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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.
Truth and reality don't matter anymore; soundbytes and headlines and ever-decreasing "news cycles" do.
nasty vegetarians try to take my precious.
Can't wait to send this to my vegan friends who switched to being veganese after watching some netflix documentaries...
The title is about lettuce, the article that "debunks it" says that vegetarians will not eat only lettuce. So the title is correct.
Curse you di-hydrogen monoxide.
Best way to get you kids to eat vegetables.
Now, it's not always the case that the price of something corresponds to its resource use. But things that use a lot of resources tend to be more expensive. Food for thought.
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
Pigs aren't fed lettuce.
Logic. Do you speak it mutherfucker?
The paper simply cites that on a per calorie basis many vegtables like lettuce, cucumbers, celery, etc are worse for the enviornment. It's actually obvious because these foods have no nutritional value with respect to calories, yet require water and other resources to bring to the table. The same paper states nutrition rich plant materials are actually better. The "debunking" article is just a knee jerking response and addresses "issues" that were never brought up in the paper. What we need to help fix this planet are people that run off of logic, not emotions.
Let's focus on truly man made emissions, you know shit coming out of cars, coal plants, etc and stop trying to figure out how much a cow farts or how much is generated by eating lettuce. What a waste of time and money. All of the cows and lettuce eating people on the planet pail in comparison to one coal plant.
Those cow farts are pretty much just as man made (and damaging) as your car when you look at a typical cattle (or chicken or hog) farm and the amount of mechanization that goes into turning grain and other feed into the meat in your supermarket.
http://www.independent.co.uk/e...
But in almost every case, the world's 1.5 billion cattle are most to blame. Livestock are responsible for 18 per cent of the greenhouse gases that cause global warming, more than cars, planes and all other forms of transport put together.
Since lettuce has far more water than calories, that's not much of a surprise. You'd have to eat a mountain of lettuce to get the same caloric intake as a couple of rashers of bacon. But few people eat lettuce for the calories; vegetarians often get most of theirs from nuts, mushrooms & soy, for example - none of which appear to be covered in the study
eating a vegetarian diet could contribute to climate change
Sure, but less so than most diets involving meat (disclaimer: not a vegetarian). The study also includes dairy foods and even seafood, which seems odd for a vegetarian diet but maybe bolsters their desired conclusion (cheese in particular is pretty GHG-intensive). The result seems to be more useful for fuelling misleading media quotes like the above, than for making informed decisions.
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
It does not make much sense to compare various foods so long as we overeat like crazy and throw away half of the food we buy. Start by making sure everyone lives within walking distance of a supermarket. Then people don't have to buy gigantic portions on weekly trips and have half of it get spoiled. Said daily walking trips will also help you lose weight, and then you don't need as many calories to sustain the bulk of your body. AND less greenhouse emissions from driving.
Kind of like when wine sales are down, a scientific report is released about health benefits of occasional glass of wine.
mfwright@batnet.com
Is there a way to capture said cow fart methane and burn it for energy?
Is there a way to capture said cow fart methane and burn it for energy?
Not economically, though prototypes do exist. There is some effort to capture methane emissions from cow manure.
You're probably not reading the real news.
If you want to eat your veggies and own land, grow your own. Local farmers markets also contain large amounts of inexpensive fruits and vegetables some of which are locally grown.
Think of how much acreage, water, and fertilizer is consumed to make iceberg lettuce. It conveys hardly any calories and simply gives you gas.
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In fact, IF you'd THINK about the amount of energy used in collection, transportation, and preparation of a vegetarian diet, and consider how much you have to eat to get the calories and nutrition you need to survive then consider the calorie density of BACON, it's quite plausible that the entire process of putting bacon in your belly requires the generation of less greenhouse gases per calorie than it takes to put lettuce inside you.
Because calorie wise, 4 oz of bacon is like 4 KG of lettuce. And the lettuce still has no protein in it.
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?
Just do the math on kg GHG/calorie. It's unsustainable. We've got to stop drinking water and switch to softdrinks.
No, but they eat their own shit.
You are welcome on my lawn.
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.
I agree lets start will all the brown people.
There is a huge amount of land that hasn't been agriculturalized yet. We still can make enough food. I agree we don't really "need" to have as many people as we have but I think we are more than able to produce for them. The problem is growing land and population density doesn't always align very well. People want to live in cities but we need rural to grow the food. Etc. Things get complicated really quick.
The world would be better with fewer people.
Volunteers?
Thought not. There's your problem.
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
Brawndo's got what plants crave. It's got electrolytes
Only I can judge you.
Simple logical thought would debunk the whole theory of this train of thought. Animals require plants to live. If you're getting farmed food, you're getting second hand plants. There's an extra step that requires all the processing of the first. FFS most corn goes to animal feed. Stop and think before you type. Eating animals, regardless of the ethical implications, only provides more in terms of calories density. In every other way eating less meat increases your positive affect on the environment. This is such a trivially stupid thing to debunk I'm ashamed I live on a planet with people so stupid that I have to point this out.
