[Answered] Why is the consumption of Meat considered bad
[Answered] Why is the consumption of Meat considered bad
I heard something to do with Nitrogen and …cow farts(?) I am really unsure of this and would like to learn more.
Answer -
4 Parts
- Ethical reason for consuming animals
- Methane produced by cows are a harmful greenhouse gas which is contributing to our current climate crisis
- Health Reasons - there is convincing evidence that processed meats cause cancer
- it takes a lot more calories of plant food to produce the calories we would consume from the meat.
Details about the answers are in the comments
The basic problem is that to get 1000 calories of beef, you need to feed the cow something like 10,000 calories. So growing a cow is actually growing an entire field of wheat/corn/etc., then feeding it to the cow, then eating the cow.
Farming all of those crops for the animals takes up a lot of land, consumes fresh water, produces wastes, and uses oil/gas (for farm equipment directly, or to produce things like nitrogen fertilizers) which produces co2. Cows also produce methane (that's the fart thing) which is a bad greenhouse gas.
You could just eat the wheat/corn/etc. directly (most of the time) and skip the meat step therefore saving a massive amount of environmental impact.
Meat sure is tasty though.
I remember driving through Iowa and seeing vast fields of corn and learning that the majority of that corn was not even destined for human consumption. That kinda blew my mind.
Plus is the fact that not all plants have the right amount of vitamins and minerals necessary to maintain the human body like meat does. Although it is possible, it does require research and monitoring to ensure that your getting all the nutrients you need. And yes, meat just tastes good.
What kind of bullshit are you peddling?
If you're discussing complete proteins then all it takes is rice and beans. Not particularly difficult given that about half the world population survives on that without much meat.
But growing a cow that eats the grasses makes it for I get the meat and the vegetables all at once and it tastes great /s
- Ethical reasons: hundreds of billions of animals are killed every year (not counting fish), after living a miserable and short life.
- Environmental: greenhouse emissions (CO2 and methane), deforestation for pastures, water pollution, are all caused by animal agriculture. If everyone went vegan we'd need only 25% of the land we currently use for agriculture.
- Health: there is some evidence that meat causes cancer, and convincing evidence that processed meat causes cancer. Also, the use of antibiotics for animals can lead to the development of antibiotic-resistant bacteria.
Cow farts are methane, which are a more aggressive form of greenhouse gas, though with shorter lifespan.
For the cancer risk, this is the pertinent info:
An analysis of data from 10 studies estimated that every 50 gram portion of processed meat eaten daily increases the risk of colorectal cancer by about 18%.
That's about half a hot dog. Seeing as the news isn't exploding, this means that this is relative risk. Meaning your current chances of getting colorectal cancer is X. Eating a hot dog every other day continuously multiples your chance by 1.18. American Cancer Society states that over their lifetime, 1 in 23 men (4.35%) of men will develop colorectal cancer. This means if you ate 1 hot dog every other day continuously, a man's odds of contracting colorectal cancer changes from 4.35% to 5.13% over their lifetime.
A lot more water to make the food for cows than what humans consume.
A lot more food to feed a cow than what it would take to feed the human the same type of food.
And the growth of that food to keep feeding these animals in large batch is pretty much creating dead areas of land that gets ruined if it’s not carefully monitored. And the run off into the water supply is a problem. This is why industrial level of farming is really really bad for the environment.
You’re supposed to move cattle around in pastures for regrowth and not entirely decimate it. The capitalists do not care about that until a court summons tells them to care about that.
Currently there’s some better methods however the consumption stays high.
Health wise : all meat diets (meat at every meal) can produce issues in your body.
Cured meat or heavy salted meat can lead to heart issues and kidney stones.
You should mix in some fruit and vegetables and maybe even substitute some entire meals so that meat is consumed only a few times a week if only for your body’s sake. Your taste buds aren’t the same organ as your heart. They aren’t the organs that make your body stay alive.
animals are fed parts of plants that people can't or won't eat. all of the studies about the ecological impacts ignore this fact and then attribute the water used to produce, say, cotton to beef.
won’t eat
Is not the point of the argument when we’re taking about what humans shouldn't eat. We can’t cater to wants anymore when growing percentage are starving.
can’t eat
Which is bullshit. We didn’t invent their diet. we substituted it. They might eat grass but we eat plenty of other green substitutes. The amount we consume of it doesn’t come close to their needs though.
