Summary: in practice yes, but sneakily not directly, because those areas are first turned into pastures. However, once used up, they are then turned into soy bean fields. This also circumvents legislation specific to the rainforest area against deforestation to plant soy beans, because, well, it happened indirectly.
As other comments here also bring up, direct human consumption accounts for about a fifth of all produced soy beans, with only six being in the forms consumers directly probably think of (tofu, edamame, etc.), and the other 14 in the shape of e.g. soy bean oil.
The main driver for all this production (and hence deforestation), however, at a whopping 77%, is to be a source of cheap livestock feed.
This is what the article says. It does not, directly anyway, make any health or environmental claims regarding one diet over another.
Deforestation of the rain forest is bad. We all know this. And because it is only done to meet demands from consumers, what we as consumers can do is demand access to supply chain insight so we can then avoid products that come from this horribly shortsighted process. Regardless of whether said product is a piece of meat, a bottle of oil, or a block of tofu.
I’m not expecting anyone to go vegan or even vegetarian (I’m neither). But if we all eat a small portion of meat once or twice a week instead of large portions every day, demand for soy will go way down.
Indeed. Even if eating meat caused zero deforestation (directly or indirectly), it's super inefficient. If everyone stopped eating meat, 75% of the land used for farming could be re-wilded. That land area is something like China, the US, the EU, and Australia... combined.
I'm not vegetarian, but after seeing the results of deforestation first hand I've reduced my meat intake substantially. Side benefits included improved cooking abilities and lost weight without trying.
Exactly. Going full vegan requires real effort to get enough of all nutrients you need. A vegetable-heavy diet with little animal products on the other hand easily gives you everything, without any vitamin pills, and reduces your carbon footprint almost as much. It's also psychologically easier as you can still enjoy good steak or whatever you like every now and then.
I highly recommend chickpeas and fava beans in particular. Much better for stomach than kidney beans, and perfect for many kinds of rice and pasta dishes. Fava beans are also very easy to grow outside in most climates if you're into gardening and have the space.
> Exactly. Going full vegan requires real effort to get enough of all nutrients you need.
This is really not true with the possible exception of iron, which you can mitigate by eating a lot of citrus (this helps with absorption; plants have lots of iron, but heme iron has much greater bio-availability).
I am not vegan since I eat dairy and eggs still, however this is purely because I enjoy them and not for any particular dietary reason. I allow myself these luxuries while understanding that's what they are: luxuries, not requirements. We are all human, after all, and we can't all be monks who optimize every behavior. I think it's important to be honest about that and truthful about our motivations when we decide to eat animal products, because it is really not by necessity (at least, not in the western world, where plant-based alternatives are affordable and readily purchased).
If everybody ate mostly soy and legumes it would solve a lot of problems, even if they still have a steak or cheese every now and then. But they don't need to have that steak or cheese to be healthy :)
I've been a vegetarian and sometime vegan for coming up to 25 years now, and I fully agree. If people cut down on meat just so they could use that money towards a couple of really good pieces of meat in the week, not only would that cut their meat consumption it would also improve their enjoyment of food, let alone all the other benefits.
Conventional beekeepers aim to harvest the maximum amount of honey, with high honey yields being viewed as a mark of success. When farmers remove honey from a hive, they replace it with a sugar substitute which is significantly worse for the bees’ health since it lacks the essential micro-nutrients of honey.
You are aware that tofu/tempeh/s. milk are made out of soy, right? I'm seriously concerned that one mass production (meat) will turn to another. The mass producers need to sell.
I hope my comment does not start a carnivore vs vegan war (as just like you, I'm neither).
you're absolutely right - preparing a high quality beef meal takes a lot more than just processing soy, but what I was aiming at was that we will replace one mass consumption with the other, just like we always do and that may mask the problem but I believe it won't solve it. I could be wrong though.
> but what I was aiming at was that we will replace one mass consumption with the other, just like we always do and that may mask the problem but I believe it won't solve it
You're comparing two cases of "mass production" without any quantifier.
Beef has an over 15 times larger carbon footprint compared to tofu.
I haven't ran the numbers, but parent hinted at a cow needing to eat, say, 10 Kg of soy per Kg of meat produced, while you could have just eaten the soy directly.
