Scientists routinely identify some lifestyle habit that contributes to global warming and come up with a better alternative that causes less environmental harm. Then people recommend that others should change their lifestyles and do the better alternative whenever possible. So far so good. And then somebody shows up and says, “Let’s all do this one thing and we will save the planet.” Um, no, that’s not how it works.
Thinking about tackling environmental problems is overwhelming. There are so many problems, so many sources of greenhouse gasses, so much pollution and environmental destruction that thinking about all this mess is, well, overwhelming. Thus people who think about environmental problems often focus on a single issue and end up with some pet peeve. In case all my readers haven’t already noticed, my own pet peeve happens to be waste. For me wasting resources just feels so sad, pointless, and avoidable. If a person enjoys their vacation that required a plane flight, they at least get some benefit and lots of joy from doing some action that caused extra greenhouse gas emissions. But when a person wastes resources and sends stuff to a landfill, they get zero benefit from said action, they don’t even enjoy the process. This is why I ended up with waste as my pet peeve.
For example, commonly we are told to eat a plant-based diet in order to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions. Should we?
Reduction of one’s carbon footprint for various actions.
Well, when it comes to reducing one’s carbon footprint, there are other actions that are more effective. But fine, let’s say a person especially cares about greenhouse gas emissions caused by their diet. Or maybe they cannot live without biological kids, a car, and plane flights, so they want to at least do the next best alternative and focus on their diet. Should they adopt a standard vegan diet?
Well, chocolate, coffee, and palm oil are worse than pork and poultry. Olive oil is worse than eggs. Rice is worse than wildly caught fish and milk. If a vegan tries to lecture me about the environmental harm of eggs, fish, and milk while drinking coffee, snacking on vegan chocolate, and sharing on social media their favorite rice recipe, I won’t be impressed. Condemning all animal foods while staying silent about plant foods like chocolate, coffee, palm oil, olive oil, and rice is irrational. If you truly want to reduce greenhouse gas emissions caused by your food choices, following a standard vegan diet is far from optimal.
Granted, in defense of vegans, if you only look at protein-rich foods, legumes and nuts do look pretty awesome. They are tasty too. It’s a pity that nuts are very expensive and out of reach for poorer people, but at least legumes are cheap and readily available for most people. And legumes are really tasty too. So yeah, eating more legumes and less beef really is beneficial.
Right now I am picking on vegans just because recently next to my home there appeared a billboard with the words, “Don’t eat the planet. Eat less meat.” But I could have also picked various different examples for this criticism. People who oppose fast fashion will tell us to stop buying and throwing out so many clothes. People from the zero waste movement will tell us to buy our consumable goods without packaging and to buy less stuff in general. People who oppose food waste will lecture us about meal planning and how to cook delicious dishes from various food scraps. And people who are childfree will recommend others to consider having fewer children.
(By the way, I hope that my blog posts about waste don’t come across as an obnoxious and simplistic attempt to say, “Do this one thing: Stop sending stuff to landfills and you will save the planet.” I do understand the concept of nuance even if many of my blog posts focus on just one problem.)
Here’s the problem with recommending simple solutions: people are different and their needs are not always the same.
— Personally, I don’t like interacting with children, so getting myself sterilized was never a sacrifice for me. Many other people do like kids and want to enjoy parenting. Or they never had a choice about the matter, because efficiency of contraceptives and access to abortions is far from perfect.
—I live in a place with good public transport, so I don’t need a car (I don’t even have a driver’s license). Other people live in different places.
—I dislike the smell of coffee and I never got used to drinking it on a regular basis. Many other people are pretty much addicted to coffee and feel bad without their morning cup.
—I don’t like the taste of most soft drinks. Basically, I dislike all beverages that contain dissolved carbon dioxide, which means there are very few drinks that get sold in plastic bottles that I’d be willing to consume. Many other people really like these same drinks.
—I live in a walking distance from a farmers’ market and two zero waste stores. That is a luxury.
