwide extermination of termites, cockroaches, etc. And that it gets dismissed in climate reports is also pretty weird, since natural sources of methane are taken into account. The ppm part seems like straight-up pseudoscience: the amount in ppm isn't really a good indicator without taking into account the previous baseline, how strong it is in the context of the greenhouse effect (about 25x compared to CO2) and other factors. Cyanide kills someone in sub-gram territory, but we wouldn't say we didn't believe in its toxicity because of that.
Like, there are some interesting arguments to make or discussions to have, such as the use of land we can't grow crops on, or how to handle carnivorous animals we keep as pets, but most of the points given here are pretty undercomplex.