There are many good reasons to go from animal-based to plant-based eating, such as health, kindness, and impact on the environment on which humanity depends. This paper will focus on diet, climate change, and the environment, the initial reason I went meatless several years ago.
I am not a vegan. I will eat eggs from humanely treated hens and won’t turn down food that has honey in it. It is possible to help the climate, and reduce greenhouse gases and environmental damage, without eating entirely vegan. There are many ways people can help the planet without choosing a 100 % plant-based diet.
I am no paragon; I eat highly processed foods, which aren’t as environmentally clean as unprocessed vegetables, fruits, grains, etc. I choose to live with not doing everything I can possibly do to mitigate climate change, while I also believe I am doing substantial good. There is a whole spectrum of dietary changes that can be helpful, and we don’t all have to make the most austere of choices to make a difference. I believe that the incremental improvement created by many people changing their behavior a little would be as good or better than that provided by very few people taking the most extreme measures. “Nobody can do everything, but everybody can do something.”
About seven years ago, one of my vegan daughters sent us a controversial DVD that proposed that by eating meat, we cause a substantial amount of damage to the ecosystem including, importantly, the atmosphere. Many people feel the film Cowspiracy overstated the percentage of greenhouse gases caused by factory farm meat and agriculture, but the fact that meat-dependent food consumption styles contribute considerably to the problem was nonetheless established. Reports from the United Nations and a variety of scientific researchers back the premise of causal relationship convincingly.
Up to this time, I was an omnivore with a powerful craving for the meat of nearly all kinds. (Unlike many who have gone meatless, I still crave good red meat.) The discomfort of eliminating meat from my food choices was eased considerably by the consumption of the many plant-based meat substitutes that were becoming available. Today, there are many delicious plant-based alternatives to beef, sausage, bacon, dairy products, chicken, eggs, seafood, and so on. I still enjoy them and get a lot of my protein from them. I will probably reduce the amount of such food in favor of less processed plants, but not for now. Substitutes are just as enjoyable as the meat, dairy, eggs, and seafood I used to eat. (Well, maybe not lobster.) Using these alternatives, I am much nearer to the bottom of climate-changing gas production than I used to be.
I use a vegan mineral and vitamin supplement that supplies the vitamins missing from the food of many human herbivores, such as B12 and K3.
Below I present the range of dietary choices ranked from least to most harmful. Short of a worldwide catastrophe drastically reducing the human population, and that population returning to the hunting foraging behavior of our remote ancestors, these are the practical choices we can make, ranked from least destructive to most harmful:
1. Eat food grown by you or by local small environmentally conscious producers. Use regenerative methods (those which enrich the soil rather than deplete it. Regenerative agriculture is a huge subject that deserves its own paper.)
2. Subsistence hunting. There are many people who eat wild game with minimal environmental impact.
3. Farm produce is transported over long distances. This contributes more to the insulating gases in our atmosphere, but not as much as meat production.
4. Plant-based meat and dairy alternatives, are more harmful but not as harmful as the choices below. Note that some regenerative meat producers argue that the environmental impact of producing highly processed meat alternatives is more harmful than the meat produced by regenerative farmers. There is research to the contrary.
5. Regenerative meat, produced by a method that replenishes the soil and local biosphere. Healthy soil is a carbon sink, which offsets the gases produced by livestock. Over years, however, soil can become “carbon saturated”, unable to sequester more carbon, thus mitigating the benefit. It is unclear whether regenerative meat is superior to what the industry derogatorily calls “fake meat” environmentally. Articles and research are biased in both directions.
Local regenerative meat producers would be preferable to those depending on long-distance transportation.
6. Moderate to heavy consumption of factory-farmed meat and dairy products. This is hands down the worst choice to make if one is concerned with environmental issues.
Note I do not list fish among the choices; I haven’t read anything that establishes that fishing contributes substantially to global warming. There is controversy about whether “sustainable fishing” actually exists. I gave up fish mainly to reduce my “cruelty footprint”. (“Cruelty footprints” fall outside the sphere of this paper.)
Regarding the research regarding diet and the environment, “caveat emptor”: There is a lot of research funded by food producers with axes to grind. Profits depend on promoting their own product while denigrating others. The research is slanted accordingly. People can go online and selectively read-only research that supports the opinions they already have. Confirmation bias eliminates the information one does not want to have. In writing this paper, I looked for information from a variety of sources. I found some of the work called research is a thinly veiled advertisement.
I hope the reader finds a place on the food consumption scale which fits their level of food choice comfort while reducing the substantial harm done currently.
~ Wry Welwood
6th of May 2022
in Illumination on the Medium writers’ platform.
Subsequently published March 2023 in Shadow in Light on Substack.com. Here is a link to Shadow in Light:
addendum: Since I wrote this piece, I saw a movie on Netflix called Seaspiracy.
Fishing is much worse for the planet and us than I realized. If you want to know how, see the film. ~WW
I appreciate your measured approach to diet and climate. We eat almost no processed, have own venison, try for increased veggies and fruit. I do love chicken and pork, but am trying to have more tofu and chickpea substitutes. 😊
Hopefully we can share a meal together before long