If I started telling other people to live the way I do, that would be plain nasty. I have chosen to reduce my greenhouse gas emissions in areas where it requires relatively little or even zero sacrifice from me. For example, for me not buying coffee and drinks in PET bottles requires zero inconvenience or sacrifice, because I don’t even like these drinks. Alternatively, avoiding plastic bags and plastic food packaging is a bit of hassle, because I have to remember to take my own empty containers with me whenever I go grocery shopping, but it doesn’t feel like a huge inconvenience for me; I also have to avoid supermarkets and instead walk a bit longer distance to a store with bulk bins, but it’s not that terrible. The catch is that for a another person with different food preferences who lives somewhere else doing the same actions (avoiding coffee, drinks in PET bottles, and food packaged in plastics) can be much harder than for me.
This is why I cringe whenever I hear somebody say that meat isn’t even tasty and legumes taste much better anyway, thus it ought to be easy for everybody to be vegan, and not eating animal foods doesn’t even require such a huge sacrifice. Indeed, if somebody doesn’t even like the taste of beef then not eating it really is a great idea. But it is wrong to assume that a plant-based diet is just as easy for everybody else. Never mind that some people are allergic to vegan staples or must limit their carbohydrate intake due to diabetes.
Whenever a vegan with a car, two kids, and a coffee drinking habit tries to lecture me about how I am destroying the planet (I do eat animal foods), I perceive that as hypocritical even though I can agree that eating more legumes and less meat is beneficial.
Here’s a better solution: Each person should decide for themselves, which lifestyle changes are the least painful for them personally. Instead of saying “do this one thing to save the planet” about whatever happens to be your pet peeve, it would be better to encourage people to carefully think about their actions and figure out what works for them.
In my case, whenever I publish a blog post about how to live with less waste, I’m not implying that everybody must follow my exact advice. Instead I see it more like, “In case any of my readers are interested in reducing the amount of waste they create, here’s some advice on how they can get started.”
Ultimately, nobody should be arrogant and say nonsense like, for example, “I don’t eat animals, so I am better than you” or “I don’t use plastic bags, so I am better than you.”
How much greenhouse gas reduction is really the result of reducing food waste? It’s not like the plants that provide our food don’t pull CO2 out of the air while they are growing. All that plant material doesn’t come from nothing, it comes from thin air.
It might be better for food to sit in a garbage dump than for me to eat and metabolize it, and return the CO2 back to the atmosphere.
Need a comparison of how much CO2 is added by farm machinery compared to how much is fixed by plants.
You do realize that producing food causes greenhouse gas emissions? Chop down forests, manufacture nitrogen fertiliser, use oil to fuel machines used in farms, etc. If you don’t want to eat a slice of bread, instead of dumping it in the garbage bin it would be better to not chop down that forest which used to grow where the wheat for your bread was grown and abstain from producing your unwanted bread in the first place.
Also, if you compost your food waste, it decomposes and becomes soil. If you throw it in the landfill, it cannot decompose normally and ends up producing methane gas instead.
If you want to fix CO2, plant a tree that will grow without the help of farm machinery and fertilizer. Food production is one of the greatest sources of greenhouse gas emissions.
Unless and until we get energy production to carbon-neutral or even carbon-negative, no amount of personal action is going to make a dent in climate change. It just is not feasible, humans do not function like that.
That is not to say that we should do nothing, but I get rather testy when someone tells me that I should do this or that and that it would be easy for me because it was easy for them. There are people who insist I should go vegan even after I tell them that 1) I tried it and it was not easy at all (and I am a biologist and have the knowledge of balancing such diet) and 2) my physician really does not recommend vegan diet to me, due to some of my problems.
Assuming that you know better what someone can or cannot do with their lives is a pinnacle of arrogance.
Charly @#4
Yeah, here https://freethoughtblogs.com/oceanoxia/2020/08/21/climate-change-and-individual-action/ is a post about the necessity of collective changes. I completely agree with the points made there.
