is measurably better because I quit eating meat

Many benefits and if any drawbacks in not eating animal proteins.

But, seriously, this meat-centered diet is bananas.

Regardless of whether you like to have a burger now and then, it is not at all hard to reduce the amount of meat to smaller portions, and it won't kill you to increase the number of meatless meals you have.

You don't need to take a vow and burn incense in a robe in order to cut down on meat consumption.

Are you crazy? Where's the money in that?


(For the satirically challenged around here) --->

So I won't.

You'll simply find yourself paying more for a product of lower quality, given the techniques required to meet market demand.

Personally, I never got into this "recycling" thing, and I still don't want to do it, so I dump my cans, glass, and whatnot into the woods outside my town at night.

Whatever floats your boat.

Obviously, an extra 2 billion people will make it more difficult to keep everyone fed...but it's not as if there are going to be a proportionate share of those extra people here in the United States.  Even if there were, the US produces enormous food surpluses.  

While some people in Asia and Africa may well be forced to eat less meat, I don't see that happening here in the States.  I don't think I'll have any trouble getting quality sushi and filet mignon 38 years from now.

Yes, the US produces a lot of food.

However, the US is not producing as much wealth on a relative basis as it used to.

There was plenty of food in Ireland during the famine there. The English could pay more for it.

Given X bushels of corn, and the bidders for pig feed at Y and the bidders for foodstocks at Z, then whether or not you can buy pork at a price you can afford is a function of Y and Z, not whatever your circumstances might be.

Eat as much quality seafood, beef, etc. as I can, while I can.  Then, when things start to go south, stock up on enough canned bacon to last me the rest of my life.

LOL!

My cat would think he died and went to Heaven!

And somebody will form the Organization of Carrot-Exporting Countries.

(btw...I say that AS a vegetarian).

Why should we be afraid of mostly vegetarian diet?

Cubans have experienced such change and have their experience to share. After the Soviet collapse when they were denied practically all oil imports, they changed their agriculture into small scale organic production and dietary habits to mostly vegetarian diet - necessity is the mother of invention. The general health and quality of life of Cubans improved with healthier diet.

"Rich person's food" can be a scary thought for a good reason, because we should not be ruled and destroyed by those blinded by their greed.

properly managed livestock can SEQUESTER carbon. Find me a car that can do that!

when a plant is grazed, its roots die back. soil microbes eat the dead plant matter, breaking down the cellulose and releasing it as CO2. A small fraction, however, is converted into a very stable form of carbon, humic & fulvic acid. Over time, these build up in the soil, locking away carbon.

Good grazing (high-intensity, low duration) speeds up this process and increases the soil organic matter content year by year. Poor grazing practices (low-intensity, long duration) causes OM to increase very slowly or not at all.

Increasing soil organic matter is a big tool to fight climate change. Increasing the soil OM by 1% in the top 8 inches of an acre of pasture will sequester just over 6 TONS of carbon which is the equivalent of 22 TONS of carbon dioxide. I have seen ranchers triple their OM from ~2 to 6% in under 10 years through using better grazing practices. Not only did that sequester 88 tons of CO2 per acre, it also caused a increase in grass production, water retention, slowed erosion, increased biodiversity, etc. Its very exciting!

This means that in a pinch I can get a vegetarian meal there.

And some of the BK's here also offer leaves of iceberg lettuce to have your sandwich wrapped in if you don't want that white bread. Or at least they did. But I know they definitely have the Garden Burger available. Just like a burger with the lettuce, tomato and condiments. Here people also buy large fresh portabellas at the supermarket to grill for their veggie friends when they have a BBQ dinner. I prefer the Portabella Burger by... Boca?

I like Boca's and MSF's burgers. I also have some black bean burger recipes, but of course those aren't quick.

At least in some markets.

Not bad in a pinch.

when you load them up with a buttload of salt.

I eat meat, but I do have a boca burger every now and again for a change.

and I make use of both.

I put some cheese on it though. Does all this mean we have to give up milk products also?

edit to add: I'm also enjoying a delicious brewsky. Does all this mean we also have to give up beer?

Boca's vegan burgers, though, are probably the nastiest-tasting shamburgers I've ever had. They even smell terrible when you're cooking them! I just wish all the faux meats weren't so loaded with sodium.