Your edit is actually missing the biggest reason--all the energy and water it takes to raise the meat. It's just not sustainable.
The core issue is soil quality. Without sufficient organic content in the soil, all our food, whether it be plant or meat, has drastically reduced nutritional content meaning we need to consume more for the same effect. We're heading for a global food shortage because of the one key issue. Healthy soil also sequesters an enormous amount of carbon from the atmosphere. So instead of fighting the beef vs tofu wars, we should be focusing on encouraging agricultural practices that enrich soil rather than destroy it. We have about 50 years of crop cycles left before the majority of arable earth turns to sand.
Shifting your diet to be more plant-based is a good idea, but it's not the crux of the issue.
Bam!
To learn more about the environmental impact of meat consumption, I recommend this Our World in Data article: https://ourworldindata.org/environmental-impacts-of-food
I would highlight this chart: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/ghg-per-protein-poore?country=Pig+Meat~Beef+(beef+herd)~Eggs~Lamb+%26+Mutton~Grains~Milk~Other+Pulses~Poultry+Meat~Tofu+(soybeans)~Peas~Nuts~Groundnuts~Fish+(farmed)~Cheese~Beef+(dairy+herd)~Prawns+(farmed)~Tofu
For example, getting 100 g of protein from beef emits ~ 50 kg of CO2. Getting 100 g of protein from tofu only emits ~ 2 kg of CO2.
animals are fed parts of plants that people can't or won't eat. all of the studies about the ecological impacts ignore this fact and then attribute the water used to produce, say, cotton to beef.
This is simply not true. Globally, 77% of the land area that's used for agriculture is used either by livestock or to grow food to feed to livestock (such as corn and soy). Only 23% is used for crops for direct human consumption (1): This makes sense intuitively: If I feed a cow 1 kcal of energy, it will create way less than 1kcal of energy to be consumed. In fact, beef has an energy efficiency of 1.9%. This means, for every 100 kcal the cow eats, you only get out 1.9 kcal (2). Otherwise, cows would defy the laws of physics. Do you really think that the 74 billion chicken, 620 million sheep and 330 million cattle that we slaughter each year for meat just are fed human-food leftovers? (3)
1: https://ourworldindata.org/global-land-for-agriculture 2: https://ourworldindata.org/meat-production#energy-conversion-efficiency 3: https://ourworldindata.org/meat-production#livestock-counts
I think everything has been addressed. I just wanted to clarify that the methane is from cow burps, not farts.
One other thing I think is worth mentioning: meat is good, but it’s not even that good. As a child I was a very picky eater and largely carnivorous, having to purposefully supplement the occasional vegetable. Now I’m essentially pescatarian because honestly, most meat isn’t really good. It can be low quality, bland, and boring. Innovative chefs seem to be realizing that, and I personally agree that Eleven Madison’s food is better now that it’s fully plant based.
Meat can be such a crutch, and when it’s not, it requires quality cuts and good preparation. And yet many people would rather eat a tough, poorly seasoned mediocre steak than a vegan dish, even if it’s genuinely a bad experience, but I’m pretty sure it’s a misplaced pride thing.
Finally, working with meat can be a lot harder than vegetables, especially chicken. Dominique Crenn has a wonderful cookbook featuring incredible plant based dishes, and of course Atelier Crenn is one of the most convincing arguments of plant superiority.
I find that, for those who simply don’t care about the world around them, an appeal to taste and ease is far more effective than trying to introduce humanity. It also prevents the knee jerk reaction to plant based diets— “sure, I like my meats too, but it’s just too boring/doesn’t taste good enough” shifts the discussion from tribalistic hatred of vegans to something that directly impacts them, largely the only way to actually get some people to listen.
Because the amount of resources required to raise the livestock required to support the free market of meat is unsustainable. Also the impact of all that livestock is a huge contributor to climate change. So besides the moral argument of it being wrong to eat another living beings there is a very real danger to ourselves in the future.
Feeding cows takes up a lot of land, which often requires deforestation.
