Eating meat creates four times more greenhouse gases than being vegan, landmark study finds

BlackRose@slrpnk.net to World News@lemmy.world – 683 points –
Eating meat creates four times more greenhouse gases than being vegan, study finds
independent.co.uk
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No food is "problem free" and, much like normal agriculture where different crops cause different problems, different meats (poultry, pig, cow) cause different problems and have different costs.

Are insects a valid protein source? Apparently yes! Am I willing to eat them? Maybe! I've never had the chance to try any, none of the markets I go to stock anything like that.

Ditching all meats for soy and other vegetal proteins? Doable, but more expensive than eating chicken or pig, in my case. Fully getting rid of eggs and milk is also problematic for me because they are even cheaper than the meat itself.

You know what would be really funny? If cattle ranchers were forced to come up with big diapers for all the cows, harvesting the methane and turning that into somewhat cheap extra gas for cooking.

There's an order-of-magnitude difference here. The worse case production of crops for human consumption comes out ahead even compared to best case production of animal products

Plant-based foods have a significantly smaller footprint on the environment than animal-based foods. Even the least sustainable vegetables and cereals cause less environmental harm than the lowest impact meat and dairy products [9].

https://www.mdpi.com/2072-6643/14/8/1614/htm

In terms of cost:

It found that in high-income countries:

• Vegan diets were the most affordable and reduced food costs by up to one third.

• Vegetarian diets were a close second.

• Flexitarian diets with low amounts of meat and dairy reduced costs by 14%.

• By contrast, pescatarian diets increased costs by up to 2%.

https://www.ox.ac.uk/news/2021-11-11-sustainable-eating-cheaper-and-healthier-oxford-study

In terms of biogas, here's a video looking at hog farming and talks about the problems with biogas at this point in the video:

https://youtu.be/WsUNylsiDH8?t=825

I'm a part time vegan and plant protein is quite a bit cheaper. Tofu costs nothing from the Asian shop and it's super versatile. It takes some time to learn how to cook.

Soy milk, beans, chickpeas and lentils are also very cheap.

It's just the beyond burgers and stuff that are horrendously expensive.

plant protein is quite a bit cheaper

As I said, that's not the case for me. Here, I can get a liter of milk for roughly a dollar (in local currency), while a liter of soy milk doesn't go for less than 1,50 USD. A packet with 500g of soy protein costs about the same as 1kg of chicken breast, roughly 2,80 USD. A pack of 30 eggs for about 3,60

Sincere question, is it difficult to create harvest methane from animals? Most livestock basically never sees the sun so it’s not like there’s an interminable area to harvest from, and stories of farmyard methane fires aren’t exactly uncommon so the concentration is there.