I miss bacon when I have pancakes or waffles. Their sausage links are not exactly the same by a long shot, but they help fill that particular void.

no thanks

What if it's a recipe instead? And the kitchen, it's a processing facility...aargh!

The way we factory produce and mass produce meat is not sustainable.

Mice!!!

occasional stewing.

I'd be surprised if there is 1 billion left. Probably more like 500 million max.

The consensus opinion among realistic population ecologists seems to be that the sustainable long-term human population is under one billion. We'll get there, but I think it may take another century.

First the population will stop growing. Food shortages driven by climate change will do some of that, and an accelerating drop in global fertility due to economic collapse will do the rest. That should put us at a peak of around 8 billion in about 2030.

Then the decline portion of the human experience will begin. The speed and pain of the decline will depend on what factors drive it and how severe they are. The probable contributors are social collapse (including climate/food refugees), spreading famines, pandemics, a world-wide drop in conceptions and a rise in infanticide. The Russian experience during the collapse of the Soviet Union shows some of these effects, and how fast they can act.

It's really hard to tell how fast the decline will happen, because so much depends on what social and ecological tipping points we've passed (or will pass in the next couple of decades). All we can say for sure is that populations in overshoot (as our is) inevitably decline to somewhere at or below the actual carrying capacity.

perhaps with our completely wasteful way of doing things. if we got smart and less greedy and we took conservation seriously, this planet could comfortably support more than that. just MHO.

"Wasteful" certainly doesn't apply to most Africans, Indians, Chinese, Bangladeshis, South Americans etc.

I know most conscientious Americans think as you do, but I think it's an unwarranted optimism when you expand out to take in the entire world. I'd recommend a read through William Catton's book "Overshoot" for a look at the science behind it the concept of ecological overshoot and why it applies to us.

but I am familiar with the causes & effects of overshooting the carrying capacity of an environment. At the risk of oversimplifying I can envision 3 possibilities re: earth and humanity.

#1) We crash and burn. Almost (but not total) devastation. I think we have a slightly less than 50/50 shot of causing this.
#2) We keep growing indefinitely, with perhaps a "minor" die-off of "only" a few hundred million/a few billion in the upcoming century. This scenario assumes technology will eventually "save" us from ourselves. In other words, we make it as a species and move off this rock. I give this a slightly more than 50/50 chance of happening.
#3) We slow growth to reach 0% then start slowly reducing down to a few billion people. I think this is unlikely.

I think we disagree on the ability of this planet to provide a western-style level of comfort for all humans. I think it is possible even with our current global population (and even more) but it will take some serious paradigm shifts of how we do business. In addition, i think we need some serious breakthroughs in material sciences and energy production/efficiency/distribution to make it happen. I know thats a big caveat but I think its possible and I think we have fightin' odds of making it happen. In sum, I am a short term pessimist (i think we are headed for a shitstorm in the next 50-100 years) but I am a long term optimist.

The classic overshoot curve looks like this:



But the question is, what level would our population have to fall to in order to become sustainable over the long haul?

The Ecological Footprint guys seem to think the number is somewhere just shy of 5 billion (implied by their "overshoot" calculation of 150%). I started out thinking it was two billion, now I think it's about one billion. Other estimates range from there down to 100 million or less. A lot depends on your assumptions - how you define the term "sustainable", what you're willing to accept in terms of social and ecological damage, how bad you think the degradation of the existing carrying capacity is or will become, whether you think that technology and resources are interchangeable - stuff like that.

I put the carrying capacity at one billion because that's what the planet has supported in the past without the use of fossil fuels. I think it goes down from there, because the more FF we use over the next 50 years the worse the eventual ecological damage becomes. I think the damage we've already done to the planet's ecosystems and non-renewable resources will be offset to a small degree (but not entirely) by our increased scientific knowledge.

In the end I'm pretty sure that the carrying capacity depends mainly on three things - the amount of energy we can harness, the extent to which we have used up and degraded the non-renewable resources of the planet, and the amount of damage we have done to the planet's ecology - the other life forms, the climate and the ocean chemistry in particular.

Time will tell.

It should be: ''excitedly and joyfully announced!!!''

- K&R

First I went organic, then organic with alot less meat, now no beef, pork, poultry.

