Looking for some suggestions, below is a fairly standard weekday meal plan. I am keen to reduce my environmental impact so would appreciate suggestions for swaps of elements that retains the ease of food prep, maintains similar nutrient macros and calories but reduces plastic, transport and any other packaging or production related impacts:

Everything below comes from a supermarket, I could tolerate a price hike in places, visiting more than one shop but would like to shop a maximum of once per week…..

1.
1/2 Red Grapefruit
1 Banana
Coffee (ground supermarket own)

2.
Porridge Oats (supermarket value), made with Water, Frozen ‘Wonky’ Berries

3.
fried eggs (cheapest free range, small), frozen spinach

4.
Tuna (tin in spring water), Mayo (supermarket own full fat), Wholemeal Pitta (keep in freezer)

5.
MyProtein Impact Whey (Choc mint – in case you care)

6.
Wholewheat Pasta, Pesto (green, jar, cheap), Green Veg (mixed, frozen), Chicken Breast (bought fresh, packaged)

Snacks
Crunchy corn things, nuts (almonds, pistacchio etc.) beer/wine.

I try to maintain the 100 miles radius rule, but it’s hard as a vegetarian esp in Winter, and things like coffee and chocolate are difficult to fit that into that rule of thumb. I try not to buy processed if I can make it (bread, mayo etc) and tinned fish (easy as I’m a veggie) but environmentally it’s pretty grim. Same for fruit, take care to look at where it’s come from; I try not to go beyond Europe, or Northern Africa at a push.

Compromise where you need to, but cut out processed, packaging and cut down on the miles

‘Veggan’ household (2 people)

– I get most fruit and veg from local farm shop by bike. It’s not much more expensive as is a small concern. I only found it because of C19/lockdown. So there’s one positive! Some bigger farm shops are quite expensive. Some are extortion. They usually have a garden centre attached 😉

– Fresh eggs also collected from various locals on the ‘egg bike’ 🙂 and are truly free range and usually 2/3 price of supermarket ‘Free Range’. Delicious to boot.

– Plenty of tips online about keeping potatoes in the dark in thick paper sacks etc.

– Problem for ages was fresh produce going off. Recently bought a small chest freezer that has overnight changed everything. Food waste has disappeared. We can’t afford to waste it let alone the environmental costs. So (ie) a big bag of fresh kale now gets blanched and frozen

– Batch cooking. have to optimise my time and our budget so cooking usually gets done in batches at night. Will make two or three dishes of four portions each (ie twelve meals) and freeze them in reused takeaway containers

– Keep a stock of raw and dried ingredients/seasoning and top up as they run low.

– Use the interwebs a lot for recipe ideas and adapt them

– Have use for leftovers, ie old skool bubble and squeak, bolognaise, curriesetc

– Indian cooking can be a vegan’s best friend. Although I do have a vegeburger or facon slices once in a wile.

– This week’s main meals:

1. Chef John’s Best Damn Vegan chilli, corn chips, oatly cream fraiche and sliced pickled jalapenos
2. French beans, jersey royals, vegeburgers (the beans tossed in dairy free garlic ‘butter’ ie Pure veg spread mixed with salt and garlic powder)
3. Amy’s Kitchen Organic Lentil Soup/stew (copycat recipe). I love this stuff. It also works as a base for alt meals, ie bolognaise, shepherds pie etc)
4. Homemade oven chips, egg and baked beans.

– Lidl is best for a range of nuts. Big bags of mixed, or walnuts, almonds etc. Usually buy mixed. Also cheap UHT soy milk useful for cooking, tea etc.

– Porridge as a meal with nuts and fruit.

– Experiment making your own burgers and nut/lentil loaves/roasts

– Stay away from prepackaged ready-cooked foods as much as possible.

– A big granite pestle and mortar is the best thing I’ve bought in recent years

– Collect autumn fruit. Our little patch of (communal) garden now has raspberries, gooseberries blackberries, wild strawberries and hazelnuts. Friends also give us excess produce ie rhubarb, apples etc.

– Make chutneys, are an easy and tasty way to store produce, ie green bean chutney.

– Think about an allotment/community allotment?

Also started MyFitnessPal food diary again, found is a great way to focus on our meal plans. I still fall off the wagon and cram a dirty takeaway sometimes. I look at it like alcoholism. I’ll maybe always be tempted but happier without it, and my taste buds seem to have returned. Hard to explain.