I think individual actions are better than nothing, though. Politicians and corporations don’t want to change anything until a noticeable amount of population support the new idea.
Yeah. I once tried something vegetarianish-leaning. I got an iron deficiency anemia. That wasn’t fun.
I can imagine a world in which eating less animal foods was much simpler and such a diet was more foolproof and not so tricky to manage and get right without risking nutrient deficiencies. Imagine a world in which staple foods like bread are already fortified with B12 and other micronutrients that people are likely to not get in significant amount on a mostly plant diet. A world in which vegan staples were cheap and available in every grocery store (where I live, you can only get them in health food stores where everything costs a fortune). For example, even getting enough calcium from plant foods can be tricky. Leafy greens are seasonal and only available in summer. Soy foods are expensive and hard to find in stores. If vegan dieticians literally tell me to drink a glass of calcium fortified orange juice every day to ensure sufficient calcium intake, I’ll just stick with dairy and fish, because I just don’t want to consume a sugary junk food in a plastic bottle for my daily calcium needs. And that’s just one example, multiple micronutrients can be problematic when you eat no animal foods.
My husband and I were doing so well, when COVID-19 happened and I had to stop using public transportation and started commuting by driving alone instead. (He can work entirely from home, so there is some improvement too). Now I also added a trans-atlantic round-trip due to my mother’s death. At least during my quarantine upon my return I won’t be commuting anywhere.
Andreas Avester @5: Our (my husband’s and mine) experience was that with our shopping habits when we quit meat/fish etc our food expenses dropped significantly. Over the years I shifted closer to vegan, he less so. Thus it will be hard to estimate the price of a vegan version of our diet vs a vegetarian one, but we buy all our staples in large amounts, pretty cheaply. (We currently have about 4-5 sacks of various legumes in our basement, they’ll probably last a couple of years). Also, it seems my idea of vegan staples might be very different from yours (for instance soy products including tofu are a very minor component of my diet).
OTOH, I can’t benefit from simple B12 supplementation, I need to get a supplement that has the methylated form of B12 because of a genetic defect that reduces my body’s ability to metabolize the more common form of B12. (I only found out about this because I’m a genetics nerd, never had any deficiency symptoms.) Then again, it is very cheap.
One interesting thing that can be gleamed from these graphics and that I was arguing about too at different time and place – whilst the meat has always higher average carbon footprint than plant-based proteins, it has very wide range. And the lower end of that range is very close or even overlaps with the upper end of the range for legumes. That shows to me that the biggest problem is not the meat consumption per se, but how the meat is raised. I would bet my money that the practices with the highest carbon footprint are also those most profitable (i.e. factory farming in cages versus natural pastures – net emissions of cattle on pastures are lower -click- and that is even without taking other huge environmental benefits of pastures into account).
We do not need to go vegan. We need to reduce meat consumption and to produce the remaining meat differently. And for that we need to curb corporate greed.
As a child-haver, I’ll bring up the point that there are less tangible benefits to the environment to bringing up kids who are, for instance, lifetime voters. A country and a world where people who care about the planet don’t have any kids, while those who don’t give a rip carry on having as many as ever, is not a sustainable future either.
anat @#7
When I talk about “vegan staples,” I mean the foods recommended by Messina and Norris in the book Vegan for Life. I know there are countless different ways how to have a vegan diet, but this is the book I have read on the topic.
Here are the prices of some foods where I live:
Milk—0.62 euro per liter, I can have it poured in my own reusable bottle.
Animal bones and organ meats—0.20 to 1.50 euro per kg, sold without packaging (I eat bone marrow, cartilage, and organ meats, and I know how to cook them).
Raw Baltic herrings—0.80 euro per kg, sold without packaging.
Heads, bones, tails, and fins of fancy fish (for fish soups)—0.20 to 1.50 euro per kg, sold without packaging.