I can't see myself ever going vegan though. I enjoy dairy, eggs and fish too much

...but I no longer eat any red meat. I can't actually. After you stop it makes you sick to smell it. At least it's been that way for me. But it was serious illness and five surgeries that gave me the incentive to change my ways.

Now I eat veggies, veggies, veggies, fish-maybe a little fowl of some kind, and more veggies, veggies.....

- Best thing I've done for myself in ages......

Because pigs are smarter than dogs. Then I gave up ground beef--too fatty. Then I gave up all red meat. Then I went plant-based and gave up most of the rest of it: poultry, dairy, whole eggs. I still will occasionally eat egg whites in recipes, and fish maybe twice a month. Egg yolks, they say, are as bad for you as smoking.

All of this happened over about 12 years.

Congrats on improving your health!

But I also could never turn vegan. I love dairy products and fish.

while we (Americans & other western nations) ought to reduce our meat intake, the idea that we need to sacrifice meat to feed more people is a false choice. Proper grazing techniques can quadruple the number of cattle a given acre in Virginia can grow; Ive seen it happen. Our current model of raising cattle is highly inefficient: we set-stock cattle (as opposed to rotationally grazing them) then ship them hundreds of miles to be corn fed (also inefficient). Grass finishing is harder to do but it improves the land and increases production. To be blunt, cattle are both the cause of and solution to many environmental ills.

half of all food produced is wasted.

And just stop actively destroying land and ecosystem and let the bison come back. They were slaughtered to starve indians so that Europeans could start turning prairie into dust bowl.

we dont have a production problem so much as a distribution problem. that said, i dont think it is feasible to restore the number and range of the bison. Too many people & fences & highways. The ecological niche of the bison can be replicated by 'mob-stocking' cattle on restored prairie.

fwiw, its estimated that we can sequester ALL anthropogenic carbon through proper grazing. what a win-win! good meat, healthy prairie, and slow climate change that is something i'd like to be a part of!

Of which asphalt is made of for cars that run on oil. It's finite and global production has already peaked. So slow by slow many of those road are starting to push daffodils. For bisons and cows and many others to eat.

Native peoples had no fences nor concept of private ownership of land. Those don't belong to the ecosystem, they are not sustainable nor adaptive to evolution.

that are not readily arable. Sun + a little rain + well-managed livestock = improved water and mineral cycles, less soil erosion, and delicious beef.

why should we (farmers) saddle ourselves with debt to pay for heavy machinery that rusts & depreciates, to fill it with diesel that pollutes, to spray chemicals that kill weeds, to harvest a crop and ship it hundreds of miles to fatten animals when we can get the animal to do all that for itself, for free? its insane.

well-managed pasture is a win-win situation all around. I truly believe we will wake up and create a food production system that works (many are already doing it) but the real question is, will western civilization choose it in time or will it be forced upon us when 'the wheels fall off' ? Im hopeful it will be on our own choosing but its hard to keep the faith in that when i see current trends.

Hey DU'ers, while Ive got your attention, seek out and purchase local, pastured meat. Its out there! Your body, the environment and the local economy will all thank you

The scientists who are referred to in the OP aren't chemists or physicists just making vague guesses about this - they're people who actually study agriculture for a living. They already know what "well-managed pasture" can produce - and it's nowhere near enough for the world and the trajectory its meat consumption is on.

"Western civilization" has been using more land than is sustainable for meat production, for its share of the world population, for a long time. If the rest of the world tries it too, and the world population increases a bit above what it is now, it will be completely impossible to feed everyone.

I have seen it with my own eyes. I have seen a pasture DOUBLE its carrying capacity after one year of good grazing techniques. it was not an isolated incident; it is a replicable feat.

but we have begun "vegetarian Wednesdays.". It's a start.

...ahead of the curve.

I turned into a vegetarian after working in a pork processing plant.

`nuff said...

this hardly seems to be a threat. If most people knew how good
well-prepared vegetables are, it would not seem like a threat either.