Meat production uses a lot of land to produce food for your food, that's why it's so inneficient. Instead you could just use a tiny fraction of that land, and grow enough food for everyone.
That would still be a good thing. If everybody would switch from cow's milk to soy milk we would cut green house gase emissions by two thirds.
The affects on land and water usage are even greater.
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-46654042
This discussion is about how producing meat requires tons and tons of land in the form of soy bean fields that feed the animals, which indirectly and directly contributes to deforestation. Now you come along and say, just eat meat produced using this other method which takes a lot MORE land for the same amount of meat production?
No they're not, at least they're not pasture. They're either already farmed fields or they're wild meadows. Putting meadows to intense use would destroy whole ecosystems that may look like "just grass" from afar, and farmed fields are obviously already in use.
Any land reclaimed from livestock feeding could be returned to nature, be it rainforests in Brazil or woodlands in Europe. Livestock uses a massive amount of agricultural land in comparison to plant production meant for direct human consumption.
It's just a very very simple math based on the amount of crops it takes to grow animals for meat -- and soy is much more efficient than grass in that sense, so your suggestion would make things decidedly worse for environment.
> but woodlands in Europe aren't 'nature' in any primitive sense.
Europe is varied, not sure where you live but the forests in Northern/North-Central Europe that I'm familiar with absolutely do support wildlife. I think it shouldn't be controversial that returning agricultural land to nature, whatever "nature" means in different areas, is good for environment.
Anyway, this is wildly beside the point, which is that pasture feeding cattle can't satisfy the current demand for meat, not even close. Converting soy fields to grazing fields would be an ecological disaster without a serious decrease in worldwide meat consumption, as the yields would be far lower.
But why would you do that? Don't cut down forests for soy, and don't cut it down for pasture either. Use existing green grass fields to feed cattle. This can be done in between crop rotations.
> without a serious decrease in worldwide meat consumption
Maybe that's the point?
Eat less (if you want to eat at all) and eat grass-fed. Do cattle even choose to eat soy when they have green grass available?
> Maybe that's the point? Eat less (if you want to eat at all) and eat grass-fed. Do cattle even choose to eat soy when they have green grass available?
Eating less meat was the point from the start as the main/only way to decrease soy footprint, so if you're not suggesting to replace soy feed with grass then this whole discussion was in the end more or less pointless.
Livestock has been raised in Europe for Millenia with no soy anywhere near them. Grass grazed cattle & chickens are completely sustainable and beneficial to the environment they're on. Sourced locally they're a fuckton healthier and less polluting than shipping soy and avocados across the planet.
Monocrops are terrible for the planet & wildlife, and are only even viable due to heavy use of pesticides & NPK fertliser.
Organic farming requires large amounts of animal manure to work, guess where it comes from?
Please go read about regenerative agriculture - that's the way forward.
>If the grass pasture is already there in cycle, it's not being used for anything else. Might as well put cattle on it.
This is true, technically speaking. Practically, you couldn't produce even a fraction of the amount of meat that the market wants using this way. If all meat was grass fed meat, it would be a luxury good. I don't think that would be too bad to be honest, it would lead to much less meat consumption overall.
Basically, "just eat grass fed meat" = "everyone must eat a lot less meat, unless they're rich I guess"
Not all land is a good pasture. In many parts of the world, good pasture are also efficient carbon sinks. In my part of the world those carbon sinks are rare (only about 10% of pastures are carbon sinks), and the few that are good are even better as farmland.
That overlap is not 100%. Some good pasture is bad farmland, but the claim that good pasture is good farmland is a good rule of thumb
Echoing this sentiment. I spent years doing mental gymnastics to justify my meat and dairy consumption. Going vegan was a great release of that mental tension.
If guilt tripping turned people vegan, everyone would be vegan by now (seriously, who hasn't heard at least one berate them like this?). Given that this isn't the case, perhaps you can come up with something that is a little more convincing.
Your argument could be applied to a host of topics. The truth is, the vast majority of people aren't willing to change. For example, heart disease is the biggest killer in the world and yet people still don't take the required steps to prevent themselves of suffering from that disease.
