Going Veggie Would Cut Global Food Emissions By Two Thirds And Save Millions Of Lives – New Study

[ZombieHorde]

Two things: I'm currently a meat eater, and yes, you very much enjoyed your meat-based meal recently.

Article from I Fucking Love Science!

March 24, 2016 | by Marco Springmann

Eating more fruit and vegetables and cutting back on red and processed meat will make you healthier. That’s obvious enough. But as chickens and cows themselves eat food and burn off their own energy, meat is a also major driver of climate change. Going veggie can drastically reduce your carbon footprint.

This is all at a personal level. What about when you multiply such changes by 7 billion people, and factor in a growing population?

In our latest research, colleagues and I estimate that changes towards more plant-based diets in line with the WHO’s global dietary guidelines could avert 5m-8m deaths per year by 2050. This represents a 6-10% reduction in global mortality.

Food-related greenhouse gas emissions would also be cut by more than two thirds. In all, these dietary changes would have a value to society of more than US$1 trillion – even as much as US$30 trillion. That’s up to a tenth of the likely global GDP in 2050. Our results are published in the journal PNAS.

The rest: http://www.iflscience.com/environment/going-veggie-would-cut-global-food-emissions-two-thirds-and-save-millions-lives-new

[HuckleB]

1. Indeed. It will happen, eventually, or we'll grow meat in labs.

[ZombieHorde]

3. Lab meat is probably a good idea. nt

[HuckleB]

4. I do hope they can figure it out. -eom-

[Kaleva]

2. Switching to raising and eating mealworms would have a positive impact

http://groundtoground.org/2013/01/30/how-prepare-eat-mealworms/

[Bucky]

5. Now here's the tough question... Do we really want to save millions of lives

I mean, if overpopulation is the problem...

[ZombieHorde]

6. I do. I think there are other ways to reduce population,

such as educating the world.

That said, some people, like Boyd Rice, advocate for all sorts of violence with the goal of reducing the human population. He's a big supporter of wars (including race wars), the crack epidemic that was going on a few decades ago, removing all social safety nets, etc. Anything that killed many, many people was good in his eyes, since the large population was promoting climate change and potentially dooming everyone. I understand his logic, but that behavior is against my personal value system.

[NickB79]

7. And we'd be dependent more than ever on industrial farms if this came to pass

Historically, people raised livestock not only for food, but also because their manure was a valuable crop fertilizer. Remove livestock from farming, and you break the nutrient cycle. We've already mostly done that with cash crop farming, where thousand-acre fields of corn and soy are farmed by mega-farms and fertilized with fossil fuels instead of manure. This is killing the planet, polluting groundwater and eroding soils. It must stop, or we will perish.

However, the most effective way (probably the ONLY way) to feed the planet's growing population is to dismantle mega-farms and go back to small, diversified farms like the kind we had a century ago. Farms that grew a wide variety of food, such as fruits, grains, and yes, meat and dairy. Properly managed, a 100-acre family farm can produce twice the calories per acre of an Iowa corn or California pepper mega-farm, while preserving wildlife habitat and protecting the soil and water.

Without livestock, though, you are forced to rely solely on synthetic fertilizers to maintain your land, making it damn near impossible for small farmers to compete with mega-farms. No amount of crop rotation, cover crops/green manures, and/or fallow periods can overcome this. Animal manures are unique in their ability to nourish not just crops, but the micro-biome of bacteria, invertebrates and fungi that make the soil a living thing.

A good book to read on this subject is "The Omnivore's Dilemma" by famous author Michael Pollan. He goes far more into detail about how it would be a very, very bad move to move the planet to a vegetarian diet if we care about maintaining the ecosystem and feeding humanity. By all means, we should be looking at ways to reduce meat consumption, because we eat far too much of it, but meat, eggs and dairy have an integral role in our society we cannot replace with technology.