TL;DR: Terrible article, I suggest not waste your time on it.
Why?
* Author writes """it’s more accurate to say that vegetarian diets are “less awful,” not “better,” than omnivorous diets""". He gives no hard numbers to back it up. Less awful IS OBVIOUSLY the same as better. According to many sources, that are well presented in the Cowspiracy documentary (among others) it is shown that a vegetarian diet, and specially a vegan diet, is A LOT less awful then an omni diet both environmentally, ethically and considering health impact.
* He argues vegetarians eat more staples. And that they are usually grown as mono crops, thus bad for the environment. He forgets that animals slaughtered for meat have been eating staples all their lives. A large part of the staples are grown for life stock; this makes meat so inefficient in the first place. The author is seems to know that it is also grown for life stock, but then continues that vegetarians are responsible for the monocrop disaster. Clearly misguided he is.
* Showing pictures of hippies to re-enforce the idea that vegetarians/vegans are some treehugging margin group. Whoever lives in a cosmopolitan city knows this is not true, or not anymore.
What I do agree on: eat with the seasons. But simple economics of "eat what is cheap" should help with that. It is that supermarkets choose to put the "high price" on produce all year long, except for a discount crop maybe. This is because produce does not pull customers.
What pulls customers? Cheap meat, and cheap beer. That's why there's always some meat on offer that costs less per kilo then bell peppers in the supermarkets near where I live.
If we want to save the planet from the rather imminent "mass extinction" (lets not call it "global warming" that sound waaay to nice), we should not optimize for consumerism but for sustainability. And meat eating is simply not sustainable.
> According to many sources, that are well presented in the Cowspiracy documentary (among others) it is shown that a vegetarian diet, and specially a vegan diet, is A LOT less awful then an omni diet both environmentally, ethically and considering health impact.
Just a quick note: The "Cowspiracy" movie unfortunately presents its case by cherry picking scientific evidence and presenting much higher numbers than what is reasonable. Wikipedia has something about it:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cowspiracy#Criticism
I recently saw that movie. Basically what the movie maker did was taking the highest number he could find and repeating it over and over again.
This is unfortunate, because the overall message is still very much true: Meat production causes a lot of greenhouse gas emissions and cutting them is a great opportunity. And NGOs are very reluctant to talk about it.
51% of CO2 emissions is just a number that was repeated.
there's also dead oceans by 2048 which is the most pessimistic estimate.
but some numbers are fine.
the amount of land that is used for livestock is incomparable. water pollution, dead ocean zones, all caused by animal agriculture.
the amount of environmental destruction and pollution is incomparable. more than 90% of destroyed Amazon rainforest was for the sole reason of raising more livestock.
yeah, CO2 equivalent footprint might not be 51% but the oil industry does less environmental damage than animal agriculture. highest CO2 footprint isn't even cars and transport but heating and cooling.
I believe it's 51% of the greenhouse effect, that include 20ish percent of co2 emission resulting from cattle + the effect of methane which is a much more powerfull green house gas than co2.
(now whether this number is 51% or something else is another debate)
51% includes also respiration of cows, which should be net zero, because it is exactly the CO₂ that was captured by the plants before. (which is not okay to do)
Also 51% because equivalent calculations are not done over the span of 100 years, but shorter (methane becomes more dominant) and deforestation is also accounted for - (which is both fine).
So it is somewhere in between the results of renovated studies that say it is around 31% (e.g. Tukker et al) and the 51% worldwatch report.
Yeah, I would have loved some more facts and sources in that film. Nonetheless, as others have said, it presents awful circumstances that need to be changed.
The author is also playing the false dichotomy vegetarian <-> omnivorous, while people in the "omnivorous" category can eat varying amount of meat, and from 21 times a week down to one.
I don't know about this. Eating meat as a staple like Americans currently do is certainly not sustainable. But you can raise meat in such a way that it makes use of resources that you can't otherwise use. For example, pigs can live quite comfortably on waste like vegetable peelings. Cows can live on land that is not arable like meadows. Lamb is a by-product of raising sheep for wool.