Sure, but it's still counterproductive. Most people respond to guilt by just digging their heels in. When you want to convince someone to give up something dear to their heart, you have to tread carefully.
There's nothing inherently wrong with anything. That said, they're being restated for a reason and unless that reason is the satisfaction of reading the post or hearing the words out of your own mouth, restating these facts doesn't make any sense.
Highly refined carbs are certainly a problem. Regardless of your opinion, red meat - including processed meat such as bacon - is also a cause of coronary heart disease.
"We found that greater intakes of total, unprocessed, and processed red meat were each associated with a higher risk of CHD. Compared with total, unprocessed, or processed red meat, other dietary components such as soy, nuts, and legumes were associated with a lower risk of CHD." [1]
This study suffers from severe methodological flaws, which the authors acknowledge (having made their research questions explicit), but alas it is used in ways that extrapolate the findings to conclusions unsupported by the study.
In particular, the findings are entirely compatible with
1. The possibility that meat will lead to a reduction in risk if used in the same kinds of dishes as the nuts and legumes in this study
2. Nuts and legumes will lead to an increase in risk if used in the same kinds of dishes as the hotdogs and burgers which were the focus of the study.
I've seen people (not you) dump citations like this to claim health benefits for crap like facon, which is deepfried coconut infused in liquid smoke, at the same time as branding a caesar salad a cardiac risk.
Just doesn’t have the same sensation, I’ve tried all the latest modern vegan stuff and it just replaces things that actually would be the lighter more flavorful parts of the meal with stodge.
There is no vegan food alternative to say a rare steak or raw tuna which is extremely flavorful, nutritious and light.
I've found that the cheaper processed meats (chicken, burgers etc.) have the most convincing plant-based alternatives, usually from soy protein. Any seafood or dishes where the meat is the main flavour such as steak there's just no alternative that comes anywhere close; same goes for vegan alternatives to cheese.
What I found most helpful when going vegetarian was realising that it's not an all-or-nothing type situation, and if I can go completely vegetarian except for eating tuna or steak a couple times a month then that's better than not trying at all, even though that's not an argument I've really seen repeated all that much on the internet.
That’s like saying there is no animal faster than a horse for transportation... until you realize you don’t need animals at all to get you to your goal. Yes you can’t replace the experience of a steak, but you can replace the satisfying meal with something non-meat (I’m not vegetarian).
I agree imitation meat usually tastes like crap but I’ve had great vegan fried chicken in Japan where I didn’t even know it was not meat until after the meal. That and just getting used to all the non-meat stuff you can eat (ramen, MSG, bean curd, legumes, kimchi). In American cuisine i think of vegan food as imitation meat and stramed veggies...
I think what most people associate with meat is actually the flavors that go into the meat-centric dish most cuisine is based on.
My point is nothing hits that specific sensation that rare steak and raw tuna hits. Avocado is maybe the closest managing to hit the fatty sensation similar to the tuna but still has a stodge sensation too while the tuna doesn't and can't possibly replicate the mix of freshness and Maillard reaction of steak.
There's a good reason steak is such a common food for vegetarians to give in and eat.
I'm not a vegan, so I'd be a pretty terrible liar if I was trying to guilt trip others into being something I'm not.
My point was that if you think in terms of meat, or horses, you'll only be able to come up with solutions to your problems in those terms.
If you go one level up and realize that your problem has nothing to do with horses or animals, and deals with transportation then you'll realize you can solve that problem and never have to deal with horses again.
People enjoying horse riding is in fact a completely unrelated problem (entertainment, enjoyment, or whatever you want to call it), as I was making the point by mentioning cannibalism (you're doing it because you enjoy it, not because human flesh is necessary for your sustenance).
If you open your mind to the fact that it may be that what you enjoy about your food isn't the meat but the flavors and effort the chef puts into the dish that just happens to contain meat, you'll see that you're probably associating that deliciousness with the meat when in fact it's just because the deliciousness was imbued onto the meat dish. We started using meat because of its convenience, not because it has some magical properties that make food palatable where other things cannot substitute.
I personally am not vegan because animal welfare is not high enough in my priorities to overcome the hassles of adjusting around the current bias towards meat in most cuisine. But if most cuisine started orienting around non-meat dishes (and a lot of cultures already do this, especially from countries that historically couldn't afford meat), I know I would not complain.
