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this is based on poore-nemecek 2018, a paper so fraught with methodological faux pas as to be a warning to anyone trying to do a metastudy.
Following the trail of your comment: https://ourworldindata.org/land-use-diets does indeed cite https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aaq0216, but I’d love it if you could provide more details on your criticisms of methodology.
this paper is over half a decade old, and i’ve been whining about it pretty much that whole time, but i don’t recall the last time i actually dug into the methodology. to my recollection, they call it a metastudy and they compare LCAs from disparate studies, but LCAs themselves are not transferable between studies. that’s just one point.
if i recall correctly, they also used some california water study as the basis of their water use claims, but the water use included things like cottonseed, which is not grown for cattle feed, and using it in cattle feed is actually a conservation of resources. cotton is a notoriously light and water-demanding crop, so using the heavy byproduct to add to the water use of california dairies is, to me, dishonest.
i have no doubt that if i were to slice up this paper citation-by-citation, every one of them would have some misrepresented facts or methodology being repackaged as, i don’t say this lightly, vegan propaganda.
Dug up the paper in question for anyone curious: https://sci-hub.se/https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aaq0216. At a cursory glance, I’m not seeing any of the referenced concerns. But, y’know, down vote away I guess.
I encourage you to read the citations and learn about LCAs
i was shocked when i realized you have to read absolutely every tiny bit about a study. i hate that. reading is not the problem. understandig it is.
i mistrust large studies, i think they are bloated intenionally.
So what’s a better study or metastudy? The actual results, aside from poultry being weirdly low-resource, seem about right when you consider the way energy usually moves through food webs.
That’s “Life Cycle Assessment”, for anyone else that’s wondering.
The actual results
are meaningless, because they misuse the source data.
So what’s a better study or metastudy?
personally, i believe that attempts to quantify any complex system into discrete metrics is likely to have blind spots and misunderstand the system as a whole. i think that if you are concerned about the environmental impacts of agriculture, the correct approach is to evaluate each operation on its own and try to optimize it for inputs and outputs.
You can probably see how actual statistics are useful for policy or public discussion, though, right?
We aren’t going to fix any big picture problem by leaving it up to the businesses pedaling whichever product. Like, you wouldn’t apply that to an oil well, would you?
I can see how politicians and bureaucrats would prefer statistics, but I don’t believe that’s a good source for public policy myself, no.
And priests prefer faith. How do you think it should work?
If you’re against science as a concept maybe I shouldn’t even bother.
@commie @CanadaPlus dude, this ain’t no hill you need to die on …
Thanks? I didn’t think there was any dying yet. I wasn’t even arguing there, professionals are often happy to point you to their preferred sources.
Do you often feel attacked by vegans? What exactly is vegan propaganda? Everyone uses studies on both sides, that’s how unsettled science works. Are most of them wrong? Of course, because again its not settled.
Seems convenient to discount the other viewpoints studies as propaganda when the opposing side is funded just as precariously.
Seems convenient to discount the other viewpoints studies
the only viewpoint I care about is the truth. the only studies I care about have scientific rigor.
Everyone uses studies on both sides, that’s how unsettled science works. Are most of them wrong? Of course, because again its not settled.
this is gold
the joke wrote itself.
Its not my fault you choose to interpret my words that way. All I’m doing is referring back to the unsettled part.
You say you only listen to science, then when people bring you science you say its the wrong kind of science, but never get specific. Sort of how you cherry pick half sentences of mine and make stupid jokes about them.
Is the goal here to just defend your position to th3 bitter end? You aren’t even in the main group vegans would take issue with, yet you act like you are their spokesman.
Honestly, if you are just going to reply in bad faith and hyperbole just dont bother. The only reason I replied to you here is because I thought you could carry on a discussion, but apparently thats the crux of the whole matter on this site isnt it.
when people bring you science you say its the wrong kind of science, but never get specific
I’ve been explicit.
Is the goal here to just defend your position to th3 bitter end?
my position is that we should only believe true things. and, yes, I mean to defend that to the bitter end.
if you are just going to reply in bad faith and hyperbole just dont bother.
I haven’t done that once.
Think of all the parking lots we could build with that land!