I still fall off the wagon and cram a dirty takeaway sometimes

Oh, and go easy on yourself. Unless you are actually fighting a crusade against the industrialisation of food and consumerism, don’t treat your life like you’re conducting a one man crusade against the industrialisation of consumer society…

I am keen to reduce my environmental impact so would appreciate suggestions for swaps of elements that retains the ease of food prep, maintains similar nutrient macros and calories but reduces plastic, transport and any other packaging or production related impacts:

Harvest fungii

Oh, and go easy on yourself. Unless you are actually fighting a crusade against the industrialisation of food and consumerism, don’t treat your life like you’re conducting a one man crusade against the industrialisation of consumer society…

That’s just the way you’ve framed it? Concern is appreciated though, thanks.

I’ve seemingly lived/adopted a few lifestyles’ over 50 years, so working to get one decent one into gear that is good for me and the wider world. Choice is a luxury I don’t wish to waste.

Most everyone hates litter and disposable BBQs/bushfires up in their local woods. Same goes with getting a belch of diesel in the face when walking/cycling.

But burn the Amazon/lungs of the World and destroy the world’s marine life for biscuits, bycatch, ‘bargain‘ burgers and placcy bags… and we’re like, ‘oh, that’s a bit bad’ hmm, but I don’t want to be hard on myself and it won’t change anything no matter what I do’

Not directed at anyone here, but rhetorically speaking how is cooking tasty food and chatting to friends and farmers on my bike ‘hard on myself’? Picking my own raspberries? Eating a vegan brioche with homemade burger and (small!) portion of megatasty homemade-chips vs not having a doner kebab/bag of offal and pastry from the local greasepit/Greggs?

Plus, I’ve always cycled for groceries. Can’t stand short car-journeys for a number of reasons, it always feels like they are wasting precious moments of my life (ie an hour cycling at leisure via back routes and little paths – vs 15mins dash in the belching bubble), as well needlessly **** the environment.

There is also the not-so-small matter of being a ‘comfort eater’ (self-medicating for depression/anxiety via crapfood/carbs/sugar = perpetuates the cycle)

This currently sees me @80lbs overweight and THAT is VERY hard on me for a number of reasons. I fell off the wagon for over a year now, plus quit smoking nearly 2 years ago – and this year has really been bad with overeating cheap ‘Pick-me-up’, foods ie bread, pies, sos rolls, chips, crisps peanut butter, chocolate, jam on toast etc etc. Dopamine hits? Even when I began quitting industrial meat I’d still self-medicate with vegan crisps and pastries, potatoes, chocolate etc

That is surely what is ‘hard on myself? ‘ Have not been suicidal per se but recently caught self thinking ‘if I was to get sick and die would I care at the minute? It could solve the pain’ As they say, if you’re having a bad day, just don’t spoil someone/or something else’s day. ‘Depriving‘ self of doner means my day isn’t spoiled, and neither is that ewe-lamb’s! Not on my account at least. Not customarily making a <5 mile car trip also means that my bike errands remain intact.

OK now it reads like a sermon but wasn’t meant that way. 😬 I think what I’m trying to say is that for me self-destruction and consumerism go hand in hand. Like alcoholism and white lightning. We’re (as a culture) basically all pissed up, littering and torching the woods/dynamiting the pool while feeling massively entitled to be doing so. Sounds like another thread? The one about those thoughtless, selfish littering scummy people who make our bloods boil!?

Onwards! Now Am Crusading! 😉. That’s why I’m going to share another recipe later!

A couple of things:

1 – ‘Envirofriendulate’ is a marvellous word.

2 – I may be teaching you to suck on grandma’s eggs here but thinking about seasonality aslongside food miles is fairly important. E.g the energy saving you make by growing a tomato in Spain far offsets the energy spent transporting it to the UK. It’s horribly complicated though and I gave myself a nosebleed trying to find a good rule of thumb on this.

Something to think about – some meat isn’t necessarily all that bad. Upland reared lamb for example is raised on land that often isn’t suitable for anything else, and eats a lot of grass. So it’s a lot more eco friendly than importing say avocados.

Something to think about – some meat isn’t necessarily all that bad. Upland reared lamb for example is raised on land that often isn’t suitable for anything else, and eats a lot of grass.

Sheep are raised on land suitable for growing trees, and restoring woodland. People complain about the destruction of the Amazon, while ignoring the deforestation in this country.
Also sheep farming leads to more run off of water, so causes flooding downstream, destroying more fertile farmland.

I worry that if the world turns vegetarian, the greenhouse gases will soar due to all the farting plant eaters do.
Look at the dinosaur era 😕 A huge number of plant eaters and the climate was that of a steaming jungle.
We might not know what that time looked like, but we sure as hell knew what it smelled like…

[strong]CraigW[/strong] wrote:

Sheep are raised on land suitable for growing trees, and restoring woodland. People complain about the destruction of the Amazon, while ignoring the deforestation in this country.
Also sheep farming leads to more run off of water, so causes flooding downstream, destroying more fertile farmland.

