I'm the author. Ho boy. Just a few clarifications based on things I'm seeing here:
"a vegetarian diet, and specially a vegan diet, is A LOT less awful then an omni diet both environmentally, ethically and considering health impact."
I agree. Nowhere did I contradict this.
"He argues vegetarians eat more staples."
No, I argue that the most vegetarian diets are composed primarily of staples. Subtle but extremely important distinction.
"Showing pictures of hippies to re-enforce the idea that vegetarians/vegans are some treehugging margin group."
I dug my own grave here. Had no idea this article would go viral. Oops.
"meat eating is simply not sustainable"
Correct; CAFO industrial meat that's eaten without an ear toward seasonality or ecological propriety is pure hell. However, sustainable food production systems will rely on modeling natural patterns (which is the opposite of what nearly all farms today do), and that will rely heavily on animals - though far, far, FAR fewer of them - for mineral cycling and fertility, as do nearly all native ecosystems. I don't have the space here to talk about fertility via animals vs nitrogenous covers; may address that in a later article.
"Cowspiracy"
This movie is directed at the industrial meat supply chain: the land-expansive background farms that feed CAFOs and the CAFOs themselves. I advocate for neither.
"The author is also playing the false dichotomy vegetarian omnivorous"
There is an entire paragraph in my article where I explain that not all vegetarian diets, and not all omnivorous diets, are created equal.
"Had the author consulted the literature, he'd know that the environmental credentials of grass-fed beef are extremely suspect; some studies suggest that the carbon footprint is actually greater than intensive feedlot beef and the land use is absolutely vast. He'd know that only a handful of animal sources of protein have equivalent CO2 emissions to plant sources - intensively reared poultry, eggs and some inshore seafoods."
The increased carbon footprint of grass-finished beef is based on grass finished beef living longer than grain finished beef because they take longer to finish. The studies I've seen regarding grass/grain cattle emissions are limited to examination of lifetime carbon output directly from the cow through expiration. They do not examine 1.) the sequestration of carbon into soil built by ecologically managed, rotationally-grazed herds, 2.) the carbon output of CAFO manure lagoons, 3.) the carbon footprint of the grains fed to CAFO animals. In short, the studies do not address the net carbon effect of the entire system, and they only address the two "traditional" methods of raising cattle, neither of which I endorse.
"He's very clear that eating a fully vegetarian diet now is worse, footprint-wise, that eating a mildly omnivorous one."
Not quite. I said it's POSSIBLE for a fully vegetarian diet to be worse, footprint wise, than a plant-centric omnivorous one. I.e. there is no deterministic link between vegetarian diets and sustainability.
"Besides some flimsy claims about who consumes the most staples"
Again, I make no claims about who eats the most staples. I make a claim that the most vegetarian diets are principally composed of staples.
"It's not much about vegetarianism, except to attack it for clickbait reasons."
Absolutely correct. I had to choose between an accurate title that almost no one would read, or a caustic one that would stimulate debate and get me yelled at. And so here we are :-)
"The author should cite the article(s) that claim vegetarian diets alone will save the planet"
As stated in the first sentence, this article was prompted by a slew of responses from vegetarians to my previous article about organic agriculture, nearly all of whom argued that the "simple" solution to food sustainability was to switch to a vegetarian diet.
"Question: aren't 'local', small-scale farms more resource-intensive per unit of food grown than factory farms, not less?"
Yes. However, I'm advocating a form of agriculture that doesn't exist yet.