Vegan stuff:
Soy drink, calcium fortified—from 1.70 to 3.00 euro per liter, sold in a plastic bottle.
Tofu—8.80 to 20.00 euro per kg, sold in plastic packaging.
Hummus—about 8 euro per kg, packaged in plastics.
Vegan fake meats—from 12.50 to 18.00 euro per kg, packaged in plastics.
Dry soy beans—2.30 euro per kg.
See my pain? Cheap food is important for me, I am sort of poor. For example, I’m not going to buy soy milk when cow milk is a lot cheaper.
Dry soy beans are actually affordable, and I do cook them occasionally; unfortunately they must be cooked for 4 hours. Hence I mostly stick with other beans, peas, and lentils that are cheaper and have shorter cooking time. The cheapest legumes I can get are split peas for €0,86/kg. And the cheapest healthy source of calories and protein are probably flaxseeds, which cost 2 euro per kg here.
Finding cheap legumes is simple enough (and I perceive them as very tasty too). Nuts are tasty and healthy, but unfortunately those are so expensive (about 11 euro/kg) that I cannot eat them often. Among seeds, there are a few that are both cheap and healthy (flax, sunflower seeds), but I don’t like their taste enough to eat them on their own, I can only add smaller amounts of these seeds to various meals. There are also seeds that I perceive as very tasty (pumpkin, chia), but unfortunately those tend to be pricey. Oh well, at least whole grains can be found cheaply, for example, rolled oats are 0.90 euro/kg here.
Or consider individual micronutrients. For example, let’s look at calcium. Among vegetables, leafy greens (collard, turnip, kale) have somewhat more calcium, but those are seasonal and sort of pricey. Tofu (prepared with calcium sulfate) is unaffordable. Calcium fortified vegan drinks are either too expensive or full of sugar. Well, cow milk is cheap and available for the entire year.
That being said, my main problem with all restrictive diets is the fact that they require effort to manage. As long as I eat everything in moderation and try to eat healthier foods more often and junk foods less often, I have a foolproof and healthy diet that is super easy to have. I don’t need to worry about planning my meals and micromanaging my diet to make sure that I have adequate intake of every micronutrient. Unfortunately, the moment you cut out entire food groups on a restrictive diet (be it keto, raw food, vegan, or anything else) you are basically balancing on a tightrope. It can be done, but as soon as you make a mistake you get a nutrient deficiency.
There are plenty of ex-vegans who quit after getting a nutrient deficiency. Still-vegans tend to accuse these people of failing to do a vegan diet correctly and seem to have little sympathy for people who literally got sick and don’t deserve nasty insults for it. However, the fact that a vegan diet can be hard to do correctly and failures are pretty common indicates that such a diet cannot possibly be for everybody.
I know myself well enough, I know that I am terrible with planning meals and remembering to take supplements. It took a pandemic to force me to start making loose shopping lists and I stopped bothering with them as soon as the number of COVID-19 cases dropped in my area and social distancing restrictions got partially lifted. I absolutely hate planning my meals or paying attention to how much of various foods I eat, instead I avoid food waste by having several recipes with endlessly interchangeable ingredients so that I can make a meal from whatever random stuff I happen to have at home. That’s what works for me. Restrictive diets that require paying attention to how much of some food you eat and remembering to take supplements don’t fit me. Getting an iron deficiency during my vegetarianish-leaning days was enough for me.
So yeah, eating more legumes and less meat is simple enough and doable for me. Anything beyond that is too much hassle in the current food environment. Granted, I can imagine a different society with changes in food availability that could enable me to have a diet that’s closer to vegan.
Also, I refuse to obsess about what I eat. I’m not going to scrutinize every food label for trace ingredients nor do I want to worry about my food every time I eat meals prepared by somebody else.
I don’t have a basement that I could use for food storage, but I do have plenty of those at home. These are my favorites.