Looks like we could change to just eating poultry and have roughly the same effect
Poultry is definitely the more climate friendly of the meats but it doesn’t come without problems
There’s still increased risks of pandemic with factory farmed chickens and most chickens are raised in inhumane conditions
lots and lots of ammonia. and they use no land because they are all in overcrowded chicken factories.
this is exactly what i do: replace most of my beef consumption with pork, chicken, and kangaroo
i don’t cut out beef entirely because i think abstinence is a recipe for relapse (if i reeeeeally feel like steak or a beef burger i’ll do it but that happens maybe 3 times per year)
i do not miss beef
looking at the dairy part of this however i may need to do more research and move to other milks in my coffee!
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It’s what your graph shows! I question if that could possibly be accurate, though. Chickens are not perpetual motion machines.
I suppose this doesn’t take into account more humane animal farming? Like not keeping a million chickens and three long barns? Or pigs with a livable space?
The thing with pigs is: they eat a metric fuck-ton, so a lot of that land usage is to grow grain for feed.
That’s the vegans’ main point – we grow food to feed it to our food.
pigs are mostly fed crop seconds or other waste product. it’s just not true that we are growing food exclusively for pigs.
the soybean meal is literally the byproduct of pressing soybeans for oil.
Byproduct does not equal waste product. Plastic is a byproduct, so is gasoline. Your conflating the ideas.
it would be waste if we didn’t have a use for it
The use predates the creation of it. There had already been a use for it the moment it was made. It has never once been considered a waste product except in the style of argument you are making right now.
Yes, although I suspect we’d actually make less soy oil without the demand for feed. I’m honestly not even sure what it’s used for; most of the vegetable oils on sale where I live are different.
The corn case is pretty unambiguous. DDGS is a byproduct, white grease is probably a byproduct (maybe of pigs, which is “fun”), the rest looks purpose-made but isn’t relevant here.
I suspect we’d actually make less soy oil without the demand for feed.
i don’t know how we could prove this.
It’s the perpetual problem in economics, right? That’s fine though, I think I’ve made a reasonable case, and this isn’t a court trial with an explicit standard of proof.
you don’t feed pigs corn that you could sell to humans. there is a reason it ended up in the barnyard instead of the grocery store.
Yeah, you specifically plant feed corn, instead of grocery-type corn. Also why stealing corn cobs off the roadside can backfire.
field corn is also used in ethanol production, and the stalks and cobs become fodder, which, yes, is also feed, but it’s a highly efficient use of the plant and land, given the outputs.
Sure, but you could also grow food corn, so it’s not really a flaw in this graph.
and you have lots of corn for vegan food products, and the chemical industry, and biogas production, and much more.
Yeah, that would make it even worse. I’m not sure by how much though, because like the other person said this is representative of cropland.
They still haven’t figured out a way to humanely slaughter animals let alone keep them in fulfilling environments that would be impossible to tell from their wild counterparts.
We can’t afford to let animals live full lives. Pigs are butchered at 6 months but can live decades naturally.
We haven’t even begun to approach the conversation of maybe possibly being able to in the maybe distant future being able to consider a humane way to keep animals and then also harvest meat from them when they pass.
I’ve been avoiding poultry for fucking nothing? I’m gonna go eat a thousand chicken nuggies
also pork and game meats like kangaroo are pretty fine afaik
I like how poultry-inclusive diets get us 95% of the way there.
I think things would be markedly better with eating only fish and eggs, although I think the fishing is out of hand already, and egg chickens can be kept in just as horrible of conditions as meat chickens.
that’s conflating ideas though… climate change may very well be an extinction level event… animal cruelty is upsetting, but by far the lesser of 2 issues here
They go hand in hand, the meat industry is so polluting because of the commercial scale which is also why its so inhumane.
I think many would settle for just a much smaller meat industry. Maybe a more careful one.
hand in hand implies intrinsically linked - if we could solve the climate crisis tomorrow by stopping the consumption of beef and lamb, and switching to poultry which is treated much worse, then that’s good for one and bad for the other
Well switching from meat to meat obviously will do nothing. In fact smaller animals like birds means more death per person. But that aside, I was talking about rating meat vs not. And when I mentioned most would at least be happy with no commercial farming that meant for all animals.
Its a much different conversation when someone is hunting for their family vs whatever you want to call this meat-is-candy world we live in now. Meat should be considered a delicacy, and rarely eaten, and it should be priced appropriately for what it is. Meat and dairy wouldnt be profitable without subsidies in the first place, which is another way of saying failed business.
