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Not Our Gains (europe.pub)
submitted 1 day ago by to c/microblogmemes@lemmy.world
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[–] 1 point 9 hours ago (3 children)

The problem is that's an elitist and exclusionary take.

Vegan and vegetarian replacements are way too expensive for almost the 99% of the population, and while you can theoretically replace some of these with medication and supplementation, it will never be the same as the synthetic replacements will never have the exact nutritional matrix that the natural animal source has, and as such it will not interact the same with our metabolism and our organs, thus causing a higher probability on related diseases and health issues.

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  • [–] [S] 3 points 7 hours ago* (2 children)

    As they scale up, the costs will be lower. It's a supply chain thing, not a fundamental limitation. The input costs are lower. In the broader sense, plant-based diets from whole-foods are actually already cheaper

    It found that in high-income countries:

    • Vegan diets were the most affordable and reduced food costs by up to one third.

    • Vegetarian diets were a close second.

    • Flexitarian diets with low amounts of meat and dairy reduced costs by 14%.

    • By contrast, pescatarian diets increased costs by up to 2%.

    https://www.ox.ac.uk/news/2021-11-11-sustainable-eating-cheaper-and-healthier-oxford-study

    This is also true in real spending data

    Based on primary data (n = 1040) collected through an online survey, representative of the Portuguese population, through logistic regressions, it was possible to conclude that plant-based consumers, particularly vegan, are associated with lower food expenditures compared to omnivorous consumers. In fact, plant-based consumers are shown to spend less than all other consumers assessed

    https://agrifoodecon.springeropen.com/articles/10.1186/s40100-022-00224-9

    Compared to meat eaters, results show that “true” vegetarians do indeed report lower food expenditures

    https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0921800915301488?via=ihub (looking at the US)

    EDIT: I should also note that in an increasing list of countries, non-whole plant-based things like this are already cheaper too. With meat prices rising further, that's only likely to increase more

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  • [–] 0 points 7 hours ago (1 child)

    Yeah, I understad that.

    But most countries are underdeveloped, or in ways of development, and there it's not really viable now.

    Also, take into account this. The scalability IS a fundamental issue because the quantity, quality and speed of production needed to feed the global population are not compatible with the limited space, resources and the physics, chemistry and biology of soils. You will cause massive soil losses due to the mere fact that such soils will be above their limits.

    There's also enviromental and echological issues, such as the point that you'll be displacing many native species (both from plants and animals) to be able to grow others that are edible to us, massively altering ecosystems. If with the scale of plant production that we now have that's a serious problem, imagine with such a drastic increase. We wouldn't give enough.

    Moreover, think on the issues of transport: not all plants are able to grow in every country, and as such you'll have to move a massive amount of these around the globe, boosting the carbon footprints of global transport.

    And then we have all the hydric issues, and all the issues with fertilizers and insecticides.

    And it could go on, but it would never end.

    I have to look better at these studies, tho, I'll do it later because nevertheless it looks like there are interesting advances I haven't heard of before, and that makes me a bit excited because anything that can help both humanity and animals is good.

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  • [–] [S] 3 points 7 hours ago

    Perhaps counterintuitively, it's the other way around. Meat, dairy, etc. production is what does not scale well. Low income countries don't have nearly as much of it because high income countries have to subsidize the hell out of animal farming to make it as common as it is. It actually takes significantly less plant farming to eat plants directly

    we show that plant-based replacements for each of the major animal categories in the United States (beef, pork, dairy, poultry, and eggs) can produce twofold to 20-fold more nutritionally similar food per unit cropland. Replacing all animal-based items with plant-based replacement diets can add enough food to feed 350 million additional people, more than the expected benefits of eliminating all supply chain food loss.

    https://www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1073/pnas.1713820115

    Pesticide and fertilizer use is significantly lower

    To produce 1 kg of protein from kidney beans required approximately eighteen times less land, ten times less water, nine times less fuel, twelve times less fertilizer and ten times less pesticide in comparison to producing 1 kg of protein from beef

    https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25374332/

    Even if we maximally used manure, it's still lower

    Thus, shifting from animal to plant sources of protein can substantially reduce fertilizer requirements, even with maximal use of animal manure

    https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0921344922006528

    For transport, it's actually not the driver of food emissions. The production itself is more important, especially when it comes to animal products

    Transport is a small contributor to emissions. For most food products, it accounts for less than 10%, and it’s much smaller for the largest GHG emitters. In beef from beef herds, it’s 0.5%. Not just transport, but all processes in the supply chain after the food left the farm – processing, transport, retail and packaging – mostly account for a small share of emissions. This data shows that this is the case when we look at individual food products. But studies also shows that this holds true for actual diets; here we show the results of a study which looked at the footprint of diets across the EU. Food transport was responsible for only 6% of emissions, whilst dairy, meat and eggs accounted for 83%.

    https://ourworldindata.org/food-choice-vs-eating-local

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