I'm going to piggyback off of this too since i havn't seen it mentioned as much, cows need a LOT of water. They are literally walking bathtubs (the average cow stomach is the size of a tub, i have a bachelor's in animal science and actually have seen in one ><) and this is why it baffles me when someone talks about the water need for plants or things like almond milk. It's not even comparable as far as efficiency is concerned, and honestly, plant producers have actually worked to be better at water conservation since it's important to them, but most cow production doesn't even consider it into the equation.
Because it's speciesism. If we started giving birth to humans to eat them, that would be absolutely outrageous, but to do that to animals seems perfectly fine to most people. Animals have the same desire as we do not to be killed or abused, and to live a happy life.
This argument also implies that "dominionism" is wrong, i.e. all life has a right to not be killed or abused. Yet human life is impossible without killing and consuming other living organisms, be it plants, animals og fungi. Thus it is unethical to continue living.
This argument is bad, because for human life to be possible, you must draw the line between life that you consider ethical to kill and life that you consider unethical to kill.
It's not about "all life" but about "all sentient life". Only beings that are able have pleasant and unpleasant experience should be considered. If something (living or not) cannot experience suffering then you can't harm it, by definition.
Sentience is studied scientifically. It cannot be stated with absolute certainty but scientists have good sets of criteria and experiences that helps identify it. With the current knowledge it's almost certain that all mammals are sentient, like us. Fishes and birds are also very likely to be sentient. Some species of insects are probably sentient while others may not be. And plants are likely not sentient.
But even if all living things are sentient, it doesn't change very much. Speciesism means treating beings differently only because they belong to some specific species. There are good reasons to treat different beings differently but they should be based on the beings' interests, not their species (and studying sentience helps identifying these interests). It's very likely that we do less harm by growing plants than by breeding animals. And even if it was the same amount of suffering we would still do less harm by avoiding eating animals because breeding them to eat them actually requires more plants than just eating plants. We should seek to minimise suffering and avoiding eating animal is a good way to do that.
IMO what's bad is not meat consumption itself, which we were able to do sustainably for millennia and it was never really a problem. The problem is that now you're getting too much of it way too easily. Eating too much meat is a problem because it perpetuates demand for unethical mass-production of meat and livestock are made to suffer as a direct result.
Take a look at the global human population chart over the last few millenia. Things can seem sustainable when there are a million people on the planet. When there are 8 billion things are a bit different.
There is a lot of waste from the agricultural process that needs to be considered as well, like fertilizer run off into rivers, etc.
Which applies even more to meat production. You have to grow massive amounts to feed livestock, more than if we just grew and ate the food directly.
Exactly my point. We can’t just look at the meat. We have to look at the entire process.
Even if we stopped eating meat agriculture in its own right is a big problem.
If we stopped eating meat we’d have to grow a lot more crops to make up for it which will only cause other problems instead of fixing the root cause.
You're not getting many answers yet regarding nitrogen.
As a preface: When it comes to climate and environmental concerns with respect to agriculture, the word "nitrogen" does usually not refer to the completely harmless atmospheric nitrogen (N2). Instead, it refers to various compounds that contain nitrogen.
Nitrogenous pollution from cattle comes in two shapes:
The first is methane (NH3). A single cow burps and farts out about 100kg of methane each year. Methane is a greenhouse gas that's 28 times as potent as CO2. This means a single cow is responsible for as much as 2800kg equivalent in CO2 each year due to burps and farts alone. For reference, the CO2 per capita emissions globally are about 4 tons (4000kg) per year, for all sources combined. Cows, relatively speaking, therefore produce a huge amount of CO2 equivalent.
The second is all the nitrogenous compounds in their excrements. This acts as a fertilizer on soil and in the water. While that sounds good, it leads to various unwanted effects. One is that agricultural runoff causes algal blooms in water that then ends up killing a significant amount of marine life. Another is that nutrient-rich soils tend to seriously decrease plant species diversity. Many native and wild plants actually need nutrient-poor soils to thrive. Those plants will get outcompeted by a small group of fast-growing plants that do well in all the cow-poop-infested soil. These compounds also tend to travel far, via agricultural runoff or even via the air, so ecosystems far away from farms are also impacted.