I'm not sure I buy this oft-repeated non-arable land claim. First, aren't GMOs and other technological advances redefining "non-arable". Secondly, doesn't land used for pasture generate more methane and waste and take more energy and water, than if it was just left unused?
You can have sheep spend the summer there. GMO wheat fields, not.
Methane and waste, well, maybe. It's not clear to me that there can be enough sheep there that the waste is a problem. I've never even tried to quantify the methane.
Energy and water aren't issues. The energy to gather the sheep in the autumn is a rounding error, and how would you water such an area anyway?
You can't grow crops on that. No one's watering it. The only energy use is rounding all the sheep back up.
As for methane... well it's not the land that makes that, but the sheep. You're going to have that problem as long as you're rearing ruminants to eat. There's a lot of research being done on that - it's possible we'll be able to engineer low-methane sheep...
Just pushing things further, since I appreciate your insight, in terms of nature (as opposed to feeding humans), wouldn't a more natural ecosystem be preferred? Might it better help protect against extinctions and such?
More so than that, animals contribute in a positive way to vegetable production.
Chickens are great weeders.
Sheep and goats graze down grassy areas (or woody if goats) including areas that are in rotation but currently fallow, so it doesn't need to be mowed down with fossil fuel machines.
Pigs are great at rooting up uncultivated areas. And are wonderful waste disposal units.
All livestock make great fertilizer. In the case of pigs and chickens at least they make great fertilizer out of stuff we consider garbage.
But yes, meat consumption likely must be curtailed significantly.
Had the author consulted the literature, he'd know that the environmental credentials of grass-fed beef are extremely suspect; some studies suggest that the carbon footprint is actually greater than intensive feedlot beef and the land use is absolutely vast. He'd know that only a handful of animal sources of protein have equivalent CO2 emissions to plant sources - intensively reared poultry, eggs and some inshore seafoods.
Indeed. Organic beef has more CO₂, because it is about twice as long on the field (and releases therefor more methane into the air). Things become questionable - chickens are way better on CO2/kg of meat, because they are cramped into small cages. Trade-offs...
Not quibbling with the broader point, but... is this actually a problem? When I see center-pivot irrigation circles laid out on a square grid, wasting 20% of the land, I don't get the impression we're short of the stuff.
For America, not particularly. It is a big deal for smaller countries that would like to retain some degree of food independence, most obviously the United Kingdom.
It could become highly significant due to the growing global population and increasing meat consumption in the developing world. Global meat consumption has quadrupled in the last 50 years; continued growth at that rate is entirely plausible and entirely unsustainable.
You recommend a documentary with opposing views instead; should we only read and watch things that we agree with?
>Whoever lives in a cosmopolitan city knows this is not true, or not anymore.
Vegetarians compose about 3% of the population. I'd say that's a "margin group". If you live in a coastal city in the US, vegetarians may be over-represented.
>It is that supermarkets choose to put the "high price" on produce all year long, except for a discount crop maybe. This is because produce does not pull customers.
Blatantly false where I live. Produce is substantially cheaper all summer and into the fall than it is in the winter when we have to import vegetables from around the world.
I explain why not. Because bad, unsubstantiated arguments are provided.
> should we only read and watch things that we agree with?
Sure not. But when disagreeing, bring evidence pls.
> Vegetarians compose about 3% of the population. I'd say that's a "margin group". If you live in a coastal city in the US, vegetarians may be over-represented.
Someone who does not eat meat/fish for a day, is that person a vegetarian? I do not know definitions, but I just want to say it is not black-white. Not hippie vegetarians vs the normal omnis.