Large beans are from my garden, they are an old local bean variety. Brown peas are the “Retrija” cultivar. Lentils aren’t a local food, but I love their short cooking time.
Cool that it works for you. It certainly would be beneficial for humanity to reduce the total consumption of animal foods, thus it’s great if it works at least for some people.
brucegee1962 @#9
Well, yes.
But it is also possible for the society to try to help raise other people’s kids into decent adults. Just because some adult has terrible worldview doesn’t mean that their kids have to grow up like them.
Obviously, I am not criticizing people who have kids. It’s their choice, I’m not going to tell other people what to do with their bodies or lives. Moreover, if the birth rate dropped to zero, that would not be desirable due to causing various social problems.
Charly @#8
In case you are interested about this topic, I can recommend Meat: A Benign Extravagance by Simon Fairlie. It’s a book about the environmental impact of food and how to raise livestock without causing so much environmental harm.
Option #1: raise pigs by feeding them food waste that humans don’t want to eat.
Option #2: raise pigs by feeding them grains that humans could eat.
#1 is perfectly fine for the environment, and I think that feeding food waste to pigs is better than composting it or even worse—sending our food waste to landfills.
The pesky problem is that in wealthy countries people want to eat a huge amount of meat in every meal. It is possible to produce a small amount of meat in ways that are environmentally sustainable. But once demand for meat skyrockets among people who can afford to buy it, farmers must start feeding their pigs with grain that could be eaten by people directly.
That’s just one example, the book I mentioned discusses these issues in detail.
The practices that cause animal suffering are the most profitable. It’s perfectly possible to raise livestock in such conditions that they are comfortable and happy. It also costs more to give them space to wander around.
When it comes to profit and higher carbon footprint, in general yes, but not always, it depends on a lot of factors.
I once watched a documentary about food waste. They featured a Japanese pig farm in which pigs looked happy, they were roaming around free and eating food waste that was collected from local households. In that documentary the farmer said that feeding pigs with locally collected food waste is actually cheaper than buying dedicated pig food.
On this planet we have land that can only be used for raising grass eating livestock and cannot be used for growing plant foods for humans. We have plenty of food waste that people don’t want to eat but pigs could happily consume. It is possible to produce a smaller amount of animal foods without causing suffering for the animals and also without huge greenhouse gas emissions. However, that would require humans to eat less animal foods and also pay more for them.
I agree.
@Andreas Avester, I think pigs were actually domesticated for the purpose of feeding them offal and other waste products not fit for human consumption. When I was a child it was still common to have a pig and feed it that way. And we used to have rabbits who were solely fed grass grown in our garden.
Pastures and coppiced forests can be used to raise meat and sequester carbon at the same time. But it requires more careful planning than factory-farming. Still, it is doable, because it is nothing new – that is how livestock was raised for centuries. And pastures and coppiced trees can be sanctuaries for many, many species of plants and insects that are endangered by both agriculture and lack of care because they require regular grazing and the roaming herds of wisents, bison, and aurochs are no more.
Charly @#13
Back in Soviet times my boyfriend’s family kept rabbits and chickens in their backyard. Rabbits ate grass. Chickens could eat all kinds of various foods including some table scraps. They stopped raising animals when the Soviet Union collapsed and grocery stores stopped being so empty.
20 years ago as a child I spent summers living in the countryside. There pretty much every family had a few animals that they raised for themselves. For example, my grandfather’s neighbors had one cow, her name was Gaida. She was really friendly and she allowed me to pet her. Whenever I had some food scraps that a cow could eat (like carrot leaves, etc), I gave them to Gaida. My grandfather allowed his neighbors to let Gaida eat grass on his property, and every day he bought two liters of Gaida’s milk, because he didn’t have any cows of his own.
So yeah, raising animals doesn’t have to be harmful for the environment and they don’t have to lead unhappy lives. The problem is that mass producing animal foods in ways that are the most profitable results in environmental and animal welfare issues.