Someone spent too much time reading George Monbiot a few years back. If you notice he has quietly changed his tune on this.
A. All land is suitable for growing trees. The better and more fertile the land, the bigger and more valuable the trees. It is fertile farmland and cities & towns that need to be rewilded if you are serious about getting more trees out there. More trees have been cut down in the past 300 years for industrialization and urbanization that ever can be planted where sheep graze. And they will happily graze under trees too. There are far far worse examples of what needs to change in this world in terms of food production than sheep. They are right down there are the least-damaging end of the scale.
B. Sheep don’t really lead to more run off and flooding. More rainfall does that. And that is a result of human induced climate change more than anything else. And flooding is only a problem cause we have built on the flood plains. Covering fertile land with flood water is actually very beneficial for it, not a problem (see Nile river and Aswan Dam for example!)

As for soya milk….

https://uk.glbnews.com/08-2020/52781001924432/

Someone spent too much time reading George Monbiot a few years back. If you notice he has quietly changed his tune on this.

When did he change his tune? The problems with sheep have not changed.
Sheep farming covers 3/4 of the land in Wales. That’s a lot of land that could be reforested. Lack of trees leads to more run off and flooding. You’re not going to get many new trees growing if there are sheep grazing them all.

As for soya, it can easily be grown in much of Europe. No need for clearing rainforests.

E.g the energy saving you make by growing a tomato in Spain far offsets the energy spent transporting it to the UK. It’s horribly complicated though and I gave myself a nosebleed trying to find a good rule of thumb on this.

Probably

Grow/source local seasonal produce (x) where available
Eat frozen/canned/pickled version of (x) over winter

Welsh Farmer:

As for soya milk

Thanks for the article/link. Did you cross-reference it?

I’d like to get to the bottom of it. It won’t send me back to buy cow’s milk, but it would make me thinking about quitting use of soy milk (currently in tea and some cooking, but use oat milk for coffee)

How does your study square up with this?:

And

A cup of coffee made with cow’s milk has produced around 53g of carbon dioxide equivalent (CO2e). The same coffee without milk equates to around 21g of CO2e — less than half the footprint. Studies estimate that switching to non-dairy milk will roughly half the emissions of that food item, so by swapping dairy milk for non-dairy that cup of coffee’s footprint reduces to around 26.5g CO2e.

https://medium.com/@tabitha.whiting/what-milk-should-you-buy-to-reduce-your-environmental-impact-e0489153e3b8

This is a couple of years ago, did they really get the figures that wrong???

I followed a rabbit trail to the supposed study via The Sustainable Food Trust article you linked, and it turns out I ended up here

https://www.dairyuk.org/images/20160309_Dairy_APPG_Report_Putting_Dairy_Back_on_the_Daily_Menu.pdf

Dairy UK?? (study also seems to be missing) And who is the Sustainable Food Trust? A scientific organisatiin, or…?’

Must admit am cynical at the sources, do you have anything else?

Oat Milk tastes great in coffee so that’s a no brainer x

Upland reared lamb for example is raised on land that often isn’t suitable for anything else, and eats a lot of grass.

And hence the uplands are covered in grass and limited wild flowers and wildlife. Sheep per sae arenta massive issue but stocking numbers are much higher than they would have been traditionally due to the limiting factor of over wintering fodder being much increased by covering the inbye in inorganic fertiliser and switching to silage production. More sheep are therefore out overgrazing the uplands.

but rhetorically speaking how is cooking tasty food and chatting to friends and farmers on my bike ‘hard on myself’?

It isn’t, but:

I still fall off the wagon and cram a dirty takeaway sometimes

Betrays a somewhat guilty train of thought, and TBH, having the occasional takeaway (in the grand scheme of things)  isn’t something you need to be apologising for given the rest of your lifestyle, hence, go easy on yourself…Sorry, re-reading my throw away post it could be easily taken as if I was having a crack at you, that wasn’t my intent. I apologise.

[strong]anagallis_arvensis[/strong] wrote:

And hence the uplands are covered in grass and limited wild flowers and wildlife. Sheep per sae arenta massive issue but stocking numbers are much higher than they would have been traditionally due to the limiting factor of over wintering fodder being much increased by covering the inbye in inorganic fertiliser and switching to silage production. More sheep are therefore out overgrazing the uplands.