> Blatantly false where I live. Produce is substantially cheaper all summer
Ok. I was comparing the supermarket with the street markets. In street stalls the prices seem to fluctuate much more according to seasonal availability then in the supermarkets. But heay, just and observation :)
I don't eat meat not to solve any sustainability problems. I don't eat meat because of how the meat industry is treating the animals and the nature
(By the way, most soy and grain is produced to feat our animals). I can give you a lot of examples for the planned economized genocide on other races than humans. But people, like the author of this text, don't want to hear arguments or examples like that. They don't buy at the local market, they buy the cheapest meat at the supermarkets and care about their wallets more than they care about others. We totally lost the connection to the lives of the animals we eat. Additionally I don't eat meat because 80% of our antibiotics is produced to feat it to animals. Just Google MRSA and find out how much your government is doing about that issue. Some scientist, here in germany, call the resistance against antibiotics an equal threat to the mankind like nuclear weapons. This issue brings meat consumption and therefore the meat industry in a total different perspective.
That's not what this post is about (why people shouldn't eat meat). It's about the claim that vegetarian diets are better for the environment, which they are, but not to the extent that they'll solve our sustainable agriculture challenges. Please take your soapboxing to a place where it's on topic.
Please there is no call for being mean like this. I personally found this comment to be interesting and relevant. I also think it is relevant to the larger discussion of which this article is a part.
How is calling out people for highjacking discussions that are remotely about their personal convictions to preach about those convictions 'mean'? If anything, this site should police such behavior more - what we have now is half of the posts arguing a straw man because they see a keyword in the title and feel they need to defend their ideological positions. The OP is about how vegetarianism won't lead to sustainable food supply - and the GP answers 'you should become vegetarian because poor animals'. Fine, but in the context of this threat pure noise. Look, I'm not saying I can always restrain myself to stay on topic in every post I type; I'd be happy to have those posts summarily deleted too if that meant the signal to noise ratio in the comments would increase.
Basically what the text says is that plant-based food usually is less resource intense and thus better for the environment, but there are also other factors and plant-based food production isn't perfect. (Independent of the question whether all the other things he says are true.)
So the headline is obviously strictly true, but highly misleading. A more accurate one would be "Vegetarian diets are good for the planet, but they're not the whole solution".
The text explicitly says that vegetarian diets are not part of the solution. Either now, or under the system he proposes.
He's very clear that eating a fully vegetarian diet now is worse, footprint-wise, that eating a mildly omnivorous one.
He's also very clear that while eating a vegetarian diet under his proposed system would be just about possible, it is built around the assumption that most people will be eating meat, and that it would form a primary food source for the months of year when plant-based sources were scarce.
He's certainly trying to suggest that vegetarianism is worse, but he doesn't back it up. In fact, his off-hand remark that "Most of these staple crops — especially corn and soy — wind up in animal feed" undermines this point.
"He's very clear that eating a fully vegetarian diet now is worse, footprint-wise, that eating a mildly omnivorous one."
I don't think the article ever mentions that point of view. This is the only time a similar argument is mentioned:
"Given the way we grow food today, it’s more accurate to say that vegetarian diets are “less awful,” not “better,” than omnivorous diets"
The only time a mention of an omnivorous diet being an improvement is under the constraint that produce is bought locally, perhaps at a farmer's market:
"A vegetarian who consumes whatever’s in the produce aisle of Wegmann’s is going to have a much larger eco-footprint than the plant-centric, meat-occasional omnivore who purchases exclusively from the local farmer’s market"
Frankly, that kind of consumer has to be in the extreme minority.
There are many facet to preserving the planet and optimizing food production so the jury is still out.
One quick interesting discussion point is that no land can indefinitely sustain intensive farming and some plot will only ever be able to sustain grazing animals.
So let's reduce these constraints for the sake of argument: the world is two field as such. what's more eco friendly? A corn farm and a shrubland, or a forest and a sheep herd?
The article should be titled something more like 'Local, Seasonal Diets Are Going To Save The Planet'. It's not much about vegetarianism, except to attack it for clickbait reasons.
