Most of this isn’t new. And globally, more people are turning vegan and more people are becoming vegetarian, because of scientific studies like this. But it isn’t happening fast enough, as people are also getting richer and as they get richer, they also want more meat. Meat consumption needs to be taxed, CO2 intensive products (production/transport/disposal) must be taxed, but even then the turn around will be very slow.
Yes, and the subsidies that animal flesh gets needs to stop completely. these subsidies would make animal flesh completely impossible for the regular person to afford. Animal flesh really is a luxury. A lot of poor countries are vegan, or at least vego because animal flesh is expensive.
In more rural areas, veganism is rare. Animals can turn indigestible stuff like unworked grassland or the parts of vegetables people can’t eat into eggs, milk, wool, skin, and meat.
You might have a migratory herder trading away milk or wool to locals and to cheesemakers, who also trades away meat when an animal gets injured and can’t keep up.
Or you might have a bunch of free-roaming chickens finding stuff to eat no human would bother with that roost in a place their eggs get taken because they don’t get hunted there.
Or you’ll have someone bringing around a pig that eats the organic household trash that eventually gets slaughtered.
Or you might have hungry kids trying to trap wild birds because they can’t work the farm equipment and birds are more calories per hour.
Basically, food insecurity is common in poor countries, and animal exploitation is used to mitigate that. Someone who hasn’t had enough protein in a week isn’t going to say no when a cow’s leg got broken and the herder has hundreds of kilos of beef to get rid of within two hours of each other because nobody can afford a fridge.
Veganism - the ability to say no to all animal products for ethical reasons - implies either a level of food security that billions of people do not have, or a level of commitment that 99.9% of western vegans have never had to show.
Good points.
A wilfully overlooked answer.
You know what else would help? Growing food local, sustainable farming, less animal farming. Getting rid of ocean shipping, that accounts for 40% of global emissions.
I don’t know about that. That means only Mediterranean countries get olive oil, only tropical countries get bananas, avocados and chocolate, and so on.
Most countries would have to use a lot more greenhouses, more water, import soil, use more fertilizers.
Ocean shipping needs to go electric. Fuel oil is about the dirtiest form of burnable fuel. It is so thick it has to be heated into a liquid before it can move through fuel lines into the engine.
Or just use local alternatives that are less harsh on their local ecosystem? No one needs olive oil, especially if you’re in the Americas where there’s a thousand plants able to produce more oil per acre, most of which are pretty tasty. Avocados are an anomaly in the plant world given they are a fatty fruit, but their water requirements make growing them outside the literal rainforests they were domesticated in a nightmare – there are no large scale avocado farms that are in their native climate, they should be eliminated from all international diets.
And while bananas are neat, there are significantly better sources of potassium, and there’s a native tuber producing more potassium than any banana in every single continent if not every single country.
The reason a lot of vegetables have become just so bland and samey is because we are importing non-native plants to places and just ignoring local, native alternatives that have been growing there, statistically in a domesticated way, for the last 10,000 years.
Native plants are awesome, usually a lot more tasty than the bland super spread counterparts, and are easier to farm with less fertilizer and less maintenance like pest spray – since they’ve been fighting off local bugs and competitors since before humans touched the ground.
Native fetishization is kind of bullshit in age of climate change I get your point about growing what you can grow where you are within obvious limits but in a few years many native species will not grow in their historical regions and new shit will and soil quality and bearing vary a lot and regions with lots of 0people don’t always have best soil water and stuff for growing lots plants.
I agree reducing shipping is important and we need to eat less stupid but native is bullshit fetishism one of them oversimplification intellectual lacunae
This isn’t native fetishization, this is literally fighting climate change. Most native plants have survived far worse fluxations than anything that will happen in our lifetime (and I am a believer we’ll have a BOE by 2030), additionally this reduces water use, fertilization use, with the addition of the obvious less fuel use.
Yes, you will have to give up your almonds, which are killing California, and avacados, which are devastating communities across South America. Too bad. Native plants are literally designed over the last 200k years or more to be where they are. That includes more than one ice age.
I’m not defending almonds or avocados I said specifically stupid food I hate how accurate my name is sometimes I’m saying smart for climate needs to be more comprehensive and thought out than native especially if were going to be feeding huge populations with them we haven’t made vertical farming work yet but we might be stupid with that too blind fetishization of what has worked in the past will not get us through this even if its a good basic guideline starting point good regionally engineered well considered plants that may or may not have regional precedent new or ancient and updated styles of plant nurturing and a lot of luck are going to be necessary I’m not arguing for decadence here I’m saying more radical moves than native may be necessary
That creates a big inequality of food available depending on where do you live. Some people get nice olive oil, other get palm oil. Arid and cold countries barely get a fraction of all cultivable food.
We can not have everyone on a plant based diet if we don’t move food around the planet.
Yeah but what would happen to all the animals if we just set them free and didn’t slaughter them by the billions??? /s
Hell yeah
A good long-term solution!
A good short-term solution would be cutting out the rich who are creating AI data centers and destroying the environment too!
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We can only do this gradually. For instance, there are coastal people that rely on fishing for their sole income, (no pun intended) so we’ll need to come up with alternatives for them.
That’s not to say we can’t try though.
