#PlantBasedDiet #MeatFree #DairyFree #Vegan #EnvironmentalImpact #HealthBenefits #AnimalWelfare
Would it really make a difference in the world if everyone stopped eating meat and dairy?
🌱 The impact of a plant-based diet on the environment 🌍
When it comes to the environmental impact of meat and dairy consumption, there is no denying the significant role it plays in contributing to climate change, deforestation, and water pollution. Here are a few key points to consider:
– Greenhouse gas emissions: Livestock farming is one of the leading contributors to greenhouse gas emissions, with methane and nitrous oxide being released into the atmosphere.
– Deforestation: The demand for meat and dairy products has led to widespread deforestation to make way for grazing land and feed crops, further exacerbating the loss of biodiversity and carbon sequestration.
– Water usage: The production of meat and dairy products requires a large amount of water, leading to water scarcity and pollution in many regions.
Switching to a plant-based diet has the potential to significantly reduce these environmental impacts, as plant-based foods generally have a lower carbon footprint and require fewer resources to produce.
💪 The health benefits of a plant-based diet 🍎
Aside from the positive environmental impact, a plant-based diet also offers numerous health benefits. Research has shown that individuals who follow a plant-based diet tend to have lower rates of obesity, heart disease, diabetes, and certain types of cancer. Some of the key health benefits include:
– Lower risk of chronic diseases: Plant-based diets are rich in vitamins, minerals, and antioxidants, which can help lower the risk of chronic diseases and improve overall health.
– Weight management: Plant-based diets are typically lower in saturated fats and cholesterol, which can help individuals maintain a healthy weight and reduce the risk of obesity.
– Improved digestion: The high fiber content in plant-based foods can promote healthy digestion and reduce the risk of gastrointestinal disorders.
By adopting a plant-based diet, individuals can not only make a positive impact on their own health but also contribute to reducing the burden on healthcare systems worldwide.
🐄 Ethical considerations and animal welfare 🐓
The ethical considerations surrounding the consumption of meat and dairy products cannot be overlooked. Factory farming practices often involve inhumane treatment of animals, including confinement, overcrowding, and the use of growth hormones and antibiotics. By choosing a plant-based diet, individuals can take a stand against animal cruelty and support more humane treatment of animals.
Moreover, transitioning to a plant-based diet can help reduce the demand for animal products, ultimately leading to a decrease in the number of animals raised for food and a decrease in their suffering.
In conclusion, the decision to stop eating meat and dairy can indeed make a significant difference in the world. By reducing the environmental impact, improving personal health, and standing up for animal welfare, individuals can contribute to creating a more sustainable and compassionate world for future generations.
If you’re looking to learn more about the benefits of a plant-based diet and how to make the transition, be sure to check out our website for helpful resources and delicious plant-based recipes! #PlantBasedLiving #SustainableChoices #HealthyEating #CrueltyFree #GreenLiving
Assuming we also stopped raising the animals, it would make a significant difference, yeah.
Of course! A huge difference. A lot of things (animal welfare, environment…) would actually change positively
I’d probably be dead from my chronic and extreme anemia.
Something like 70-80% of crop calories grown globally goes to feeding livestock. Imagine how much extra food for people that would be or how much land that would be for re-wilding
Edit:
This is of human edible calories.
Of total calories it’s about 36%, which is still a huge amount. We could have a third more land available for human food or natural vegetation
A huge difference. Basically animals whose primary function was meat/dairy (I e cows and pigs) would become scarce. People might keep them as pets / service animals / organ donors but not in the numbers we have today.
Yes.
A MASSIVE difference. The average American eats 23-26 chickens a year. That’s a ton of chickens, and a ton of production (and a ton of waste from said production).
Yes. The world’s food-related CO2 emissions may drop by 68 per cent within 15 years. Meat and dairy specifically accounts for around 14.5% of global greenhouse gas emissions, according to the UN’s Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO).
It can’t be the ONLY thing that we do as a society to hold the horses on climate change, but it is a crucial component.
YES.
Co2 levels would decrease heavily. So my unnecessary traffic by truck/ship would sueze to exist.
There’s no ”mixed answers” about this.
If everyone stopped eating meat, some industries would suffer obviously (as with any such change), but the climate benefits would outweigh that by miles.
I also can’t stress enough how utterly stupid it is that we grow food for cows, instead of growing it for ourselves. That would also stop being a thing.
