Red meat has a huge carbon footprint because cattle requires a large amount of land and water.

https://sph.tulane.edu/climate-and-food-environmental-impact-beef-consumption

Demand for steaks and burgers is the primary driver of Deforestation:

https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2022-beef-industry-fueling-amazon-rainforest-destruction-deforestation/

https://e360.yale.edu/features/marcel-gomes-interview

https://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/stories/2023-06-02/almost-a-billion-trees-felled-to-feed-appetite-for-brazilian-beef

If you don’t have a car and rarely eat red meat, you are doing GREAT 🙌🙌 🙌

Sure, you can drink tap water instead of plastic water. You can switch to Tea. You can travel by train. You can use Linux instead of Windows AI’s crap. Those are great ideas. But, don’t drive yourself crazy. If you are only an ordinary citizen, remember that perfect is the enemy of good.

    • Boomer Humor Doomergod@lemmy.worldEnglish
      305·
      2 months ago

      The idea that we have to grow food for food is ridiculous. Cows turn grass into meat just fine, why do we need to grow corn and soybeans for them

      I bet it’s because, like with hogs, we’ve bred them to be so growth optimized they can’t get enough calories from grass anymore.

      • usernamesAreTricky@lemmy.ml
        253·
        2 months ago

        Unfortunately grass-fed production is no solution. It both does not scale or help reduce emissions

        We model a nationwide transition [in the US] from grain- to grass-finishing systems using demographics of present-day beef cattle. In order to produce the same quantity of beef as the present-day system, we find that a nationwide shift to exclusively grass-fed beef would require increasing the national cattle herd from 77 to 100 million cattle, an increase of 30%. We also find that the current pastureland grass resource can support only 27% of the current beef supply (27 million cattle), an amount 30% smaller than prior estimates

        […]

        If beef consumption is not reduced and is instead satisfied by greater imports of grass-fed beef, a switch to purely grass-fed systems would likely result in higher environmental costs, including higher overall methane emissions. Thus, only reductions in beef consumption can guarantee reductions in the environmental impact of US food systems.

        https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/aad401

          • usernamesAreTricky@lemmy.ml
            92·
            2 months ago

            To an extent, yes it would likely do that. Though on the other hand running into the maximum capacity limitations would not look pretty. Even countries that have a just bit higher grass-fed production than others have a fair number of issues (and still use plenty of supplemental grain)

            For instance, in New Zealand, they use a massive amount of synthetic fertilizer on grasslands to try to make it keep up for dairy production

            The large footprint for milk in Canterbury indicates just how far the capacity of the environment has been overshot. To maintain that level of production and have healthy water would require either 12 times more rainfall in the region or a 12-fold reduction in cows.

            […]

            The “grass-fed” marketing line overlooks the huge amounts of fossil-fuel-derived fertiliser used to make the extra grass that supports New Zealand’s very high animal stock rates.

            https://theconversation.com/11-000-litres-of-water-to-make-one-litre-of-milk-new-questions-about-the-freshwater-impact-of-nz-dairy-farming-183806

            Or in the UK and Ireland where grass-fed production leads to deforestation and they still need additional grain on top of it

            Most of the UK and Ireland’s grass-fed cows and sheep are on land that might otherwise be temperate rainforest – arable crops tend to prefer drier conditions. However, even if there were no livestock grazing in the rainforest zone – and these areas were threatened by other crops instead – livestock would still pose an indirect threat due to their huge land footprint

            […]

            Furthermore, most British grass-fed cows are still fed crops on top of their staple grass

            https://theconversation.com/livestock-grazing-is-preventing-the-return-of-rainforests-to-the-uk-and-ireland-198014

          • commie@lemmy.dbzer0.comBanned from community
            35·
            2 months ago

            the first time in probably a year i’ve seen someone explain supply and demand correctly. thank you.

      • commie@lemmy.dbzer0.comBanned from community
        32·
        2 months ago

        why do we need to grow corn and soybeans for them

        we don’t. but we do grain finish most cattle, because it’s faster.

      • Azzu@lemmy.dbzer0.com
        21·
        2 months ago

        Well, it’s not “growing” per se, but we produce fertilizers which are “plant food”, so you could say we grow food for our food even for plants.

    • logicbomb@lemmy.world
      126·
      2 months ago

      My big problem is not with individuals ethically trying to do the right thing, or about people trying to convince individuals to be ethical and to do the right thing.

      My big problem is the amount of effort in this when it will have only small gains. In today’s society, meaningful gains come from changes in government regulations and policies.

      If you want people to stop eating as much red meat, get the government to stop providing subsidies to cattle owners. I have a money-focused relative who owns cattle only because of the subsidies. At least let the price of beef go up to its actual market value. You’d think that would be an easy sell for Republicans who believe in the free market, but they’re the ones who want the subsidy the most.