It's uniquely American (maybe European too?) to eat a giant slab of relatively cheap lean steak with just salt and pepper... most other cuisines mix meat with veggies, or in the case of Japan go for slightly higher quality (non-factory farmed) but lower volume meat consumption. Veggies in American cuisine are an afterthought (something you have to eat to "balance" your meal) whereas if you take Chinese dishes (while many feature meat), they can often center around veggies and make them the primary focus.
I'll be direct and to the point: I'd rather slit my wrists than drop meat long-term.
I find most vegan food distateful to the point of depression-inducing, and of all diets I've tried nothing has felt better for my body than going low-carb and upping my fat intake; which is nigh-impossible in an already limited vegan diet.
I'm happy that it works for some people, and I'm not against economically reasonable measures to reduce the externalities of meat production. But veganism is absolutely nowhere near being a universally viable diet for human beings.
There is no way personal choice affects industry enough to make a difference. Regulation effects it much much more. If you don't want people eating meat, reduce all the subsidies and make meat price sky rocket, problem reduced.
Say it with me, there is no such thing as the free market, there is no such thing as buying your way into fixing environmental problems, some exception though may be found in religion where certain things are banned so it's so socially unacceptable to eat those things that it may well be codified into law. When it comes to fixing these things, it's politics all the way down. Policy, regulation, and enforcement. Also private ownership of the land with terms of ownership saying you can't do anything to this land, through zoning laws. You want to be an environmental billionaire, buy all this land and do nothing with it because you can't and because it's privately owned the government can't decide to let people use it to create jobs, they could however rezone it.
There is a lab behind it investigating how to make a grass-based product that can be used instead of milk even for making cheese. That means getting microorganisms to create the right proteins from ground up grass in a fermentor.
The animal was fed something we could have eaten. It doesn’t do us much good to shun soy fed beef for corn fed beef. Agree with you on local and chicken.
Research is underway to process grass into a milk-substitute. It's a matter of making microorganisms that create the right mix of proteins from ground grass. Plenty of food is already created this way. E.g. microbial rennet is made up from proteolytic enzymes grown in a fermentor and natural (as opposed to chemical) vanillin can be made by a microbe.
there's actually an interesting argument that i first heard Diane Fleischman pose -- that chicken is worse than beef on a calorie/animal measure and so would harm more animals because it takes more chickens to feed x people than it does cows, and so more animals suffer for the same amount of food produced.
I don't think you can make the argument that a cow is exponentially more intelligent than a chicken.
I'd actually make the argument that most dairy cattle have a much better life than any but the most "organic" chicken. Speaking for the situation here in Germany, where I studied veterinary medicine.
Also, who knows? Maybe plants suffer the most of all species. Going from the other side for humans the circle of empathy is increasing including now all mankind and on the verge to expand to mammals.
But if you consider the way demand increases because of the scale of the world population and economic growth (i.e. people are getting richer and want to finally be able to afford and enjoy meat) the bottom line is that, when it comes to environmental issues, we also need to reduce the global human population sooner than later because this really is the root cause.
We have enough insight into the supply chain to know that the block of tofu is not the driver of the problem.
Soybeans have a high protein yield, hence why they're grown for feed. The plant fixates nitrogen as alluded to above. Soy is a complete protein, albeit with an amino acid profile that is not quite as similar to human muscle tissue as some meat.
It is a miracle plant! Soybeans are easy to prepare and taste fantastic, and can form the core of a healthy diet.
As other comments here also bring up, direct human consumption accounts for about a fifth of all produced soy beans, with only six being in the forms consumers directly probably think of (tofu, edamame, etc.), and the other 14 in the shape of e.g. soy bean oil.
The main driver for all this production (and hence deforestation), however, at a whopping 77%, is to be a source of cheap livestock feed.
This is what the article says. It does not, directly anyway, make any health or environmental claims regarding one diet over another.
Deforestation of the rain forest is bad. We all know this. And because it is only done to meet demands from consumers, what we as consumers can do is demand access to supply chain insight so we can then avoid products that come from this horribly shortsighted process. Regardless of whether said product is a piece of meat, a bottle of oil, or a block of tofu.