What’s new to me in this data is that the increase in cropland for humans for a vegan diet is still less that what we currently feed to animals in spite of the enormous amount of pasture they also require.
Yep. As a rule of thumb, 1/10th of the energy makes it to the next trophic level in any food chain. We might be doing better than that, but you’re still going to to be wasting a lot of land at 30% end-to-end efficiency.
except that the food that is fed to livestock is largely crop seconds or parts of crops that people can’t or won’t eat. so we need to find a whole other use for those parts of the plants or accept it as waste.
I know a lot of people who grow feed on prime agricultural land. Like, can you eat alfalfa? Have you ever tried feed varieties of maize?
people definitely eat alfalfa sprouts. to be clear, i didn’t say no land is used explicitly for feed, but much of the land that is used for growing feed is actually growing some crop that will produce multiple products, with feed being only one of them.
Yeah, I like alfalfa sprouts too. That’s not what the fields here are full of though.
It’s not my lived experience that it’s all or even mostly byproducts. Unless you have hard numbers, that seems like the meat industry equivalent of “the climate has always changed”.
dig into poore-nemecek, and you’ll find onions are part of the feed crop.
Or we can use it as compost, which we should be moving towards producing and using instead of manure as fertilizer for a lot of our agriculture. That way it doesn’t go to waste even if it does get ‘thrown out’.
even so, we would still probably expand cropland to feed a vegan world
We would need to expand the cropland growing food for humans, yes. But there is a lot of cropland currently growing types of corn and hay that we as humans can’t eat, just so we can feed animals and get a less than 20% return on calories from the ‘food’ we get when we eat animal muscle and organs.
Which is why our total crop land use would go down if we didn’t eat animals: we need less space to grow calories and nutrients for us that we do to feed the animals we eat. So much gets wasted with the current process that it is unsustainable, and we need to start shifting this now to avoid running into severe land and water deficiencies with the changing climate.
like when cocal cola is stealing the water of whole regions by taking it for basically free, and selling it? or like when in south spain people have no water, because all those vegtable farms?
our total crop land use would go down if we didn’t eat animals
even poore-nemecek doesn’t say this. do you have a source that does?
well that part is just logical
about 10% of the energy and nutrients animals consume get passed down into humans (ie for 10kg of feed we get 1kg of meat - i’m actually surprised it’s even this much!)
that means if we get those nutrients from plants directly for every 10kg of plant we get - perhaps not 10kg since there’s still waste, but you don’t waste 90% of the plant to consume
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So my diet is better than a vegan family of four? Glad I got that vasectomy.
There’s more than one way to save the earth :)
I looked at it for five seconds and I figured this doesnt work like this at all
How so?
oversimplification. letting out a lot of questions. leaving out why all of this is benificial at all. leaving out that science is really divided about vegan diet and its effects on health. lumping every climate, culture, agrarcultural practice in one pot.
there is no easy answers for complicated questions.
there can’t be when the question isn’t even clear in the first place.
take water, for example: people always talk about how farms and fields use up water. but, is that really true? water goes in a cycle. it never gets used up. if there is no pasture or field, water gets used up anyway. or do you go there to collect it? yes, its bad to taint your water soils with chemicals. but, then just don’t use them?
its plants, factories, chemical industry and cities that use up the water. because thats the water you have to recycle really hard.
or, take fischeries: they are not mentioned here, not on the graphs. but they destroy our planet as well, by ships, debris from nets, overfisching, crude oil that gets disposed of in the sae, and fish and shellfish farms are the tainting your water really really bad,
or take biogas farms: they use so much land for corn that it would make your head explode, corn gets used for all kinds of chemicals, it would not help if people ate vegan, since its use is in chemical industry and energy production, so the graph doesnt mention that either.
the whole thing is oversimplification.
Its about encouraging people to make better decisions, thats what the whole point of this type of research is. Its to entice people to head in that direction and see if we are right or not, because continuing the path we have been on is diasterous at best.
It shouldnt be so hard to see the goal of this type of graphic is to stoke conversation not to force everyone into a specific viewpoint. 50 years from now veganism might be considered abusive.
Its important to move forward, because doing nothing is moving backwards. There is no such this as neutral.
well. that attempt was kinda weak.
