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Eating Lettuce Three Times Worse For The Environment Than Bacon
According to a recent paper put out by scientists at Carnegie Mellon University, following the USDA dietary recommendations to consume more fruits, vegetables and seafood would consume nearly 40% more energy and 10% more water resources on average than it would take to eat the Standard American Diet (SAD). While I don’t dispute the findings, I certainly think the media hype surrounding this paper is loaded up with a whole bunch of disingenuous nonsense.
Of course eating a diet of only lettuce would put out three times more greenhouse gas emissions than eating a diet of bacon if you calculate resources used per calorie. A pound of bacon contains 2077 calories compared to a pound of lettuce with contains 63 calories. So a person would have to eat 33 pounds of lettuce to match the calories in a pound of bacon. Obviously that’s an absurdity. No one would ever eat that much lettuce in one sitting, but people eating a pound of bacon in one sitting is a common occurrence.
Common sense tells us that a normal vegan diet, based primarily on whole grains, tubers and legumes for calories, would ended up using far fewer resources per calorie than the present SAD diet. Just ask yourself what the cows are eating. Ever wonder why cows are fed a diet primarily of soy and corn instead of the grass they were born to eat? That’s because soy and corn are extremely calorie dense vegetables. A pound of potatoes has 347 calories, averaging just 6 times less the caloric density of bacon. A pound of corn has 388 calories and a pound of beans has 419 calories. A pound of soy beans contains 558 calories.
The USDA guidelines suggest swapping fish for beef and loading up on green vegetables, fruits and whole grains. Of course fish are going to be more resource intensive per calorie than beef, and of course green vegetables and fruits are going to be more resource intensive per calorie than chicken. However, that doesn’t mean eating a healthier diet is going to end up destroying the planet or consuming vastly more resources to produce. Eating a common sense healthy diet should not involve subsisting on lettuce, apples and fish.
Humans were able to escape the equatorial rain forest regions because our brains evolved to the point where we were able to grow and harvest grains, legumes and tubers. Being able to harness the power of fire to cook these normally inedible calorie dense foods is what took us out of the jungles. Before that, we had to stick to where uncooked food was plentiful, like our great ape cousins do today.
We presently produce enough calories in plants to feed a planet of 12 billion people. Given that there are only 6 billion people on the planet, the remainder is all being fed to livestock. If we didn’t eat animals, we wouldn’t need to grow all that feed for livestock. We could easily reduce our agricultural resource consumption in half by simply eliminating animal products from our diet.
Another common sense point that bears noting is that humans managed to produce enough food to feed themselves without the benefit of modern irrigation, tractors, harvesters, mills or other equipment for hundreds of thousands of years. Do you think the slaves in Egypt were living off meat and lettuce? What about the farmers in early America? They were all subsisting on grains, legumes and tubers. Meat was for the kings and queens. Livestock was far too valuable to eat. Those oxen were needed to plow the fields. Very few resources are necessary to produce enough grains, legumes and tubers to feed everyone. People have been doing it by hand as far back as historical records go.
Of course, I don’t believe in global warming, but the water and energy resources used to produce all that grain are still very real threats to the health of our environment. Deforestation, agricultural runoff and water depletion, not to mention the health consequences from saturated fat and cholesterol consumption, are very real problems with major impacts on human health, longevity and living standards.
Rather than using the USDA guidelines (that are the product of agricultural lobbyists) as the basis for their research paper, these scientists should have used a bit of common sense and looked at the resources that would be needed to consume a healthy plant based diet. Had they done that, the results would most assuredly have been the complete opposite of what they presently found.
Source: https://www.libertariannews.org/2015/12/15/eating-lettuce-three-times-worse-for-the-environment-than-bacon/