Is there a way to absorb methane from the atmosphere? Ie like a plant absorbing CO2 is there a substance which does something similar for methane?
Also for runoff, I assume there are no ways to contain this issue. Or is there perhaps a more sinister answers that it is possible but farms have not invested into such structures due to economical reasons.
There is no solution to capture methane in the air. Its lifespan in air is 12years, so if we stop emitting, it will go away by itself. Until then, it's quite bad. Capturing it at the source is also challenging (can you hemetically seal a cow's ass without impacting its health?!).
The best solution is... less farms, less cows but that means less meat!
The main issue is probably less meat itself than the ginormous quantities we consume.
Most livestock farming is intensive, meaning they can't rely on grazing alone and need extra food sources, typically corn. They emit methane, a greenhousing gas on steroids.
That grain is produced through very intensive agricultural methods because we can't get enough of it. It consumes ridiculously large amount of water and slowly degrades the soils. Nitrates eventually end up in the sea, causing algea to proliferate while other lifeforms are suffocated. See the dead zone in Mexico's gulf.
71% of agriculture land in Europe is dedicated to livestock feeding.
The percentage must be similar or higher in America, and don't count North America alone: without grains from Brazil, we're dead. Period. So next time you hear the world blaming Brazil for deforestation, keep in mind that a large share of it is to sustain livestocks...
Cattle farming in the USA is heavily subsidized, by allowing farmers to use federal land for grazing for free (I believe something similar is in place in Canada?). The claim they "take care of the land" is absurd: nature has been doing that for millenias without needing any help. First nations have been living in these lands also without supersized cows herds and it was going alright. Farms actually prevent wildlife to take back its place.
But I wouldn't blame them. People in North America (among others, and I live in Canada, definitely me too) eat indecent and unhealthy quantities of meat, and that has to come from somewhere.
Now, simple math will tell you: if everyone in the world was consuming meat in the same quantities as us, there would'nt be enough suitable land on Earth to grow the corn that needs to go with it.
Another thing is not all meats are equal in terms of pollution. From the worst to the least bad, in equivalent kgCO2 per kg of meat you can actually eat: -Veal: 37 -Chicken (intensive, in cage): 18 -Beef: 34 -Pork: 5--7 -Duck, rabbit, pork: 4--5 -Chicken ("traditonal, free range): 3--4 -Egg (for comparison): <2
You can appreciate the orders of magnitude!
There are only 2 ways out of this:
- reduce meat consumption, and pick it right
- grown meat (meat made without the animal around it, in machines)
One can be done today, starting with your next meal. We don't need meat every meal, we don't even need meat every day, but it is true that going full vegetarian force a certain gymnastic to get all the nutriments one need.
The other solution is barely getting there, so there are still unknown (food quality, resources consumption, etc.) and the economics may not help it taking off.
The third (and let's face it: current approach at national level everywhere on this issue) option is to do nothing and keep going as if the problems didn't exist. This is guaranteeing a famine in the coming decades. When we'll fail to feed our livestock, and it will start dying, it will be too late to turn around and get the whole agriculture sector to transition. These things take many years.
We're trying to reduce our meat consumption at home, or to favor the least impacting ones. We still eat too much meat, but I hope we can gradually improve.
because you have to kill a living thing for it
I swear there was another reason why the practice was considered bad. Something about nitrogen and sustainability. I never really understood that part, hence the question.
I think that one was the cows burp methane, which is a greenhouse gas. So if you apportion the greenhouse gas emissions over the delicious hamburgers, you make more climate change by making a cow burger than a veggie burger. So we should cease the production of cows as part of our attempt to not make our planet terrible. And buying cow burgers to eat is contrary to the goal of ceasing cow production.
For the methane issue. Apparently adding seaweed to their feed reduces that by up to 82%:
Trials in Tasmania this year sadly did not reach anywhere near the original methane reduction goals.
I looked it up and it says a 28% reduction was achieved. That's still a huge reduction and perhaps, with other feed formulations, an even bigger reduction can be made.