All you have to do is drive the stretch of the 5 by Harris Ranch in CA to know the answer to this.
The biggest impact would be to the environment.
Here’s a link that explains it;
https://interactive.carbonbrief.org/what-is-the-climate-impact-of-eating-meat-and-dairy/#:~:text=Meat%20and%20dairy%20specifically%20accounts,and%20Agricultural%20Organization%20(FAO).
I’ve been a vegetarian for 48 years, and I’m pretty proud that I’ve lasted that long so far. I recently went on a comparison website to see how much my longevity has made a positive impact – and I was impressed, and so happy they figured out how people choosing this route would make a difference.
Yes. I researched it a few months ago and was convinced it would.
I couldn’t quite commit to being vegan because I’m breastfeeding, but, I am now vegetarian. And so far I’m really surprised by how easy I’m finding it.
It would eliminate all the land we devote to raising food (silage) to feed livestock. That in turn reduces greenhouse gases in several ways – first, the livestock are not there to poop and fart, reducing emissions. The fossil fuels involved with making fertilizer for the silage are gone. The harvesting of that silage stops, which means all the fossil fuels involved with the harvest, transport to a facility for processing, then trucked to distribution points, all gone. The runoff from animal waste and fertilizer are eliminated, which dramatically improves water quality in our watersheds. The suffering of factory farm animals goes away.
Some of that math gets replaced by having to grow plant protein sources and the transport/processing/delivery of that food. But the overall scale of emissions is far less with plant foods and is much better for the planet.
We had this discussion with a professor I had in college once. Anthropologist.
This is what he had to say about it.
Humans evolved to eat meat out of necessity. Early humans were foragers. Eating mostly plants and seeds…until the ice age hit. Plant life became scarce but carnivorous animals were still plentiful. Its believed that the consumption of animal flesh that evolved the human brain to higher intelligence.
The problem with everyone switching to a conpletely plant based diet is…..there are too many of us.
There are over 8 billion people on this planet and growing fast and even as big as the planet is, less than 40% of our land mass is farmable and of that which is farmable less than half of that is suitable for the types of crops humans would need for a sustainable diet. And much of that “farmable land” is useless, buried beneath cities, highways, and houses.
Much of our population live in the footprint of mountains. The rockies, the Alps, the Himalayas,. These areas are virtually unusable for anything but grazing livestock.
Humans need carbs, protien and fat to survive long term. Carbs, sure but protien and fat? Modern vegans rely heavily on soy, which grows well in temperate climates…but also olives, avacados, almonds, coconuts, and other high water use crops. We can get dark leafies from the ocean but what about the protien and fat?
The problem with a species that has evolved to be omnivoric going vegan overnight is that there are simply too many of us. It was be impossible to grow enough food to sustain the human race as a whole because of the variety of food we need to get enough nutrients cant be grown everywhere or its completely unsustainable to grow in the amounts that we need.
Half the planet would starve to death and the rest would suffer the ecological consequences of clearcutting forests to create more farmland.
Contrary to popular belief, “rice and beans” arent a sustainable diet and consuming nothing but starchy vegetables will lead to a LOT of health problems.
We havent even touched on the consequences to food animals. Dairy cows, for example, are the result of thousands of years of breeding. A single dairy cow will make up to 10 gqllons of milk per day…a nursing calf only consumes…maybe 2 gallons and only nurses for around 6-8 weeks. However the cow will continue to produce milk for up to a year after her calf is weaned. If you dont milk her, she will develop mastitis and fatal infection. (Their milk doesnt dry up.) Your dairy cows will die off pretty fast.
Pigs are omnivors, not unlike humans. But, unlike humans, they can survive on meat and the crap we wont touch…but they also breed like rabbits and will absolutely turn to cannibalism if there are too many of them and not enough food to go around. Ask anyone who lives in the Ozarks how f*cking dangerous a feral hog can be.
Speaking of rabbits. The problem with people associatng them with being “pets” in a handful of countries is that people forget that they are prolific and voracious PESTS in others. Rabbit populations in a life where there are no more “predators” but a a massive uptick in agriculture….rabbit populations that can quadruple with each new generation…what do you think will happen to the crops?
Deer? Antelope? Elk? Remember the whole clearcutting of forests, thing? They are just as destructive to crops and without forest to graze from and no culling to keep them in check, they will both explode in numbers but end up sick, disease ridden and destructive to our already delicate food supply, from lack of resources.