      Of course, then, you can add additional regulations and encourage environmental responsibility.

      • usernamesAreTricky@lemmy.ml
        144·
        2 months ago

        We should push for large institutional change, but don’t ignore individual change either. Problem is how will you get said governments to act if people aren’t also stepping up and they expect backlash to acting? The more people expect it to be cheap and highly consumed, the harder it will be for them to act. Moving people away from meat individually makes it easier. Movements that succeed usually have both individual and institutional change

        Institutional change that is achievable at the current moment is smaller. There’s been some success with things like changing the defaults to be plant-based (which is good and we should continuing to push for that), but cutting subsides is going to be an uphill battle until a larger number of people change their consumption patterns

        • logicbomb@lemmy.world
          32·
          2 months ago

          I agree that individual change is important, but you have to go about it a certain way. Actually the way OP is phrasing it is pretty good. Let people understand that just eating less red meat is always better.

          Because if the messaging is at all confusing, you’ll get the kind of result you got during the start of Covid with the masks. It was always true that any amount of masking helped, but when you started to make it complicated, you got a lot of backlash and people completely stopped masking. And of course, with both Covid and red meat, there are people out there incentivized to make things complicated so that people give up. I think it really needs to be dead simple to work.

    • Screen_Shatter@lemmy.world
      5·
      2 months ago

      I enjoy red meat, but I avoid it most of the time because of trying to be healthier. Also guilt from seeing videos of happy cows looking like gigantic dogs.

      Fucking shit though I had no idea coffee was so high up the list. I probably should drink less of it anyway, but ouch, that one hurt me way more than the beef.

      • ApollosArrow@lemmy.world
        1·
        2 months ago

        I was surprised it was that high. I don’t ever drink coffee, so hopefully it offsets some of the meat. We have already reduced our consumption.

    • NewNewAccount@lemmy.world
      51·
      2 months ago

      because companies pollute much more

      This argument drives me crazy. Companies, in this context, are the people. The companies pollute exclusively on behalf of their customers. WE ARE THE COMPANIES.

    • selokichtli@lemmy.ml
      13·
      2 months ago

      See, OP is not saying we should “just drop red meat”, and this is probably why you get that kind of reactions.

    • commie@lemmy.dbzer0.comBanned from community
      211·
      2 months ago

      if you think about the energetic demand of growing food only to feed an animal that then will become food, rather than skipping this step and eating the original food instead.

      most people don’t want to eat grass or soy cake. letting cows graze, and feeding soycake (the byproduct of soybean oil production) to pigs and poultry is a conservation of resources.

          • usernamesAreTricky@lemmy.ml
            51·
            2 months ago

            Good news is that overall arable farmland usage goes down the less meat you eat. Don’t need to use all the same land, you have flexibility to move around production

            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

            • commie@lemmy.dbzer0.comBanned from community
              15·
              2 months ago

              overall arable farmland usage goes down the less meat you eat.

              I don’t think that has ever happened.

      • usernamesAreTricky@lemmy.ml
        41·
        2 months ago

        It’s worth noting that soybean meal is not a byproduct. When we look at the most common extraction method for soybean oil (using hexane solvents), soybean meal is still the driver of demand

        However, soybean meal is the main driving force for soybean oil production due to its significant amount of productivity and revenues

        […]

        soybean meal and hulls contribute to over 60% of total revenues, with meal taking the largest portion of over 59% of total revenue

        https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0926669017305010

        This is even more true of other methods like expelling which is still somewhat commonly used

        Moreover, soybean meal is the driving force for the whole process [expelling oil from soy] because it provides over 70% of the total revenue for soy processing by expelling

        https://www.mdpi.com/2077-0472/9/5/87

        • commie@lemmy.dbzer0.comBanned from community
          14·
          2 months ago

          hexane solvents are not the most common method of oil extraction. you have been misinformed.

        • commie@lemmy.dbzer0.comBanned from community
          15·
          2 months ago

          some studies show soybean oils being as much as half the value of the crop, despite being just 20% of the weight.

          • usernamesAreTricky@lemmy.ml
            31·
            2 months ago

            If we assume that’s the case, half of revenue is still not a byproduct, it’s a coproduct. The other half is still pretty relevant to its value and usage. If 50% of your revenue disappears from something, you’re going to be making a lot less of it

            • commie@lemmy.dbzer0.comBanned from community
              17·
              2 months ago

              i think at this point we’ve devolved into arguing semantics. you’re not going to convince me soybean is a viable crop unless you can press it for oil, and i don’t think i can convince you it’s a viable product unless the meal is fed to livestock. but i hope you have a good night!