The Veganism Thread

[Chris_]

Another ex vegan speaks about his experience - good to see it's without bashing other vegans.

 

 

 

I do like the part about trying everything for yourself. Reading it is one thing, but living it is another.

[Odinson]

All the way from 2008: 

 

Another look into why the claims that 'exotic' fruit 'n veg eaten by vegans have higher GHG impacts than local animal products is false.  

 

 

Despite significant recent public concern and media attention to the environmental impacts of food, few studies in the United States have systematically compared the life-cycle greenhouse gas(GHG) emissions associated with food production against long-distance distribution, aka “food-miles.” We find that although food is transported long distances in general (1640 km delivery and 6760 km life-cycle supply chain on average) the GHG emissions associated with food are dominated by the production phase, contributing 83% of the average U.S. household’s 8.1 t CO2e/yr footprint for food consumption. Transportation as a whole represents only 11% of life-cycle GHG emissions, and final delivery from producer to retail contributes only 4%. Different food groups exhibit a large range in GHG-intensity; on average, red meat is around 150% more GHG intensive than chicken or fish. Thus, we suggest that dietary shift can be a more effective means of lowering an average household’s food-related climate footprint than “buying local.” Shifting less than one day per week’s worth of calories from red meat and dairy products to chicken, fish, eggs, or a vegetable-based diet achieves more GHG reduction than buying all locally sourced food. 

 

https://pubs.acs.org/doi/pdf/10.1021/es702969f

 

From Harvard: 

 

Do food miles really matter?

 

 

So, do food miles really matter? Yes and no. 

For most American diets, the carbon cost of transportation is slight compared to the carbon costs of production (running the tractors, producing chemical fertilizer, pumping irrigation…). Therefore, the most effective way for most Americans to reduce their diet’s carbon footprint is not by buying local, but rather eliminating or reducing their consumption of animal products.

For a vegan, food miles contribute to a larger portion of their food’s carbon footprint. Plant-based foods have lower production footprints, so transportation is comparatively more significant. Even then, the raw mileage is hardly informative for determining carbon footprints; the mode of transportation is the key variable. Cargo ships are the most efficient, followed by trains, then trucks, and lastly planes. 

Although exact numbers vary across analyses, flying one ton of food is close to 70 times more carbon intensive than transporting that same weight via a large cargo ship (source). That means a product flown from Chicago to Boston has a significantly larger carbon footprint than one shipped 11,000 miles from Asia to California. As a result, locality is more important for perishable foods that are often flown like raw fish, asparagus, and berries. Foods such as tomatoes, bananas, pears, and apples can all be harvested before ripening, stored for long periods of time, then inoculated with ethylene gas (the naturally occurring hormone produced by fruits that causes the change in color and flavor profile associated with ripening) before entering a supermarket. In many cases, these shelf-stable foods have lower carbon footprints when produced internationally because the carbon cost of production far outweighs that of transportation.

Another frequently cited comparison is that of lamb produced in England verses lamb produced in New Zealand. For a consumer in England, the New Zealand lamb actually has a lower carbon footprint. Our intuition failed us. Why? Sheep in New Zealand are generally raised on farms run by hydroelectric power. This energy saving is so immense that it overrides the fuel output of the 11,000 mile cruise to England (source).

A similar story unfolds here in Boston. Local meat production could be more carbon intensive because the animals must be housed in heated facilities during the cold winter months. For a large portion of the year, we are better off shipping in a tomato from South America than growing one in a local greenhouse.   

Edited April 19, 2019 by Odinson

[Mudsimus]

A sexist vegan cafe. Who came up with that great idea.

 

https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.news.com.au/lifestyle/food/eat/melbourne-cafe-handsome-her-closing-two-years-after-introducing-man-tax/news-story/cf19a4e85e46981815e498e2d3d43ed0

[Pieter1]

Done a month of vegetarianism. Feel good. I was thinking I’ll lose weight tho...

[Patchelicious]

https://www.facebook.com/awakenwithjp/videos/1850502948298892?s=100010221106886&v=e&sfns=mo

[Odinson]

Done a month of vegetarianism. Feel good. I was thinking I’ll lose weight tho...

 

How much dairy / eggs are you still eating. It's calorically dense foods, so don't underestimate it. 

 

Try and maximise whole foods - grains, veggies, legumes, etc. if you're trying to shed a few kg's. 

[Chris_]

Beyond Meat listed in the US a couple days ago.

 

IPO was done at $25 a share. it gained 165% on Thursday to $65/sh, and looks like its indicating  another +15% this morning....

