AHHH! Veg News is the magazine. I meant vegweb.com - the vegan recipe database.

You know, I often read vegetarians or vegans claiming that their diet is better for the environment.

Not all animals are fed “feed crops” - many animals the world over graze, as is their natural wont, on land that’s not suitable for cropping - open range, desert and mountainous areas.

If we all stopped eating meat and animal products tomorrow, we’d have to grow a lot more grains and legumes - crops which rapidly deplete the soil and usually involve the heavy use of artificial fertilisers, one ton of which requires ten tons of crude oil to produce.

And it’s very unlikely that we could feed the world with organic, so much of it *would* be relying on artificial fertilisers.

Then there’s how far food needs to be transported. When you eat soy products, where do the soy beans come from?

Do you think it’s better (from an environmental perspective) to eat tofu made from soy beans grown in China (for example), with rice (the worldwide growing of which in 1993, for instance, caused 155 million cases of malaria by providing breeding grounds for mosquitoes in the paddies) grown somewhere else, or to eat locally caught fish with locally grown organic vegetables from a mixed farm?

One has cost the earth a lot in greenhouse gases from transportation, in monoculture farming that depletes the soil, in artificial pesticides and herbicides that cost the earth in petroleum products to produce.

The other has cost much less in transportation, nothing in artificial herbicides and pesticides, and mixed farming is far better for the land and far more sustainable than the sort of monoculture agriculture that is used to produce soybeans (even organic soybeans).

If you compare factory farming of animals to vegan production, you might come out marginally ahead in the environmental stakes, but a vegan diet is not more environmentally friendly than eating locally-produced organic food.

And that’s without even going into the fact that grains and tofu are not part of a natural human diet - we’ve only been eating them for around 10,000 years since the advent of agriculture, and 10,000 years is not enough time for our digestive systems to have evolved to cope well with them. (http://www.answers.com/topic/stone-age-nutrition-the-original-human-diet)

Again, that report is talking about conventional agriculture - with comments like “The livestock business is among the most damaging sectors to the earth’s increasingly scarce water resources, contributing among other things to water pollution from animal wastes, antibiotics and hormones, chemicals from tanneries, fertilizers and the pesticides used to spray feed crops.” Well, der. But I don’t eat meat produced like that - I eat locally produced, organic food. If you were to compare a locally produced diet of organic meat and vegetables with a vegan diet, you’d be getting a very different result. You’re then comparing small, mixed farms with soy beans and grains that are grown as monocultural crops.

This report also notes that “For many poor farmers in developing countries livestock are also a source of renewable energy for draft and an essential source of organic fertilizer for their crops.”

Do you think it’s better that those poor farmers should be forced to use synthetic fertilisers that they have to pay for, and that pollute the world’s increasingly scarce water supplies, or that they should have a few animals and use their manure?

Even though the report acknowledges that animals are a source of pollution, the report also suggests remedies - “Beyond improving animal diets, proposed remedies to the multiple problems include soil conservation methods together with controlled livestock exclusion from sensitive areas; setting up biogas plant initiatives to recycle manure; improving efficiency of irrigation systems; and introducing full-cost pricing for water together with taxes to discourage large-scale livestock concentration close to cities”.

All of which makes sense - particularly biogas plants, which can be a good source of renewable energy.

I’m not trying to make anyone eat meat - I’m just trying to point out that the environmental issues are not as clear-cut as “eating meat is bad for the environment” and “eating vegetatian/vegan is good for the environment”.

Oh and to Rebekka it’s great that you believe in an organic-sustainable diet but remember most organic farms still have to use alot of resources like water to keep their livestock and feed farms going.

A

Wow, this is a great discussion! A friend of mine just sent me a scientific paper that compares regular (factory farmed) meat eating with driving an SUV, in terms of it’s environmental consequences. Imagine if we could make meat eating as unpopular and looked down upon as Hummers!

Rebekka, you make some excellent points, especially about conventional farming and the land needed to grow crops. This is why I see the solution as being slowing, and then reversing population growth. There are just way too many people for us all to live well without decimating the planet.

In terms of meat-eating, if most people ate meat a couple times a week, that was from wild-caught animals or naturally grazing animals (though over-grazing causes much devastation to prairies) I might buy its environmental cred (though I’m personally morally opposed to eating animals, I don’t like to push my moral beliefs on others). But the vast majority of meat eaters don’t eat these kind of animals, nor are there enough wild animals (or spaces) for any but a small percentage of people to get their meat this way. And aren’t wild animals (and fish) pressured enough, from our traipsing all over (and building malls and parking lots on) their land? It seems to add insult to injury to go out and hunt already-stressed wild animals whose native habitats get squeezed more and more every day.

I think it’s really important to have these kinds of discussions though….it’s so important to think about these issues, and many people have yet to discover the important links between what they eat and their impact on the environment.