We havent even touched on the fact that our planet goes through feast and famine. The “droughts” in California arent droughts at all. The souther half of California is a desert but enjoyed unusually wet weather for a couple of decades, which lead to it being suddenly used to grown crops that normally wouldnt be sustainable there….well, guess what? Desert decided to DESERT and now we are damming up rivers to sustain the astonomical amounts of water it takes to grow those crops.
Speaking of which, where the hell would we get all the water?
We can certainly work to consuming less animal products, to utilize sustainable farming amd fishing practices, and reduce our reliance on water inefficient food in favor of native food sources. (Ditching almonds in favor of walnuts and pecans, for example) but humans going vegan on a global scale? No, it wont happen without some serious consequence.
*edit. I know I made some spelling and grammar errors. Broke my glasses. Apologies.*
Absolutely
There’s absolutely no question that it would make a huge, huge difference. The ranching and meat packing industries are both hundreds of billions of dollars, and they use enormous amounts of water and land. I once did some back-of-the-envelope math and calculated that if you took the amount of land worldwide used to farm beef for the US, and converted that into the same amount of calories in fruit and vegetable production, you’d still free up something like 1/2 – 2/3s the size of Texas in land usage. And the amount of fresh water needed would go down enormously as well.
In terms of environmental sustainability, fruit and vegetables are insanely better than beef. Even just converting all been production to pork and chicken would make a significant difference on the scale of the entire US.
41% of global deforestation, and 80% of amazon deforestation is from the beef industry.
This is sort of linked to your question, so I’ll share it any way.
I heavily reduced eating meat because of this figure.
If we took a population of vegetarian people, and took the amount of vegetarian food that would feed them for *one whole year* and instead fed that to meat bearing animals, we would get *two weeks* of meat for the population.
Any change that we do that will reduce the amount of meat we eat will mean a huge reduction in the resources required to feed us.
It would be a HUGE difference. Sudden and total abolition of meat and dairy wouldn’t be an ideal scenario, though. It would be better for people to gradually reduce their consumption of meat and dairy, so that we have time to adjust to the changes.
There would be some obvious environmental benefits. Emissions of greenhouse gases would fall, we’d use less fertilizer, we’d use less water, and we wouldn’t be converting new wildlands to agricultural use.
However, we’d also be left with lots of abandoned agricultural lands, and that would pose a serious challenge. Abandoned agricultural land has typically been seriously degraded, and it’s not going to recover overnight. Vast swathes of land that have been badly degraded through agricultural use but are currently being propped up by mechanical tillage, artificial fertilizers, and irrigation would, in the short term, basically just collapse into fields of dust without that kind of maintenance.
Abandoned agricultural lands can gradually recover on their own, but “gradually” is a key word. Studies of lands formerly used for agriculture and then abandoned show that after a century of abandonment they still haven’t recovered the biodiversity and abundance of comparable wildlands that were never degraded by agricultural use. Intentional rewilding can produce much better results than abandonment. Land managers can bring in plants and animals from undisturbed wildlands to help them get established in the abandoned areas, rather than just waiting for them to wander over. However, that still takes time, and it also takes effort and money. Incidentally, it also takes grazing animals to keep grassland ecosystems healthy—so although our herds of grazers would be dramatically smaller, we’d need to keep some just for land maintenance. That would be complicated, and require careful planning; like, you need large tracts of connected land for a wild herd, so you couldn’t do that piecemeal. In any case, that kind of carefully-planned rewilding would be way easier if agricultural land use were gradually scaled back, rather than being suddenly and dramatically reduced.
There would also be significant economic consequences. Lots of people work in the meat and dairy industries, and there are large regions that are very economically dependent on those industries. Again: we could probably adapt to a gradual shift. However, a sudden collapse of those industries would be an economic catastrophe.
There would also be health effects. Those would *mostly* be positive. Vegetarians and vegans are at lower risk for heart disease, diabetes, diverticular disease, kidney stones, cataracts and some cancers. However, they have a higher risk of stroke and bone fractures. Supplements might help with that, but it’s not clear how much.
Although, this raises another dietary question: is fish still on the menu? Pescatarian diets seem to be significantly healthier than vegetarian, vegan, or meat-based diets. Although, also: it’s not like the oceans are in great shape. A sudden shift in demand from meat to fish would probably seriously exacerbate overfishing issues.