Stupid story, who says vegetarians eat lettuce anyway, it is just crispy flavoured water.
The degree of processing required to feed true herbivores is highly variable. Some of them can survive entirely on their own without any human intervention. Much of the American interior was once covered with them.
On the other hand, Humans are very poor at exploiting plant material. Most of what is grown to feed humans can't even be digested by a person. That's not even getting into the waste associated with plant production at all levels of the supply chain.
On the other hand, Pigs in particular are omnivores that put us to shame. They can eat all kinds of leftovers and industrial byproducts. They tolerate modern high density industrial farming much better than chickens or cows.
You're not nearly as smart as you think you are. You're just a smug clueless idiot with a political agenda.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
You're ignoring the debunker's point, which is that meat-eaters don't just eat bacon...
I would, if my wife would let me.
I, for one, am willing to accept this study's results at face value.
#DeleteChrome
when CMU isn't busy deanonymizing tor hidden services, they're publishing nonsense studies. that place is the lamest thing about pittsburgh.
That Archie Debunker, always after the Meatheads!
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
Bacon is even better for the environment than the study suggests, because you getting a heart attack will cut your carbon emissions to zero.
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
They ignore the real villain: Water causes FAR MORE CO2 emissions per calorie than bacon. It is so large that we can't even quantify it.
This and no other is the root from which a tyrant springs; when first he appears as a protector - Plato (423 to 327 BC)
May the best though!
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
I doubt slate outpaces sciencedaily for factual content.
They can eat all kinds of leftovers and industrial byproducts.
stop, you're making my mouth water.
But seriously, we couldn't feed more than a small fraction of the Earth's population that way. Also, free range pork (as you appear to be advocating for) can have trichinosis, so I wouldn't eat eat if I were you.
You're ignoring the debunker's point, which is that meat-eaters don't just eat bacon...
I would, if my wife would let me.
I, for one, am willing to accept this study's results at face value.
I'm going to go and cook some bacon right now. Nice and wobbly. I blame slashdot.
It's good that it's mostly saturated fat, and so it won't promote cholesterol oxidation leading to heart disease and cancer, but will help lower my LDL and increase my HDL, unlike lettuce. Don't listen to the vegetarians. They're scientifically naive.
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
This is especially true if people use a bacon based diet. The more the better. As we already know that such diet will kill you soon, it reduces the population and therefore the source of resource wasting.
If you doubt that then you might also doubt the calorie based metric. What a bunch of loonies.
I want a study that compares the emissions of cattle to those of how many bison there used to be in North America. We've slaughtered so many animals that my gut instinct is that cattle emissions are less than that of the population devastation we've had on wild animals.
As a tangential topic, I want to see us transition from cattle to bison. Emissions are supposedly less (from what I remember), but they are also easier to feed in the winter, as they can still graze and won't need as much feed. As a bonus it would bring back the population, even if it is domesticated.
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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Presumably these should now be outlawed. N.
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Pigs are Liberals?
So I can sympathise with the sentiment. It doesn't make pig rearing eco friendly but pigs are quite hardy animals and they're omnivorous so their diet can be feed made from some common crop like barley plus whatever seasonal foods are grown locally such as beet, apples, acorns etc. They'll even eat bugs and earthworms that they root for.
I'm sure governments could formulate a tax on meat and veg that shifted consumer demand onto locally grown, seasonal produce but whether they have the balls to do it is another matter.
Subject says it all. Editors, this is literally your job. Don't give equal time to obvious lunatics.
Posting a link to an opposing viewpoint shows that the topic is contentious, not debunked. If it's contentious it's not eliminated from discussion.
On top of that, the linked contentious viewpoint is a "Slate editorial assistant", the website being Slate this makes sense...however her level of knowledge is perhaps not sufficient to immediately 'debunk' a report by Carnegie Mellon people who, at the very least, actually educated in the subject matter.
blindly antisocialist = antisocial
should be celibated for their contribution to the world
That seems harsh!
The problem is that they are counting greenhouse gas by quantity rather than by contribution. By contribution to global warming, since methane has a shorter half life, 5% is agriculture, 5% is animal farming, and 10 to 11% is transportation. Industry , heating, electricity are way above that.
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"greenhouse gas emissions per calorie"
Well duh.
60 calories in a slice of bacon vs. 60 calories per metric fuck-ton of lettuce.
As the denominator (calories) approaches zero, the function tends quickly upward.
WTF is this suposed to be??!? Some half-assed attempt to blurr the real issue? The new epitome of the Chewbacca defense? Seriously?
Who the fuck cares about some marginal greenhouse gas per calorie consumed ratio when meat 'production' is proven to have an abysmal eco-balance-sheet over all??
Water polution, megacorp-driven livestock food monoculture, pathogens, the meat-industry driven anti-biotics disaster, etc.
Water polution with meat production alone is actually close to that of a chemical plant.
The truth is, no matter how you spin it, the eco-balance of meat production is abysmal. Period.
Letuce is a filler - you don't eat it for calories. Calories per weight wise letuce is a serious underperformer.
