Being vegan isn’t as good for humanity as you think
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Re: Being vegan isn’t as good for humanity as you think
#2The main point of the article appears to be that the vegan diet doesn't use the perennial cropland. Would be nice if they bothered to mention why. Are the perennial crops 100% feed crops and not something that humans can use, even in crazy reprocessed vegan food substitutes?
Re: Being vegan isn’t as good for humanity as you think
#3why do free masons would fight against veganism now?
because I have a blog that speacks about free masonry crimes and I am orthodox and hold lent and they see that lent could be justified with vegan movement and they fight God Christianity and lent
here is the blog
https://medium.com/@CyberBuyan
Re: Being vegan isn’t as good for humanity as you think
#4Interesting, if a bit vegan shaming :-p According to the research referenced a vegan diet is about 1.8x as efficient as a normal american diet. Seems pretty good for humanity.
Limiting meat consumption by ~50% would have a similar sustainability impact to a vegan diet.
W.K. Kellogg funded the research. Their grant: http://www.wkkf.org/grants/grant/2009/02/foodprints-and-food...
Re: Being vegan isn’t as good for humanity as you think
#5The main point of the article appears to be that the vegan diet doesn't use the perennial cropland. Would be nice if they bothered to mention why. Are the perennial crops 100% feed crops and not something that humans can use, even in crazy reprocessed vegan food substitutes?
It doesn't matter: it's a hit piece. Maximising 'the number of people that can be supported by existing farmland' is not the be all and end all of 'good for humanity'.
Re: Being vegan isn’t as good for humanity as you think
#6The main point of the article appears to be that the vegan diet doesn't use the perennial cropland. Would be nice if they bothered to mention why. Are the perennial crops 100% feed crops and not something that humans can use, even in crazy reprocessed vegan food substitutes?
Reading the actual study, I can't help but think that the authors are being intellectually dishonest. Their logic is thus:
> Cropland in perennial forages included hay crops and grazing on land which could be cropped but is used for pasture.
A: Perennial cropland is used as pasture for animal agriculture.
> Perennial cropland requirements were zero in the vegan diet.
B: Vegans don't require pastures for animal agriculture.
> The ovolacto- and lacto-vegetarian diets used about half of the cropland restricted to perennial forages, while the vegan diet used none of the restricted cropland.
C: Therefore the vegan diet wouldn't have any use for perennial cropland.
This would be true if perennial crops for humans didn't exist, but that's just not true. For example, we can grow perennial sunflower (!), grain (!!) and rice (!!!): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perennial_crop#Example_crops
Re: Being vegan isn’t as good for humanity as you think
#7Talk about a strawman. The world is no where near 100% vegan. The fact that all of humanity being vegan isn't the most efficient use of our resources has no bearing whether it's better for you, today, to be vegan.
100% of humans being cops is bad for humanity. Does that imply being a cop is not good for humanity?
Re: Being vegan isn’t as good for humanity as you think
#8The main point of the article appears to be that the vegan diet doesn't use the perennial cropland. Would be nice if they bothered to mention why. Are the perennial crops 100% feed crops and not something that humans can use, even in crazy reprocessed vegan food substitutes?
If I am reading the original paper correctly, there is a bottleneck with the vegan diet that essentially requires you to only use cultivated cropland to get enough of a balanced diet.
The vegan curve never flattens out, because it is entirely dependent on cultivated cropland, unlike the other diets:
https://images.elementascience.org/611000.elementa.f005.PNG_...
Re: Being vegan isn’t as good for humanity as you think
#9The main point of the article appears to be that the vegan diet doesn't use the perennial cropland. Would be nice if they bothered to mention why. Are the perennial crops 100% feed crops and not something that humans can use, even in crazy reprocessed vegan food substitutes?
Land is not a problem if vegetables come to reign, hydroponics and aeroponics will easily substitute the inefficient land-use.
Tom et al. (2015) [1] also show that in the US the switch to a vegan diet would be less efficient. But it's natural, from an economic perspective, that existing processes are optimized for efficiency and low costs and given the high demand for vegetables and fruits there would obviously be a huge incentive to optimize the production processes and lower the prices.
Vanham et al. (2013) [2,3] show that EU would benefit from a vegan diet when it comes to water usage.
Overall, it's quite obvious that the medical costs of today are extremely large mostly due to overconsumption of animal products. It is unfortunate that they can be easily overconsumed and thus cause health issues. Diet that includes animals is much more destructive when it comes to dead ocean zones, rainforest destruction, species extinction and water pollution, being the biggest factor in mentioned issues.
[1]: Energy use, blue water footprint, and greenhouse gas emissions for current food consumption patterns and dietary recommendations in the US http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10669-015-9577-y
[2]: The water footprint of the EU for different diets http://temp.waterfootprint.org/Reports/Vanham-Bidoglio-2014....
[3]: Potential water saving through changes in European diets http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0160412013...
Re: Being vegan isn’t as good for humanity as you think
#10Going vegan isn't supposed to be as good for humanity as possible -- it is supposed to be as good as possible for all conscious beings, including non-human animals. It would be rather surprising if the best diet for humans would also be the best diet for humans and animals taken together. On the other hand, it is encouraging that these two goals do not conflict for the most part: The paper only finds pretty minimal land-use efficiency gains if one mixes some animal products into a plant-based diet.