Well, okay, again: a sudden and dramatic change would not be ideal. There would be lots of benefits to a shift that was gradual enough for us to adjust to, and after surviving the shocks of a sudden shift we might gradually end up better off overall, but a sudden change would still be a big shock and that would hurt a lot of people.
Yeah. It would make a huge difference to all the people who work in those industries. And their families. And their local economies. And…
Cows, pigs, and chickens would all go extinct.
There’d be no use for them if people stopped eating meat, dairy, and eggs.
Who wants to keep any of those animals as a pet, it’d be a lot of work, and they’re generic animals. They’ve also been domesticated to a level where they require humans to survive, they can no longer survive on their own in the wild.
Then there’s the major issue with cows, where they need to be milked daily otherwise they will die an extremely painful death. Which means they can’t survive on their own.
Riots, unemployment, economic collapse. Could you imagine all the people whose livelihoods depend on those industries?
I think human population would reduce pretty quickly. Also in some environments it might actually cause issues of over population for non farm animals.
Even if it made a difference, I wouldn’t do it. If this is how nature intended it to be, then it would be so. We would all be herbivores by default.
Well yeah, it would collapse so many industries.
Give up your humanity so there’s more room for more humans. What a cause.
Here’s a good video to watch, make your own judgement: https://youtu.be/sGG-A80Tl5g?si=Hi0bIi1FCQT-nE3f
No, it would not as we’d be wearing highly processes foods created in factories to resemble dairy and meat.
Follow up question: *I have read here that it would free up land, the land used to grow feed for those animals. Plus all the land for the animals.*
Plus it would save water in that process.
**If there was no animals to feed, wouldnt there still be large production farmers?**
We would need a protein source, so beans and rice. Then more vegetable farms to supply the people.
Also, wouldn’t it make the demand for processed food greater?
A lot of animals would die, that’s for sure.
A significant portion of the 800 million undernourished people on the planet would die. Luckily that wouldn’t leave us short of undernourished people because we would have brand new undernourished populations.
The number of people with certain vitamin deficiencies would explode.
Apart from destroying a load of livlihoods, for people like me with chronic conditions that affect the digestive tracts, it would mean living in constant pain. From the sort that saps your energy and makes it almost impossible to concentrate, to agony that kinda makes you want to die.
Omg people just stop. Stop. We aren’t giving up our meat or dairy. The Earth is greener now than it’s ever been and I really can’t stand to hear this BS anymore.
These types of people are the same ones that throw Cheez Whiz on the Mona Lisa to bring attention to ‘climate change’. 🙄
There would be alot of unemployed people in the world.
So animal lives are more valuable than plant lives? How so? Shall we all become vegan and then resort to killing plants by which to get our sustenance? Plant lives matter too right?
All lives matter. And life, whether plant or animal, has to die so that we can live. That’s the rule of existence. No getting around it.
As humans are omnivorous it would on the face look possible. But then you come back to adequate nutrition. Humans need significant amounts of protein and other nutritional elements contained in meats.
So no but that said Americans could reduce the amount of meat they regularly eat.
it would mainly repurpose current pasture land to farmlands for grain for humans, which would increase human population growth and increase environmental damage.
Cows would die out. Farmed pigs and sheep too. Grazing land would be converted to grow crops and destroy a large number of small ecosystems.
Around 40% of agricultural production being in livestock would cease leaving many unemployed and have a massive effect of the economy as a whole. In some countries this could lead to financial collapse.
People on poorer countries or areas with less access to certain foods would struggle to feed themselves leading to starvation or malnutrition in many poor countries and areas.
Obviously if this was staggered out over a long period of time…. more than 15-20 years then much of this could be managed.
Depending on how this was introduced, if this was a mandate by a government there would be a huge amount of backlash from people like myself who enjoy eating meat and due to its forced implementation would be far more impactful than the small activitist vegan groups nowadays.
Oh and I would be very upset.
No it won’t, it would make a difference if we stopped eating veggies.
Let me explain; to plant anything you need to kill everything around the crop including every animal, every insect, every living thing. You also need to use a shit ton of pesticides which are not good for the planet.
One person can survive a whole year eating the same cow, if you care about the enviroment try a carnivore diet. Vegan diets are actually the one that kill the most living things.
90% of the human population would die, so yeah, it would make a big difference.