I do use some cheese, some eggs, a little seafood now ant then and eat like a queen.
Do understand these are not your mother's recipes for vegetables. It is important
to be adventurous, but that is easy to do with internet available for
recipes and so many wonderful organic vegetable available

I get generous amounts of protein and feel great on this diet.
I have not eaten any meat or poultry for over twenty years. There are
a few meat preparations that I still miss, but I would never go back to
my previous diet.

seafood for three to four meals a week and once a month or so I have a turkey sandwich. I've done it this way for the last 14 or 15 years and I'm real happy with it. I feel better on this type of diet and I'm probably already at about 5% animal protein in my diet, so this warning doesn't scare me at all. I do it by choice.

As an emotional/stress eater I was an extreme case of that, as the ticker in my signature shows.

I have cut out the meat and dairy, and my weight has come down with very little exercise (due to disabilities rather than laziness).

People who aren't overweight and who show no outward signs of illness also feel much better eating plant-based.

There need be no relative reduction in animal product consumption even with the addition of billions more to the population, if the proper policies are implemented.

No problem.

people cut back on the amount of meat they consume and stop having so many kids.

to medical means; they would control the amount of population...

2nd, if the developed world would eat less meat; and more veggies, we would probably have enough. There are some cultures who are vegetarian only anyway. I personally prefer tiny portions of meat (if any) and tons of veggies (2 or 3 diff kinda on the plate). Most of the family is the same way. I wish they would portion meat sizes out smaller. I go to a meat market a lot of the time because they will cut exactly what I think 2 to 3 people need plus have a variety of local fresh fish from the area.

Also, we seem to have a spaghetti/ pasta night with my own homemade sauce. I put meat in it, but I cook up enough that 8 or 9 meals can come from it (freezing the extra sauce for future use).

In the hot summer in FL; it too hot to cook and I make about of Greek salads and maybe put a grilled chicken or shrimp skewer or nothing at all on top. Too hot to eat/ heat the house up.

single folks, without children, thank them for not having children.

I quit most meat (I still eat local seafood) a month ago as part of my drive to get healthier. I feel just fine and have even started losing weight again. The only time I've really missed it was driving by a diner cooking bacon

I think humanity will adapt to whatever they need to adapt to

just remember that without the processing, that would only be a hunk of pork belly--a big, quivery blob of fat. (yeesh!)

It's the salt and the smoke flavoring you are craving--just buy a bottle of liquid smoke and add it to your veggies. Or use baco-bits.

I quit meat in January. It was to support my daughter who wanted to go vegan, I wasn't going to go that far, still haven't. But, now I am thinking vegan would be better. The only problem is I really, really like cheese. I have always loved dairy a lot, much more than meat. I guess that is why the meat part was easy peasy, except I do crave chicken. I love love chicken, I have to scoot pass the roasted chickens in the store before I get too good a whiff, oh drat now I did it. I will be ok really. Anyway, it's really not that hard to quit meat. It will probably be difficult for a lot of people like me to quit dairy and eggs though. But, I do think if we all went vegan it would be the best thing.

BTW if you do go vegetarian be prepared for the shock of finding out how meat centric our culture is. It is very difficult to find vegetarian choices and it is wayyyyyyyy harder to impossible to find vegan choices, talking healthy choices not junk food, that is everywhere and easily found. I have had to cut entire restaurants out. I don't go to KFC for obvious reasons, Wendy's, Leane Chins however that is spelled. Perkins, Bakers Square, most pizza places, because I like cheese, but I want more pizza choices than plain cheese, Subway yuck went there got a veggie sandwich with avocado it was nearly inedible.

Burger King has a decent veggie burger so I go there occasionally. But, mostly I just eat out a lot less and avoid fast food, because it mostly sucks and I thought that before going sans meat. Jimmy Johns has one sandwich choice that is pretty decent #6 I think. Au Bon Pain has a good bean burger sandwich. If anyone has any other ideas I would love to know where else I can eat when I am out and about. No cheese pizza please, I like a full range of veggies on my pizza.

however, pizza is also loaded with fat and carbs, so that too, is off my diet

I have intestinal problems connected to my disability which make digesting too much roughage very, very painful. There's no way I could survive on a fully vegetarian diet.

There are far, far more white tail deer and wild turkeys here than the relatively small population could devour, even if that was all the meat we ate. Hunting is everywhere, often year round, under the table -- most likely to put food on the table.

Thousands of deer are killed by autos on the numerous rural two lanes here, many unpaved. In my county there is nothing but two lane roads, except for one four lane divided. Few on that highway exit in this county.