I mean, it's better than nothing but seriously dairy is fucked long term. It will always be an inefficient system compared to consuming plant-based proteins directly, and lab grown milk protein is gonna be huge. And that is good news, because dairy farming sucks in terms of land use, fertilizer run off, animal welfare, and, here in NZ at least, the destruction of native tree based ecosystems to make way for grass monocultures.
It would be such a small but significant thing to pass a law requiring adding seaweed to their feed. Even if they passed the cost on, it would raise the price of meat insignificantly. It's crazy that we haven't done it yet. Same with making new roofs white to reflect light instead of absorbing it.
EVEN at 18% it's way too fucking high
Thanks everyone for the answers, I will update the post to add in the answer.
I guess my only follow up would be that if we reduce our meat consumption to a more sustainable level, that would mean that we would have to replace our protein source with something more sustainable.
Seafood maybe out of the question as I hear concerns about overfishing as it is.
I would assume that would leave plant protein, like Peanuts or something similar. Are there other sources of protein that are in development (Also major assumption that Beyond and those other meats are also based on the plant protein)
Yes, pulses like peanuts, beans, lentils, as well as rice and other grains (and a variety of other vegetable sources) are alternative sources of protein. As far as development, the only thing aside from plant-based meat substitutes are the new lab-grown meats that are being developed. Those are actual meat, but grown in a lab instead of on an animal's body.
well lab grown meat has just recently been approved for sell. So that's a major thing. But there are a lot of plant protein resources. I'm vegetarian so I eat eggs and some milk. (I actually prefer almond milk, most of my milk consumption probably comes from why protein powder cause I can't afford the plant protein powders for weight lifting). Now as someone who actually studied nutrition in college, the confusion comes from the fact that people don't factor amino acids. As my teacher said "You don't have a protein requirement, you have an amino acid requirement" once you look at it in this way, there are ways around this that we can do, but there are shortcomings as of right now (especially socio-economic) if you cut out eggs. However, it would be pretty easy to add the missing nutrients in other foods the issue comes from good ol classic capitalism issues of "efficiency and money" shit.
Honestly, some of the biggest problems we face is just a matter of focus and funding in research. There are a lot of solutions and it's honestly amazing how far we've come despite special interest groups (oil, farming trusts, etc) have worked to stunt the growth of things, so you just have to imagine what ecological, vegan, etc tech could do if it hand the same funding and backing as these other sectors. I honestly can't wait.
people have lots of different reasons. some don't like the idea of killing a big animal with feelings and expressiveness. some because of how farms abuse or torture animals in some countries. some think Anibal farming is worse for the environment. some have religious prohibitions. some think it's bad for your health. some people don't like the taste or can't afford it but don't want people to think they are weird so they tell people they have a principled argument for it.
Agreed up until the last part. I think most people would accept "I don't like the taste" or "I can't afford it" sooner than a vegan argument. I've gotten some really unhinged reactions from people just by bringing the topic up. Veganism really, really triggers some people.
yes lots of people cant understand that others can have other ideas about the world. in fact the historical norm for humans is for everyone in the same community to believe the same thing. this time of ideological diversity we live in is anomylous.
of someone says “i believe the earth is flat” most people will not accept that immediately. it's triggering.
people are triggered by alien ideas. it’s not bad. it’s just being human.
Let me guess, the same kind of people who get triggered about vaccines and own pickup trucks as fashion accessories? They tend to get triggered a lot, ironically, for people claiming that society became too sensitive.
Different vegetarians have different motives. Some of the more common ones include:
- Moral concerns, e.g. about animals suffering or being killed. This is common among Buddhist vegetarians, animal-rights vegetarians, and utilitarian vegetarians.
- Health concerns; belief that a vegetarian diet is better for one's health, whether due to substances naturally in meat (e.g. saturated fat) or introduced by industrial meat production.
- Environment and climate concerns; that raising animals for meat is bad for the environment, contributes to climate change, is unsustainable, etc.
animals are fed parts of plants that people can't or won't eat. all of the studies about the ecological impacts ignore this fact and then attribute the water used to produce, say, cotton to beef.
Today in the developed world, meat animals such as cattle and hogs are mostly fed fodder — not a byproduct of human food, but rather crops grown specifically as animal feed. Farmers who grow those crops know how much water they're using, because they keep track of their irrigation needs.