That's what potatoes or plant proteins are for. Or meat, if you prefer.
More and more people are cutting back their meat consumption and vegan is the new vegetarian. Because our planet is going to hell and meat and its production has become dangerous for your health.
Bottom line:
This article is meat industry propaganda non-sense and beyond pointless for any reasonable debate on the real issues of mass-meat production.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
When did this place turn into clickbait garbage? "This thing that is totally true!" "Summary: Likely isn't true." The definition of clickbait garbage.
Also, they are delicious.
... when you pry it from my cold, dead fingers.
That is all.
Not to mention many of the nutrients can either be synthetically created, produced via otherwise waste material (like shells of seafood into calcium suppliments) etc. Calories give you energy to do all the other stuff required to get the rest of your nutrients and none-food stuff (shelter, reproduction etc).
When someone says, "Any fool can see
The conclusion of this article is absolutely ludicrous. Animals have to eat so much food in order to grow to harvesting size, and they are farting off GHG their entire lives to boot. Also look at the amount of water required to produce a calorie of vegetation vs a calorie of meat; huge differences there too.
The author actually uses the argument that she is right because she is better than other people.
What? No she doesn't. She mentioned she was vegetarian in the interest of full disclosure and left it there.
Because the "debunking" is from a Slate blog (Slate not being known for its high standards of journalism, nor its deep and thorough understanding of science) and the original study is, at least, peer-reviewed? That's not to say it's automatically right - as we know, peer review fails at an alarming rate - but showing the original research and someone else's rebuttal gives people sources they can use to become better informed. Better to show it - and rebuttals - than to not publish it at all.
Examine even your most deeply held beliefs. Nobody is always right.
Or soybeans?
Therefore, humans eating animals are less efficient then humans eating plants,
What kind of plants? Ungulates are able to process much lower grade plant material than humans can. And much of their food can be consumed by grazing rather than raising them on cultivated food sources. Grasses are some of the most robust plant types and may very well expand into some of the more marginal environments as atmospheric CO2 levels rise. So there is going to be more food for cattle (cue the MOOOOO guy) and a resulting rise in the beef supply for people.
Have gnu, will travel.
Unfortunately, the righteous vegetarian who likely called you out also happened to have the evidence, charts, and fancy infographics on their side—not to mention the moral high ground. (Disclaimer: I am a vegetarian.)
So basically she claims that (A) vegetarians have the moral high ground, (B) she is a vegetarian.
Therefore she indirectly claims that she has the moral high ground.
You can disagree with me but I would like to point out that people with username "mwvdlee" are always correct (disclosure; my username is "mwvdlee").
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should be celibated for their contribution to the world
That seems harsh!
They didn't need the meat anyway.
Just another day in Paradise
Introduce your wife to gammon. It's like bacon but with texture.
I have a theory that there are no foods that can't be improved by adding either bacon or custard.
I only just thought of it, and I've been enjoying some vodka, so this may not hold up to scrutiny, but for the moment I'm sticking with it.
Just don't mix the two. Although..?
Lettuce is way too bland anyway. Fresh spinach makes a better "lettuce" than lettuce.
This space unintentionally left blank.
Well it seems to me that Hitler was a vegetarian...
Ha! Modded troll!
The Anti-Spinach-an-Arugala lobby is totally astroturfing this board, you guys.
Some people don't believe in fairies. I don't believe in The Patriarchy.
No it's not "debunked" It SHOULD be though, or at the very least add a caveat that it is not *growing greens* that is "bad" for the environment .. the very thought that the natural environment is bad for the environmment is absurd on the face of it. Were that so the planet would have commited hari kari eons ago. No, it is *modern FARMING practices* that are bad for the environment
If you do that, you'll probably find that vegetarians and non-vegetarians eat similarly in many ways [citation needed], so comparing the parts of their diets that are different is legitimate.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
The film Idiocracy is coming true.
So what does this mean for the future of the BLT sandwich?
Political correctness is really just herd psychology pushed by insecure people who desperately seek social conformity.
Global markets and the transportation of said goods between counties are destroying the planet, not diet. Beef is the worst polluter in the food world. However, if we eat locally raised food and ban for example, China processed seafood here in the states we would lower green house gasses.
Cows are not the problem and lettuce is not the fix.
The confusion is from focusing on animal and vegetable foods when the problem is the way they are produced and brought to market. The industrial food system is extremely fuel intensive and uses the worst possible methods for raising both vegetables and animals.
Cows and lettuce are not the issue.
Eliminating industrial mega-growers and replacing them with SMALLER, educated local growers would be a great solution. ADM, Monsanto, Cargill, et al just need to be OK with profiting somewhere else.
Therein lies our real problem. The mega farms will figure out a way to pump methane from a feed lot before they do away with the problem - the feed lot system itself. They'll figure out a way for lettuce to withstand even more toxic chemical inputs before they do away with destructive growing practices that mandate those inputs.
The biggest thing anyone can do to change the world (even if you only consider fuel use) is to grow one's own food - at home. Whether it's animal or vegetable. Even if you can only grow one thing.
Permaculture
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