So, we would be self-sufficient omnivores here with truly range raised, and all natural. It is a more or less way of life here, in an area which has been grieviously impacted by economic conditions.

Posted just to provide perspective to this thread. And yes, there are veggie gardens everywhere as well. After all, this is really rural.

.

It's really hard to eat the same in the city, but the effort is worth it.

Very very early stages yet, but it would be a huge environmental step if we stopped factory farming and industrial meat production.

(This article was posted about 10 days ago in a few other DU forums)

Today's special: 3D printed meat is what's for lunch, and dinner, and ...

ONE hamburger takes 6.7 pounds of grain, 52.8 gallons of water, 74.5 square feet of land, and 1,036 Btus of fossil fuel energy for feed production, according to a recent NPR study.

Do you really want a hamburger that badly at such an enormous environmental cost? Really?

Well then, how about you go in for a 3D meat burger?

http://www.eetimes.com/electronics-blogs/other/4394165/Today-s-special--3D-printed-meat-?cid=NL_EETimesDaily

Fire up the grill for the latest in 3-D printing. Modern Meadow, a Missouri-based start-up has secured backing from billionaire Peter Thiel’s philanthropic foundation to create printable meat.

“If you look at the resource intensity of everything that goes into a hamburger, it is an environmental train wreck,” said Modern Meadow co-founder Andras Forgacs in an interview with Mashable.

<snip>

Take those numbers and multiply them by the 26.4 billion pounds of beef that was consumed in the US in 2010 and the environmental burden becomes catastrophic.

Despite these fact Americans, myself included, refuse to give up our love affair with our favorite meat.

Enter 3-D printing to save the day. Modern Meadow hopes the same 3-D printing technology currently being used to create medical grade tissue can be used to provide food for your table, without the environmental impact.

*More at link*

The rest being sawdust, rat turds, etc. So you see, Taco Bell is actually preparing us for the future!

After all, I've been meaning to try a vegetarian diet..... I hear they're very tasty

Used to just love getting a filet mignon, but now it's $20 per pound - unaffordable! But I can still get good quality hamburger meat that works out to about $2 per burger - a bargain compared to the $7 to $9 per burger you'd pay in a resto. A burger a week is all the meat I feel I need.

However, people should realize that there are very serious dangers in adopting a totally vegetarian diet!

http://www.westonaprice.org/vegetarianism-and-plant-foods/vegetarianism-and-nutrient-deficiencies

http://www.westonaprice.org/vegetarianism-and-plant-foods/not-to-go-vegetarian

It's pretty much a certainty that meat production will plummet soon.

Between fossil fuel depletion and global warming, we'll be lucky to maintain 3 billion people on this planet by 2100.

And, as much as people would like to believe it's "free-range" as usual, it's different. Cows are managed in tightly controlled paddocks (blocks of grass, essentially - or, fields-within-fields), and moved around daily for maximum grazing and maximum efficiency. Not only are you getting the most out of the field, you're getting the most out of your meat (in quantity and nutrient density). Farmer Joel Salatin produces more meat per acre than any factory farm (remember, factory farms are not only limited to the concrete warehouses where the cows/animals live...you have to take into account the acres and acres of fields used to grow corn/soy/grain feed).

Not only that, grazing herbivores - through management-intensive grazing - are one of the most efficacious ways to build our soils. Which is something we drastically need to do if we want to grow food at all. I had a thread on this elsewhere:

To Kick Climate Change, Replace Corn With Pastured Beef

And there's this:

"It's impossible to mass-produce meat in a sustainable, free-range way."

that statement from OP is not true.

Salatin has done more good environmental work than all NGO's involved in the issues combined, if you ask me. He and Allan Savory, along with Temple Grandin and Bud Williams have revolutionized the thinking of a hell of a lot of people in the business (and outside!)

Well said.

I actually watched the entire lecture, and enjoyed it. Recently, although I don't have the links (or them memory thereof, LOL, I take statins too) at present, but research has gone even further regarding sugar which is about to scare me "straight" off sugar.

What has apparently happened is that the "fat scare" turned the food industry on it's head to make as many products "low fat" or "fat free" as possible. What they replaced it with was actually sugar, in the form of corn syrup (ah-hah, now we're really screwed with the effects of drought, aren't we ?), which is in nearly everything. I mean so many food products that it's now ubiquitous.

