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Eating meat creates four times more greenhouse gases than being vegan, landmark study finds
(www.independent.co.uk)
this post was submitted on 20 Jul 2023
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There sure is a lot of effort being made to obscure the fact that most greenhouse gasses come from industrial sources.
Like factory slaughterhouses.
I'm sure shipping vast quantities of almonds and almond milk from places like California to the rest of the world produces almost no greenhouse gases /s
Not to talk about the ecological damage it does to California due to the immense water consumption.
Roughly half the amount of cow's milk.
https://cdn.statcdn.com/Infographic/images/normal/22659.jpeg
Per person or current polution rates? If this is a 1 to 10 comparison, having twice as much gasses produced doesn't mean much.
The chart says those values are what it takes to produce one liter of each milk.
So we are talking about producing roughly 580 calories of almond milk vs producing 2400 calories of cow milk.
So in terms of calories/pollution rate, we are talking about a scale of 1:2 in favor of cow milk efficiency.
Meaning in terms of keeping people fed as a rate of efficiency in pollution, cow milk is twice as efficient.
Does that math add up? feel free to check me.
Edit: doubled the calories in an unsweetened silk almond milk for almond milk calorie count
Used a local brand of whole milk that based on a short Google search seems pretty standard.
Sounds about right, though I'm not sure if I agree with the direct comparison of calories. Milk probably isn't going to be a major source of a person's calories (at least it wasn't a major source of calories for me before I went vegan), and it seems unlikely that someone will drink 4 cups of almond milk to replace each cup of dairy milk they would have drank in order to maintain the same calorie intake from milk. Comparing by volume produced makes more sense to me, since someone switching milks seems more likely to use them as a 1 to 1 replacement volume wise, e.g. someone adding 1 cup of almond milk to cereal vs. adding 1 cup of dairy to cereal.
I dont think it is fair to discard the value of calories in a discussion of efficiency in food production.
Milk is a staple of many American diets, maybe as a result of the Got Milk Yada Yada, my point being drinking a cup of milk is going to fill you up with x calories, weather you would have replaced it with 4 cups of almond milk or not.
If you decided not to drink cow milk, and only had 30 calories from the single cup of almond milk you drank, the 90 calories you are missing will be made up elsewhere in your diet, potentially in a more inefficient replacement food.
Sure, food scarcity is not the tightest conversation in America due to the prevalence of our high calorie diets, but in terms of human dietary habits as a whole, calorie density, difficulty of obtaining, and difficulty in distribution are desperate conversations that lives depend on.
North America systemically over-consumes, hence its obesity crisis.
this doesn't accurately represent a person's relationship with food
You are factually incorrect on point 2 and point 1 was already addressed in my comment.
So I can eat 2000 calories in pure sugar and feel full for the whole day?
You said it didn't matter in America but that it does matter globally, but we're not talking about globally, because we're talking about how milk forms part of the typical American diet.
That's not addressing anything.
Nutrition isn't just about filling up some hunger bar counted in calories, otherwise we should just grow sugar everywhere and diet coke would be idiotic. Cow milk has more calcium naturally (it gets added to the alternatives), more protein (soy milk comes close, almond milk does not), but more saturated fat (the others have healthier fats)
I wasn't really going into the context of nutrition as much as I was discussing energy production.
There's good information to be found in this further analysis, but it relies on fine points of data that I didn't want to get bogged down on.
My concept is more just efficiency of energy production over pollution rate. Good details though, so thank you.
Yes that neglects the transport though. Cow milk can PE produced locally almost everywhere. Cow milk I buy here was produced maybe 10km away from me. Almond milk was transported 5000+ km.
Just wrote a comment with bad math.
Almond milk and cow milk are effectively the same in terms of cal/pollution rate.
Cow milk produces 4x as much pollution, but also produces 4x as many calories.
Which doesn't really matter because people don't put milk in their coffee to add x amounts of calories. So in almost all cases, they will use the same amount in volume/weight.
And a lot of other plant based milk alternatives have an even lower environmental impact, the difference between your average milk and milk alternative will be even bigger.
Its also bad science.
A gallon of Almond milk is 580 calories.
A gallon of cow milk is 2,400 calories.
Meaning in terms of actual nutrition vs pollution, cow milk is over twice as effective.
Calculation= cal in alm milk/cal in alm milk : cal in cow milk / 2 × cal in alm milk. (2 in this equation stands for the rate of pollution multiplicity sourced from the title of this post, twice as much gasses).
You wind up with 1 : 2.07
Why count calories? Are we calorie-starved? Last time I checked the problem in most of the developed world was the opposite, excess calories.
Because you measure energy of food in calories, and we are comparing produced value of good over pollution. Why would you not?
Look at that, compared by calories, animals products still lose: https://ourworldindata.org/environmental-impacts-of-food#explore-data-on-the-environmental-impacts-of-food