[Patchelicious]

https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:6529999337139900416

[Odinson]

Stop eating fish. It’s the only way to save the life in our seas

 

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/may/09/seas-stop-eating-fish-fishing-industry-government?utm_term=Autofeed&CMP=twt_gu&utm_medium=&utm_source=Twitter#Echobox=1557379122

 

It is the most important news humanity has ever received: the general collapse of life on Earth. The vast international assessment of the state of nature, as revealed on Monday, tells us that the living planet is in a death spiral. Yet it’s hardly surprising that it appeared on few front pages of British newspapers. Of all the varieties of media bias, the deepest is the bias against relevance. The more important the issue, the less it is discussed.

Human society under urgent threat from loss of Earth's natural life

 

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There’s a reason for this. Were we to become fully aware of our predicament, we would demand systemic change. Systemic change is highly threatening to those who own the media. So they distract us with such baubles as a royal baby and a vicious dispute between neighbours about a patio. I am often told we get the media we deserve. We do not. We get the media its billionaire owners demand.

This means that the first duty of a journalist is to cover neglected issues. So I want to direct you to the 70% of the planet that was sidelined even in the sparse coverage of the new report: the seas. Here, life is collapsing even faster than on land. The main cause, the UN biodiversity report makes clear, is not plastic. It is not pollution, not climate breakdown, not even the acidification of the ocean. It is fishing. Because commercial fishing is the most important factor, this is the one we talk about least. The BBC’s recent Blue Planet Live series, carefully avoiding any collision with powerful interests, epitomised this reticence. There was not a word about the fossil fuel or plastics industries – and only a fleeting reference to the fishing industry, which is protected by a combination of brute power and bucolic fantasy.

When you hear the word fisherman, what picture comes to mind? Someone who looks like Captain Birdseye: white beard, twinkly eyes, sitting on a little red boat chugging merrily across a sparkling sea? If so, your image of the industry might need updating. An investigation by Greenpeace last year revealed that 29% of the UK’s fishing quota is owned by five families, all of whom feature on the Sunday Times Rich List. A single Dutch multinational, operating a vast fishing ship, holds a further 24% of the English quota. The smallest boats – less than 10 metres long – comprise 79% of the fleet, but are entitled to catch just 2% of the fish.

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 ‘Fish farming has even greater impacts, as fish and prawns are often fed on entire marine ecosystems: indiscriminate trawlers dredge up everything and mash it into fishmeal.’ Photograph: Anadolu Agency/Getty Images

 

The same applies worldwide: huge ships from rich nations mop up the fishsurrounding poor nations, depriving hundreds of millions of their major source of protein, while wiping out sharks, tuna, turtles, albatrosses, dolphins and much of the rest of the life of the seas. Coastal fish farming has even greater impacts, as fish and prawns are often fed on 

: indiscriminate trawlers dredge up everything and mash it into fishmeal.

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The high seas – in other words, the oceans beyond the 200-mile national limits – are a lawless realm. Here fishing ships put out lines of hooks up to 75 miles long, which sweep the sea clean of predators and any other animals that encounter them. But even inshore fisheries are disastrously managed, through a combination of lax rules and a catastrophic failure to enforce them.

For a few years, the populations of cod and mackerel around the UK started to recover. We were told we could start eating them again with a clear conscience. Both are now plummeting. Young cod are being illegally discarded (tipped overboard) on an industrial scale, with the result that the legal catch in UK seas is probably being exceeded by roughly one-third. Mackerel in these waters, thanks to the scarcely regulated greed of the fishery, lost its eco label a few weeks ago.

The government claims that 36% of England’s waters are “safeguarded as marine protected areas” (MPAs). But this protection amounts to nothing but lines on the map. Commercial fishing is excluded from less than 0.1% of these fake reserves. A recent paper in the Science journal found that the trawling intensity in European protected areas is higher than in unprotected places. These MPAs are a total farce: their only purpose is to con the public into believing that something is being done.

You might have hoped, in view of the European Union’s failures, that Brexit would provide an opportunity to do things better. It does, but it is not being taken. On the contrary, while the EU will introduce a legal commitment to prevent any fish species from being exploited beyond its replacement rate next year, the UK’s fisheries bill contains no such safeguard. There are no plans to turn our “protected areas” into, er, protected areas. The looting of our seas is likely, if anything, to intensify.