So apparently now refined sugar has replaced fat as the real enemy, although we've also suspected it all along as a different type of threat. The biological reason for sugar being so insidiously damaging is reportedly the evolution that prepared us for this "set-up" taught us that nothing sweet is toxic, which is supposed to be scientifically true.

So now obesity is really as dangerous or more so than alcohol addiction, in raising our blood sugar AND causing a multitude of other life threatening maladies over time.

And the same scientists working on the corn syrup/refined sugar problem, which are obviously not connected with any industry funding either, are finding and on the path to proving an actual connection between refined sugars and CANCER.

I'd wish that I'd known these things before my gradual decline into debilitating health problems, although I've ignored so many red flags and warnings over the years that I'm the one to blame. But it's never too late to start and correct some deadly habits, a little at a time. My life will depend on it, at least a few years may be salvaged, anyway. Good luck !

P.S. Anyone know the present status of "Beyond Meat" products ? They have a website, but have not expanded production yet, as far as I know.

It would take a LOT of petrochemicals to create a veg only food system for the planet. Once you take organic animal inputs out of the cycle you have a real problem.

and move on to other renewable energy sources?

That figure seems a bit high.

Supposedly this year's corn crop is really getting hammered by the drought. One hopes a larger percentage of the smaller crop will go to food. Why don't we import ethanol from Brazil, which has both extensive refining infrastructure and enough biomass to process sustainably?

it was always about rewarding aggressive agricultural lobbyists (it's no surprise that the vast majority of crop subsidies go to the most profitable and most lobbyist-heavy industries even before bio-ethanol).

I'm not claiming to be an expert on the ethanol all issue, I was using a statistic I have seen used a few times.

I also agree that it certainly would help our environment and health to decrease out beef consumption as well.



In fact, in normal times, it’s said that up to 40% of the US corn crop is converted into ethanol which is then fed into cars. When the crop slumps this proportion is likely to rise. For a drought and a shortage of corn is not going to do much to change driving habits. But still, despite that shortage of corn the gasoline allowable for sale has to be blended with ethanol.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2012/07/20/drought-climate-change-corn-prices-ethanol-and-biofuels/


About 40 percent of the crop is used to make ethanol as the government subsidizes the fuel additive and retail gasoline nears $4 a gallon. Corn futures have more than doubled in the past year to the highest since July 2008, as rising pork and beef prices encouraged demand from livestock producers and as U.S. export-sales expanded at the fastest pace in three years


http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-04-08/u-s-corn-supply-shrinking-as-meat-ethanol-demand-send-crop-price-higher.html

The prediction drew little response last week when it was released by the USDA in its Crop Production and Supply/Demand Report for the 2011 crop season. The USDA kept its prediction for ethanol production demand for corn at 5.05 billion, but lowered demand projections for livestock feed by 100 million bushels to 5 billion bushels.

http://thegazette.com/2011/08/15/for-first-time-more-corn-to-be-used-for-ethanol-than-livestock/

Corn used for ethanol production rose 300 percent from 2005 to 2011, increasing from 1.6 billion bushels to 5 billion. (Ethanol production now uses more than 40 percent of the U.S. annual corn supply.)

http://www.nppc.org/2012/07/study-supports-need-to-reform-ethanol-production-mandate/

It's so easy! It's just like sailing across the ocean! 50 years ago people said manned spaceflight was impossible! Herp derp I'm so fucking special because I'm a human being! I'm so fucking precious!

we should be okay.

Kids today are lucky. They only lose their hotdogs!

As for meat, there is a lot of land that is unsuitable for ag which is suitable for grazing. If a water shortage is a problem, you are obviously not going to be irrigating those lands.

So there is at least one very stupid mistake in this analysis. I wouldn't necessarily take this seriously.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Population_Bomb

None of this good. American are already living on calories derived mostly from fructose (fruit sugar). For all the hoopla and cowboy mythology our diet is on average only about 7% animal protein. If you eliminate all of that you have a 7% change. And if the issue is mainly water then the reduction of meat will be the least of our worries.

- have enough squirrels on my property now to keep me fed for years on end. My handful of chickens can easily be multiplied. A couple of pigs and a few cows and I'm set!

Now, where did I put those "No Trespassing" signs?