And a local, seasonal vegetarian diet is a lot easier to implement in a city environment than a local, seasonal omnivorous diet. So vegetarian is still likely to be a better option in the future, especially if you consider vat-grown meat to be a vegetable.
No, because with your vegetables you get lots of peels and seeds and remains that will be just great to feed a couple of hens for instance. Sustainable agriculture, even at a very small scale, always combines plants and animals.
That's the fundamental blind spot of vegans. Anyone actually growing some vegetables and fruits in his backyard will understand this. I know many starry-eyed hippies growing organic stuff in the countryside, and if many of them are vegetarians (eating dairy, eggs, etc but no meat) absolutely 0% of them are vegans because it doesn't make sense from a producer perspective.
Sustainable agriculture, even at a very small scale, always combines plants and animals.
Absolutely, and that's why I said vegetarian rather than vegan. Working animals for eggs, milk, wool, etc are a good idea. That's still not supporting an omnivorous diet though.
While I think the solutions presented in this article sound fantastic (in both senses of the word, unfortunately; it sounds way too ambitious to be realistic in the current political climate), the attack on vegetarianism is disingenuous.
As the article itself points out: "Most of these staple crops — especially corn and soy — wind up in animal feed". So that means that eating meat has the same devastating effect (but on a larger scale, because animals eat a lot) as its strawman vegetarian diet of wheat, corn, soy and rice.
Of course vegetarianism isn't magically going to solve all the world's problems, but all other things being equal, eating less meat will reduce your ecological footprint. There's a lot more you can do, but eating less meat is an easy first step.
Besides some flimsy claims about who consumes the most staples the article just basically says:
- buy local
- eat with the seasons
- many small local farms are better than few big (remote)
- there's need for a better market for those small farms
Is it just me not getting what this has to do with the cons of "vegetarian diets"? At least where I live eating meat isn't a sign for any of those points.
Although I'm a sarcastic person myself, this anti-hippie rhetoric is completely self-defeating. While I get the environmental and economic benefits of the "eat local" ideology, the consequences for our menu appear (at least to me) more hippie-like than not eating meat. But maybe this is just my opinion living in the North German Plain not wanting to eat rutabaga the whole winter.
As another person living in that region, rutabaga is not the only locally available crop - cauliflower, a whole variety of cabbages, corn lettuce (feldsalat), parsnips, and a bunch of other related plants are in season now, as are cultivated mushrooms. We mostly eat fresh stuff from the local farmer's market and it certainly doesn't feel hippie-like at all - it's just normal winter food.
As an aside, rutabaga has an awful reputation, which I feel is very much unjustified. It's by no means my favorite vegetable, but it certainly has its uses, and is lovely combined with say sweet potato in a mash. I understand it was the food of last resort for many in times of famine, but it's been two generations since the last time that was the case, and I think it's high time it was restored to the table as something more than a poor substitute.
I told you I'm a sarcastic person ;). I confess using the rutabaga example knowing its bad reputation for the sake of aggravation. Although I grew up in that region with food-conservative parents,[0] I'm still fan of occasional rutabaga mash or rutabaga gratinée - withstanding the lack of understanding from my flatmates.
[0] Means: regional/seasonal food not as ideology, but because it's the food one has eaten since childhood; or in other words: "What the farmer doesn't know he doesn't eat."
>Most of these staple crops — especially corn and soy — wind up in animal feed and fuel;
Exactly. So why should eating less of the same food than is necessary to produce a substantially smaller amount of meat be discouraged? Using less resources overall is still better, right?
Yeah this article is completely half-baked. If we had only grown enough of these staples to feed humans, it would require a whole lot less than growing enough to feed animals who feed humans. The author here is making it sound like there wouldn't be much difference.