Just how many times did you copy-paste that comment?! Are you a bot or a lobbyist by any chance?
You think that we started producing some grains, and one day we realized we had too much by-products and one smart guy said: "let's start a cows herd so that they'll eat these". Sounds legit. Especially if you consider that eating beef the way we do is very recent in human history, and still inexistent in many parts of the world. Poor folks must be buried under the by-products...
So, since I don't think farmers are total morons, I would rather imagine they would produce different kind of food, such as leguminous.
Unless it's meat synthesized in a lab, it requires the forced breeding, enslavement, abuse, and eventually murder of sentient animals which don't jive too well with the golden rule.
I personally could give a hoot about it's negative impacts on environment. Gd bacon memes, humanity can go extinct good riddance
the golden rule applies to humans.
you know wild animals are suffering and dying and whole species are going extinct as a result of climate change and deforestation, right? how does that jive with the golden rule in your book?
Its not bad in my world
Same world as everyone else tho
My changing climate has a very good video on this just last week actually that goes over everything including the shortcomings of veganism and the actual nuance in it. ( I say this as a vegetarian, but let me tell you, growing up in cow country SE Oklahoma, an hour from a walmart with groceries, I know it's not as simple as some people claim it is. but i'm getting off-topic)
Since you specifically mentioned "cow farts", you were probably thinking of this: https://www.dw.com/en/fact-check-is-eating-meat-bad-for-the-environment/a-63595148
tl;dr - cattle produces a lot of methane while digesting stuff
animals are fed parts of plants that people can't or won't eat. all of the studies about the ecological impacts ignore this fact and then attribute the water used to produce, say, cotton to beef.
No... No... The studies account for that. Most cattle in the US are fed human quality base ingredient feed... It's much cheaper to feed them corn meal than anything else. (I say base ingredient because the standard on cattle feed as a whole is not human grade, but the bulk of the food, the corn, could be human grade if it had been processed for humans instead of cattle.)
The water numbers are pretty well understood.
Meat is less bad if it's crickets.
Is the methane really that bad?
I’d think it’s more the amount of energy that goes into feeding and raising them. Tractors, creating/shipping feed, etc.
Yes, it is. Cow's methane is the biggest agricultural contributor to greenhouse gases.
Each year, a single cow will produce about 220 pounds of methane. Methane from cattle is shorter lived than carbon dioxide but 28 times more potent in warming the atmosphere, so the 220lbs of methane equal 6160lbs of CO2. A car produces 400g of CO2 per mile, so a cow damages the environment similarly to driving 7000miles. Since cows grow at least for 2 years before being slaughtered it will produce the equivalent of 14.000 miles of driving. A cow produces almost 900lbs of meat, so each pound of beef is like driving 15.5 miles.
Yes, the methane is that bad. Fossil methane is also bad but we need to halve methane emissions in the next 10 years or so to have a shot at keeping global warming to ~1.5-1.7c
I think we shouldn't go vegan altogether, instead limit our meat consumption more, for health purposes too. that being said the evidence for cancer ties is not convincing at all and the WHO is freaking trippin balls for putting it together with plutonium.
I went vegan. It was the best decision I've ever made. I'm healthier, happier, and I'm helping animals and the environment. I also eat better, because it forces me to be aware of what's in my food and make more creative meal choices.
I don't understand what you wrote about the WHO and plutonium.
To add on: after going vegan, I'm about as happy and healthy as before. My shopping trips are slightly cheaper at least. It's important to do it for the animals even if you don't feel "healthier" afterwards.
being vegan doesn't help animals or the environment
basically iirc the who cathegorized meat as bad as plutonium in terms of cancer risk but like last time I ate plutonium my skin was liquefying before my eyes and that never happened with meat. that being said, the choice of going vegan is not for everyone. for some it will be dire on their mind and dire on their health. physiology changes from person to person.
This is a very important point. Eating some meat isn't inherently bad for the environment. Eating TOO MUCH meat is TERRIBLE for the environment, and not very good for you.
Meat used to be a fancy treat for most families, an expensive meal for special occasions. Eating a heaping portion of meat for every meal is fucking ridiculous, but that's exactly what many people do.
It's not. Some people are just crazy.