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 ‘An investigation by Greenpeace last year revealed that 29% of the UK’s fishing quota is owned by five families, all of whom feature on the Sunday Times Rich List.’ Photograph: Jeff J Mitchell/Getty Images

What makes all this so frustrating is that regulating the fishing industry is both cheap and easy. If commercial fishing were excluded from large areas of the sea, the total catch would be likely, paradoxically, to rise, due to what biologists call the spillover effect. Fish and shellfish breed and grow to large sizes in the reserves, then spill over into surrounding waters. Where seas have been protected in other parts of the world, catches have grown dramatically. As a paper in the journal PLOS Biology shows, even if fishing was banned across the entire high seas – as it should be – the world’s fish catch would rise, as the growing populations would migrate into national waters.

Nor are the rules difficult to enforce. As the World Wide Fund for Nature has shown, fitting every boat over 10 metres that fishes in UK waters with remote monitoring equipment would cost just £5m. Cameras and sensors would record what the boats catch and where, making illegal fishing impossible. But fitting this equipment is voluntary. In other words, it is mandatory to comply with the law to prevent discards, over-quota fishing and fishing in no-take zones, but it is voluntary to fit the equipment that shows whether or not you are complying with the law. Unsurprisingly, fewer than 1% of vessels have agreed to carry the equipment. Given the vast profits to be made by cutting corners, is it any wonder that this industry keeps driving fish populations – and the living systems they support – into collapse?

 Only rebellion will prevent an ecological apocalypse

George Monbiot

 

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There are almost no fish or shellfish we can safely eat. Recent scandals suggest that even the Marine Stewardship Council label, which is supposed to reassure us about the fish we buy, is no guarantee of sound practice. For example, the council certified tuna fisheries in which endangered sharks had been caught and finned; and, in UK waters, it has approved scallop dredgingthat rips the seabed to shreds.

 

Until fishing is properly regulated and contained, we should withdraw our consent. Save your plastic bags by all means, but if you really want to make a difference, stop eating fish.

[Chris_]

In other news Tyson Foods recalled 12 million pounds of chicken in the US. Because of metal being found in the chicken! Metal!

 

They're now going to install frikken x-ray metal detectors in the production line to avoid future such issues. Madness.

 

Edit: perhaps this has less to do with veganism and more to do with WT actual F are we doing to eachother.

Edited May 9, 2019 by CBlake

[Odinson]

In other news Tyson Foods recalled 12 million pounds of chicken in the US. Because of metal being found in the chicken! Metal!

 

They're now going to install frikken x-ray metal detectors in the production line to avoid future such issues. Madness.

 

Edit: perhaps this has less to do with veganism and more to do with WT actual F are we doing to eachother.

 

Madness. Recalls can happen anywhere, but I'd rather eat food not having to worry too much whether the piece of a corpse on my plate is covered in some asshole bacteria or has pieces of metal in it. 

 

In related news, Tyson offloaded its Beyond Meat shares and will be launching their own plant based protein options. 

 

https://edition.cnn.com/2019/05/06/business/tyson-alternative-protein/index.html

 

Yes, of course Tyson is not acting out of some newfound altruism or concern for the environment or animals, but rather ensuring that they keep up with changing consumer trends. However, if it keeps folks from no longer participating in the needless exploitation of animals, then I'm all for it. 

[GrahamS2]

In other news Tyson Foods recalled 12 million pounds of chicken in the US. Because of metal being found in the chicken! Metal!

 

They're now going to install frikken x-ray metal detectors in the production line to avoid future such issues. Madness.

 

Edit: perhaps this has less to do with veganism and more to do with WT actual F are we doing to eachother.

Xrays in food production is pretty standard. Woolworths insists on all their suppliers using them.

[Odinson]

https://youtu.be/q2Sdq_XuCYg

[Uni]

interesting podcast 

 

http://www.702.co.za/podcasts/133/the-money-show/210935/15-may-2019

 

listen from 30minutes in about the business of " fake meat " 

[Odinson]

interesting podcast 

 

http://www.702.co.za/podcasts/133/the-money-show/210935/15-may-2019

 

listen from 30minutes in about the business of " fake meat " 

 

If you want to dive into the topic even deeper, have a listen to this podcast: 

 

https://youtu.be/rE93wKm0Ok8

 

It's also on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, etc. 

[Uni]

If you want to dive into the topic even deeper, have a listen to this podcast: 

 

https://youtu.be/rE93wKm0Ok8

 

It's also on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, etc. 

got bored after about 8 minutes. Soz. but yeah, it's interesting about his plant based meat but after listening to this all, I decided to go online and have a look - the incredible burger being touted and used in some places like Burger King overseas - I found the beyond meat veggie burger online from these people - 2 Beyond Meat plant based burger patties - R160 - are they ******* mad?