Most of the arguments are just an appeal to nature. Doesn't address cow burps as a major source of pollution. Seems to be making a food miles argument, when what matters is carbon per pound of food. Transporting by boat is highly efficient and a high percentage of the cargo is food. Driving to pick up your food from 3 farmer's markets can create more pollution than would be used to transport them from across the world, because the food is such a small percentage of the weight of your car.
> Unfortunately, most food plants in this country are grown in resource-intensive systems that groan under the weight of a relentlessly demanding global consumer,
Question: aren't 'local', small-scale farms more resource-intensive per unit of food grown than factory farms, not less?
I think it entirely depends on the timescale. I like to imagine a distant future where all food production is automated. Staples, vegetables, and fruits (and fresh water) would be available to everyone for free. People wouldn't eat meat because of the environment. People wouldn't grow up eating meat, so eating a cow would be just as repulsive as eating a cat or a dog. It wouldn't even be a temptation.
> They’re so large, astronauts can see entire sections of the planet turn brown and die every Spring as farmers nuke the soil’s native biology to make way for the artificially imposed order of the grain field.
I don't know what to make of "artificially imposed order of the grain field." People have been artificially imposing order on the earth for thousands of years. Granted, it's on a much bigger scale today. Still, how do you propose feeding the earth without any artificial order?
In this future world, all of the machinery will run on solar and wind power. We will grow genetically modified crops so that we only need to use a small amount of pesticides and fertilizers. And just like all plants, these crops will absorb a lot of carbon dioxide and release a lot of oxygen.
I mean, even if this is still bad for the environment, would there even be any room for improvement? The only thing I can think of is somehow reducing the human population. That's a prickly subject.
And we're going to really have to think about all of this before we defeat aging.
Founder of Eaternity here. Putting facts to the issue, we have collected the largest database to calculate the CO₂ emissions for food - and it is freely available: www.eaternity.org
The author should cite the article(s) that claim vegetarian diets alone will save the planet - this is clickbait/trolling. I'm a vegetarian and make no claim that being so is going to save the planet - it would help if we all were but it's definitely not a silver bullet.
I am still not convinced that local anything is more eco/carbon friendly. Think the Law of Comparative Advantages - in certain areas my lunch will be way more eco/carbon friendly if I only spend the whole day producing guns instead of butter. Also I suspect that huge farms employing high end software, hardware and even weather prediction technology are more eco/carbon friendly than any local farmer can ever be.
The author's very excited about urban gardens, but have we gotten anywhere close to cleaning up our cities well enough that we can grow food there without swallowing a bunch of lead in the process?
This article reminds me of a previous one from a few months ago that talked about where the produce in Chinatown comes from (local, small growers rather than large industrial operations).
TL;DR: Try Vegan/Vegetarian diets and buy local to have the best sustainable diet.
Also, bring your own hand-knitted bags to buy food at the farmers market.
i was in NYC for work during the holidays, etsy had a pop up exchange in Chelsea market and it was absolutely nuts. After seeing it, the need to create a food market to connect, and incentivize, local producers and consumers was obviously apparent.
I think garden tech is a wide open space with room for even small application of tech mentality to have a huge impact on yield
I'm the author. Ho boy. Just a few clarifications based on things I'm seeing here:
"a vegetarian diet, and specially a vegan diet, is A LOT less awful then an omni diet both environmentally, ethically and considering health impact."
I agree. Nowhere did I contradict this.
"He argues vegetarians eat more staples."
No, I argue that the most vegetarian diets are composed primarily of staples. Subtle but extremely important distinction.
"Showing pictures of hippies to re-enforce the idea that vegetarians/vegans are some treehugging margin group."
I dug my own grave here. Had no idea this article would go viral. Oops.
"meat eating is simply not sustainable"
Correct; CAFO industrial meat that's eaten without an ear toward seasonality or ecological propriety is pure hell. However, sustainable food production systems will rely on modeling natural patterns (which is the opposite of what nearly all farms today do), and that will rely heavily on animals - though far, far, FAR fewer of them - for mineral cycling and fertility, as do nearly all native ecosystems. I don't have the space here to talk about fertility via animals vs nitrogenous covers; may address that in a later article.
