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Study Claims Lettuce Is "Three Times Worse Than Bacon" For GHG Emissions (cmu.edu)
davidshenba writes: Sticking to a vegetarian diet may not the best for environment — in fact, it might be harmful to it. According to new research from Carnegie Mellon University, following the USDA recommendations to consume more fruits, vegetables, dairy and seafood is more harmful to the environment because those foods have relatively high resource uses and greenhouse gas emissions per calorie. "There's a complex relationship between diet and the environment," Ph.D. student Michelle Tom said. "What is good for us health-wise isn't always what's best for the environment. That's important for public officials to know and for them to be cognizant of these tradeoffs as they develop or continue to develop dietary guidelines in the future." As you might suspect some find the study dubious at best.
Subject says it all. Editors, this is literally your job. Don't give equal time to obvious lunatics.
The title is about lettuce, the article that "debunks it" says that vegetarians will not eat only lettuce. So the title is correct.
Not only that, they provide a concentrated source of necessary nutrition, some of which is really hard to find in just plants...
Can you Say vitamin B12?
However, even though I'm not a vegetarian, or a vegan, or an environmentalist who's into saving the world from global warming, Count me one of the folks who hold this study in low regard.... If you set out to arrive at a conclusion, it's always possible though careful weeding out of the data you use. Just ask the global warming crowd..
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
Kind of like when wine sales are down, a scientific report is released about health benefits of occasional glass of wine.
mfwright@batnet.com
Yeah. Big news : mushrooms are 0 calories, so they're emitting *infinite* greenhouse gas per calorie. I'm surprised there is not an infinite quantity of greenhouse gas on earth.
Oh, wait, because we're not trying to get even 1 calorie from eating mushrooms !
It takes 1800 gallons of water to grow the food cows eat to produce one pound of meat. Plus what the cows drink. How many gallons of water does it take to grow a pound of lettuce?
You're ignoring the debunker's point, which is that meat-eaters don't just eat bacon, and vegetarians don't just eat lettuce.
In order to compare the environmental effects of diets, you need to do a full inventory of the foods in them, not just a comparison of two items.
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
The problem is not that people eat meat, the problem is there are so damn many of us eating anything at all.
No, the problem is: anout 50% of all food offered in supermarkets is thrown away. Directly at the supermarket. They don't even iffer it to the poor.
The ideacthat there are to many people is an american urban legend.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Yeah, because grains have zero environmental footprint, what with the tractors, industrial fertilizers, pesticides, fuel to transport across vast distances...
Only I can judge you.
The problem with the study is the selective use of calorie as a measure instead of nutrient.
-rd
You should probably wait. You're just showing your vegan friends you're too dumb to do basic logical reasoning. They are going to make fun of you.
We have forgotten that the most important part of eating is calories. A healthy person will survive a lot longer without any other nutrient than without calories.
The problem with the study is the selective use of calorie as a measure instead of nutrient.
There are many problems with this study. Comparing cucumbers to pork is silly, since people don't eat cucumbers as a substitute for bacon. If you want to compare something to bacon, then you should compare tofu, beans, tempeh, or peanuts. But then you would find that per calorie or per gram of protein, the veggie option is far better for the environment, and then there is no shocking headline to generate clicks.
It's not 0 when I sautee them in butter and eat them with bacon.
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
The article "debunking" it also claims moral high ground for it's author. Not ironically, the author actually claims that. The author actually uses the argument that she is right because she is better than other people.
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Comparing cucumbers to pork is silly, since people don't eat cucumbers as a substitute for bacon
Actually, it isn't. Comparing the GHG per calorie of any two foods isn't silly, it's basic research. However, drawing conclusions about different diets based on unrepresentative samples of the components of the diets is silly, and that's what a lot of the people writing the articles around this study seem to be doing. It is important, however, to always remember that it's the job of those writers to get us to click on the links and see the ads, not provide us with rational analysis.
The original study compares the USDA recommended food mix to the current American diet and finds that the USDA recommended diet would increase GHG emissions and energy usage, even if the number of calories was reduced to the recommended amount to maintain a healthy weight. It should be noted that the recommended diet is not vegetarian, and that a vegetarian diet was not considered in the study, so anything about how vegetarian diets compare to omnivorous diets is trolling for clicks.
Fanatically anti-fanatical