Hey! Have you had a chance to watch the documentary? It touches on both personal and systematic opportunities to reduce our impact of food.
Also, some industries are so wasteful and resource-intensive that there’s really not a good way to reduce our impact to reasonable levels, other than swapping away from that food. For example, studies show that rearing cattle for meat is extremely inefficient, even on the most-efficient farms, when compared to things like legumes, per gram of protein.
I would never recommend poore nemecek 2018: every time I dig into the methodology I’m struck at how myopically supposed scientists can attempt to quantify a complex system like modern agriculture into discreet quantifiable metrics and then make recommendations without consideration of the widespread effects. it’s flawed coming and going.
The study is a meta study over 38,700 farms constituting 90% of global calories consumed though; would this still be considered a single metric? I’m looking for something else I can send to people if not this.
if I told you that I went to 38,700 farms myself and cataloged exactly how much land it was using, that doesn’t tell you what that land could be used for. it might not be useful for anything except farming. so the bare metric of land use isn’t helpful. and then we consider other footprints: water use, ghg emissions, lca’s.
none of these is able to give you an actual understanding of how the water is used or where the emissions come from or how LCA’s stack up against each other.
My favorite example is cotton: cotton is raised for textiles. it is very thirsty. it takes up some amount of land. The farming of it emits some amount of greenhouse gas. there is also waste product from the production of cotton: cotton seed. Cotton seed is fed to cattle. Even if we take the weight of the cottonseed that is fed to cattle and we take that portion of the crop by weight and we say that some portion of the crop by weight is responsible for a certain amount of water use and land use and greenhouse gas emissions, the truth is that cattle aren’t responsible for that. In fact feeding that cottonseed two cattle is a conservation of resources.
All of these metrics, all of the sources of the material, they all need to be reevaluated in a holistic manner. that doesn’t mean a meta study where you compare LCAs, a metric that itself is not supposed to be transferable between studies. it means actually doing the hard work of figuring out how to make every individual agricultural operation operate at its peak efficiency for the metrics that we want to see improved: water use, emissions, land use, run off, etc.
ideologically opposing animal agriculture is just going to leave a hole in the agricultural space where products had previously been diverted after becoming industrial waste now need to be used or become waste again.
I would agree with you if the metrics were even close. Beef being like 100 times less efficient than legumes in many metrics makes it absolutely clear it’s better to grow legumes than beef, regardless if people want to consider, say, leather as a waste product.
given that beerf cattle can simply graze, that when they do make it to the feedlot they are fed fodder and crop seconds, what metrics do you think can meaningfully inform the “efficiency”?
our food system is so complex and interconnected that it makes no sense to claim any individual food product has a particular impact: each operation must be evaluated individually and improved in its own context.
Hey! Have you had a chance to watch the documentary? It touches on both personal and systematic opportunities to reduce our impact of food.
Also, some industries are so wasteful and resource-intensive that there’s really not a good way to reduce our impact to reasonable levels, other than swapping away from that food. For example, studies show that rearing cattle for meat is extremely inefficient, even on the most-efficient farms, when compared to things like legumes, per gram of protein.
A great source (other than the documentary) to demonstrate this: Reducing food’s environmental impact through producers and consumers
I would never recommend poore nemecek 2018: every time I dig into the methodology I’m struck at how myopically supposed scientists can attempt to quantify a complex system like modern agriculture into discreet quantifiable metrics and then make recommendations without consideration of the widespread effects. it’s flawed coming and going.
Thanks for your feedback! Would you have a better source that I could refer to?
i would not suppose that any single metric can give us meaningful insight.
The study is a meta study over 38,700 farms constituting 90% of global calories consumed though; would this still be considered a single metric? I’m looking for something else I can send to people if not this.
if I told you that I went to 38,700 farms myself and cataloged exactly how much land it was using, that doesn’t tell you what that land could be used for. it might not be useful for anything except farming. so the bare metric of land use isn’t helpful. and then we consider other footprints: water use, ghg emissions, lca’s.
none of these is able to give you an actual understanding of how the water is used or where the emissions come from or how LCA’s stack up against each other.
My favorite example is cotton: cotton is raised for textiles. it is very thirsty. it takes up some amount of land. The farming of it emits some amount of greenhouse gas. there is also waste product from the production of cotton: cotton seed. Cotton seed is fed to cattle. Even if we take the weight of the cottonseed that is fed to cattle and we take that portion of the crop by weight and we say that some portion of the crop by weight is responsible for a certain amount of water use and land use and greenhouse gas emissions, the truth is that cattle aren’t responsible for that. In fact feeding that cottonseed two cattle is a conservation of resources.
All of these metrics, all of the sources of the material, they all need to be reevaluated in a holistic manner. that doesn’t mean a meta study where you compare LCAs, a metric that itself is not supposed to be transferable between studies. it means actually doing the hard work of figuring out how to make every individual agricultural operation operate at its peak efficiency for the metrics that we want to see improved: water use, emissions, land use, run off, etc.
ideologically opposing animal agriculture is just going to leave a hole in the agricultural space where products had previously been diverted after becoming industrial waste now need to be used or become waste again.
I would agree with you if the metrics were even close. Beef being like 100 times less efficient than legumes in many metrics makes it absolutely clear it’s better to grow legumes than beef, regardless if people want to consider, say, leather as a waste product.
given that beerf cattle can simply graze, that when they do make it to the feedlot they are fed fodder and crop seconds, what metrics do you think can meaningfully inform the “efficiency”?
our food system is so complex and interconnected that it makes no sense to claim any individual food product has a particular impact: each operation must be evaluated individually and improved in its own context.
This would be true if the foods weren’t so extremely far apart in terms of efficiency. The least efficient legumes are still much more efficient than the most efficient beef, per gram of protein. Please see table one in the largest meta study ever done on the topic below, constituting 38,700 farms and 90% global calories consumed (also included in the documentary): https://globalsalmoninitiative.org/files/documents/Reducing-food’s-environmental-impacts-through-producers-and-consumers.pdf