"Cowspiracy"
This movie is directed at the industrial meat supply chain: the land-expansive background farms that feed CAFOs and the CAFOs themselves. I advocate for neither.
"The author is also playing the false dichotomy vegetarian <-> omnivorous"
There is an entire paragraph in my article where I explain that not all vegetarian diets, and not all omnivorous diets, are created equal.
"Had the author consulted the literature, he'd know that the environmental credentials of grass-fed beef are extremely suspect; some studies suggest that the carbon footprint is actually greater than intensive feedlot beef and the land use is absolutely vast. He'd know that only a handful of animal sources of protein have equivalent CO2 emissions to plant sources - intensively reared poultry, eggs and some inshore seafoods."
The increased carbon footprint of grass-finished beef is based on grass finished beef living longer than grain finished beef because they take longer to finish. The studies I've seen regarding grass/grain cattle emissions are limited to examination of lifetime carbon output directly from the cow through expiration. They do not examine 1.) the sequestration of carbon into soil built by ecologically managed, rotationally-grazed herds, 2.) the carbon output of CAFO manure lagoons, 3.) the carbon footprint of the grains fed to CAFO animals. In short, the studies do not address the net carbon effect of the entire system, and they only address the two "traditional" methods of raising cattle, neither of which I endorse.
"He's very clear that eating a fully vegetarian diet now is worse, footprint-wise, that eating a mildly omnivorous one."
Not quite. I said it's POSSIBLE for a fully vegetarian diet to be worse, footprint wise, than a plant-centric omnivorous one. I.e. there is no deterministic link between vegetarian diets and sustainability.
"Besides some flimsy claims about who consumes the most staples"
Again, I make no claims about who eats the most staples. I make a claim that the most vegetarian diets are principally composed of staples.
"It's not much about vegetarianism, except to attack it for clickbait reasons."
Absolutely correct. I had to choose between an accurate title that almost no one would read, or a caustic one that would stimulate debate and get me yelled at. And so here we are :-)
"The author should cite the article(s) that claim vegetarian diets alone will save the planet"
As stated in the first sentence, this article was prompted by a slew of responses from vegetarians to my previous article about organic agriculture, nearly all of whom argued that the "simple" solution to food sustainability was to switch to a vegetarian diet.
"Question: aren't 'local', small-scale farms more resource-intensive per unit of food grown than factory farms, not less?"
Yes. However, I'm advocating a form of agriculture that doesn't exist yet.
> On the east coast, the solution is large numbers of smaller (50–500 acres) cultivated food forests surrounding our urban centers, forming the backbone of a production system augmented by urban gardens growing on nearly every rooftop, balcony, vacant lot, road median, yard, public park, and empty warehouse floor. The solution involves brick & mortar markets and food hubs being supplanted by producer/consumer exchanges* that allow computers to handle the aggregating without obscuring the relationship between grower and eater.
I am suspicious of this - especially the part about rooftop gardens. I remember someone telling me that small gardens are quite carbon intensive because they don't get the economies of scale that large farm operations do. Can anyone confirm that? Do permaculture farms get economies of scale?
The true solution is very, very simple. A crippling carbon tax. It needs to be large enough that it becomes unprofitable to have tomatoes in winter, and for food to travel long distances.* We don't necessarily need to buy directly from directly from producers if middlemen supermarkets can transport food efficiently.
Perhaps such a heavy carbon tax would force supermarket chains to downsize and source more food locally and in season, but the real optimisations would come from the things we haven't thought of yet. Every business would be looking to for ways to cut their carbon costs, necessity is the mother of invention of course. This would require a huge restructuring of the world economy. That's possible, just a hard sell - think how much the world economy changed during WW2.
