Ok, so first and foremost, I am in favour of less suffering, climate change and globally transitioning to diets that promote that.

Now, it was !mildlyinfuriating that the study title was only mentioned as a reference after the article and ads. Here it is: Kozicka, M., Havlík, P., Valin, H. et al. Feeding climate and biodiversity goals with novel plant-based meat and milk alternatives. Nature Communications 14, 5316 (2023).

The study is very ambitious in scale, there are a lot of variables at play, and measuring social things is not an exact science. This means there are a lot of assumed values for various things. Too many for me to be comfortable with the conclusions derived on first read, even if I generally agree with the proposals. This level of assumption gets worse when reducing the paper to a headline.

Meat, milk alternatives could slash food system emissions a third: study

Yes, if… we ignore the entire animal fats and non-food animal product markets, apply supply and demand interventions globally, do not account for energy use in conversion/development of equipment, assume uniform instant transition rates, assume the historical trends of equitable food supplies continues as is, amongst many other things.

The reason I went looking into the study was because I was interested to see how they dealt with reduced yields from crops due to increased natural disasters (they don’t), and if they have factored in the declined/declining nutritional value of mass produced crops that requires much more food to be eaten to get the same nutritional content from the same produce as 100 years ago (they don’t).

The more of it I read, the more terrifying the outlook is. The linked article about the study is dangerously superficial, I worry that it encourages complacency, even if it’s a good-natured attempt to encourage people to make constructive choices and keep morale up.