this post was submitted on 20 Jul 2023
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[–] assassin_aragorn@lemmy.world -3 points 1 year ago (10 children)

This study misses two major things that need to be considered to properly evaluate a majority vegan diet for the population vs a diet that has meat. Whatever your personal thoughts, we should be able to agree that we don't have a full picture without this information.

  1. What are emissions, land use, and water use going to look like if vegan food production is scaled up to provide the same calories that a diet with meat has? This is a nontrivial consideration especially since meat is more calorie dense. You will need a larger quantity of vegan options to match a caloric equivalent of meat.

  2. Humans need amino acids that are only found in meat for our full health. This is easy enough to counteract by taking vitamin supplements, but if the entire world needed to take these supplements regularly, what sort of emissions and water use would the scaled up production have? Is manufacturing a high quantity of necessary vitamins going to be better environmentally? I honestly don't know.

Assuming we want the global population to have at least the same food access and nutrition as today, these are questions we need to know the answer to. Maybe the points I've raised are easily addressed without significant emissions. That would be fantastic -- we just need to have a full picture.

[–] FreeFacts@lemmy.world 6 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

The first point is a non issue. If we just stop for a second and think about it, the calorie output of the animals has to be less than the calorie input. Otherwise they would generate energy out of thin air. The bigger thing is that they are also homeothermic animals, which means that majority of the input calories are used to regulate body heat and not to generate output calories (aka meat). From calorie persective, going through homeothermic animals is pure waste of energy.

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