I've been in a pretty apocalyptic kind of mood lately (feeling my vibe? F#A#∞ is a great album to day dream this stuff to.). Melting permafrost in Siberia and Alaska will cause a a vicious circle of carbon being released, further warming temperatures. Political action is the only thing that can stop climate change and with the way Trumps first week has gone, my hopes for that are the bleakest they've ever been. Are we past the tipping point? I'm kind of wondering if we should just give up and use the rest of our oil to move people away from coastal areas. Perhaps militarisation of national borders is the logical thing to do to prepare for waves of climate refugees that can't be supported (that's a very, very sad thought). Will starving nations resort to nuclear war? What do people here think?
* Worried about how the poor would handle such a rise in food costs? You should be. I imagine the bulk of the tax would need to be transferred to the poor, as they spend the largest proportion of the income on basic necessities caused by a heavy carbon tax. On a global scale, a heavy carbon tax would need to result in large transfers from the developed nations to the underdeveloped. A political pipe dream...
The vegan nonsensealists perhaps should consider the role of hunting and animal husbandry in the ability of humans to inhabit northern and semidesert regions of the planet and to sustain a population. It is also good idea to read about the causes of malnutrition in poor communities.
With 54% [1] of the world's population in urban areas already (rising to over 70% in the developed world) [1] that "role of hunting and animal husbandry in ... regions of the planet" is becoming an ever increasing rarity. By 2050 the 54% is expected to rise to 66% [2] so I doubt there will be many hunter gatherers left anywhere.
Here in 'the North' at longitude 10.757933 people only hunt for sport. Although they make the claim of culling for environmental reasons I have yet to see any elk or red deer without venturing deep into the forest on foot (so I'm calling BS).
>the causes of malnutrition in poor communities.
Obvious response would be to eradicate yet more rain-forest and open a McDonalds in all those poor countries. /s Malnutrition in poor communities (and I'm not sure to where you refer with that vague choice of phrase) is likely caused by factors that control diet, and not by diet in and of itself. In other words, it's the poverty itself causing malnutrition, not a lack of meat or forced vegetarianism.
That was a hint on the cause - why this evolutionary adaptation would emerge in the first place.
For everything else - think what would happen in any urban area if a few poultry farms would close for a month. India is one single example of mostly vegetarian traditionalist population, but even in India in the tribes populated north and north-west regions vegetarian diet cannot sustain a population.
Bonus question: how do you imagine a vegetarian Pakistan or any other middle east country?
Why?
* Author writes """it’s more accurate to say that vegetarian diets are “less awful,” not “better,” than omnivorous diets""". He gives no hard numbers to back it up. Less awful IS OBVIOUSLY the same as better. According to many sources, that are well presented in the Cowspiracy documentary (among others) it is shown that a vegetarian diet, and specially a vegan diet, is A LOT less awful then an omni diet both environmentally, ethically and considering health impact.
* He argues vegetarians eat more staples. And that they are usually grown as mono crops, thus bad for the environment. He forgets that animals slaughtered for meat have been eating staples all their lives. A large part of the staples are grown for life stock; this makes meat so inefficient in the first place. The author is seems to know that it is also grown for life stock, but then continues that vegetarians are responsible for the monocrop disaster. Clearly misguided he is.
* Showing pictures of hippies to re-enforce the idea that vegetarians/vegans are some treehugging margin group. Whoever lives in a cosmopolitan city knows this is not true, or not anymore.
What I do agree on: eat with the seasons. But simple economics of "eat what is cheap" should help with that. It is that supermarkets choose to put the "high price" on produce all year long, except for a discount crop maybe. This is because produce does not pull customers.
What pulls customers? Cheap meat, and cheap beer. That's why there's always some meat on offer that costs less per kilo then bell peppers in the supermarkets near where I live.
If we want to save the planet from the rather imminent "mass extinction" (lets not call it "global warming" that sound waaay to nice), we should not optimize for consumerism but for sustainability. And meat eating is simply not sustainable.