Where are you seeing this? Here in the Black Mountains and wider Brecon Beacons sheep numbers on the open hill are probably 1/3 to a 1/10 of what they were 100-150 years ago. My farm has grazing rights for 2000 sheep on the mountain. I graze precisely ZERO up there. Niehter do my neighbours. IN fact from a valley which once had 30+ reasonably large farmsteads and dozens of smaller holdings, only about 10 units now have any sheep. Of them only 3 graze the hills here abouts. It is easy to see the affects of the reduced grazing as bracken and gorse are rapidly taking over the hillsides and hawthorn and birch are slowly recolonizing the hillsides. I used to look out at open grazed hills as a child. I now look at natural regen on the steeper slopes. Look at historic photos of the Lakes from early in the last century and you will see the same picture. Bare hills then, far more wooded and varied today. All the vast forested areas of the Cambrian mountains and the central Scottish hills would have once had 100s of thousands of sheep on them. The Scottish Highlands were cleared of people to graze sheep even. People who say the hills are more heavily grazed by sheep today than in the past are either blind or have an agenda (and I know which one it is).

Not at all Nick, thnks none taken. My response reading back was more giving myself a talking to! ‘Don’t be hard on yourself’ is by coincidence word-for-word a well-used excuse in my family to eat mucho beige sugary fatty carby things and cake. They are all either obese/and/or diabetic.

I got triggered by the phrase 😬 Sorry.

Guess is better to splurb on here rather than burden family and friends tho, so job done 👍🏼

People who say the hills are more heavily grazed by sheep today than in the past are either blind or have an agenda (and I know which one it is).

People can also be honestly mistaken/have cognition compromised by bias and/or poor information.

Which reminds me do you have anything on our conflicting results (dairy vs soy footprint)? Or a link to yr study? Thnks

[strong]Malvern Rider[/strong] wrote:

Thanks for the article/link. Did you cross-reference it?

original article

https://www.wageningenacademic.com/doi/epdf/10.3920/JAAN2020.0007

When I worked in Agri-environmental research in Germany, the Uni of Wageninigen were one of our partners. They are probably the leading Dutch Uni working in the field of Agriculture and environmental research.

Interesting chart, bit bias with evil dairy leading the field.
Rice milk a scant proportion of it as is soy milk. But as ever there is more to it than first meets the eye.

Rice production requires huge swathes of land as does soybean production. Rice production, especially on the scale needed does produce a few nasties of its own..
The main culprit is methane, a potent greenhouse gas emitted from flooded rice fields as bacteria in the waterlogged soil produce it in large quantities and Nitrous oxide, commonly known as laughing gas, is also produced by soil microbes in rice fields.

Soybean production on the other hand is one of the direct causes of deforestation in the Amazon.

^ Thnks welshfarmer…looks promising.

dyna-ti

Soybean production on the other hand is one of the direct causes of deforestation in the Amazon.

I know. Yet isn’t just 6% of that used for human food, most of which is consumed in Asia?

AFAIK increasing meat consumption is the main driver behind soy’s continuing expansion? I read that around three-quarters of soy worldwide is used for animal feed, especially for poultry and pigs?

Interesting chart, bit bias with evil dairy leading the field.

What would you prefer to be leading? Or did they get it wrong? That’s why I asked upthread, for more info?

OP don’t know where you are but our local city has/had (?) a package-free ‘zero-waste’ food shop

https://www.gohomespun.com/2018/10/new-zero-waste-shop-worcester-why-bulk-bins.html

This bombiggety recipe, defrosted some tonight and was lush (+ some green beans off-photo). I try and eat greens often. Also water/stock from greens ie cooked kale is a nice drink, don’t tip it!

Best Damn Vegan Chilli (adapted from Chef John’s award-winning recipe, he recommends much more chilli powder but less garlic). You can also bung in chopped mushrooms if you wish. I didn’t this time.

1 large onion chopped
* 1 red bell pepper diced
* 1 green bell pepper diced
* 4 cloves garlic minced
* 2 cups water
* 2 cups low sodium vegetable broth/stock
* 1/2 tsp garlic powder
* 1/2 tsp black pepper
* 1 tsp good smoked paprika
* 1 tsp oregano
* 1 tsp chipotle chili powder optional
* 2 tsp ground cumin
* 3 tsp chili powder
* 1/2 cup of buckwheat groats
* 1 15oz can pinto beans low sodium
* 2 x 15oz can kidney beans low sodium
* 1 8oz can tomato sauce low sodium
* 1 15oz can diced tomatoes (fire roasted)
* 1 Tblspn tomato paste
* 1 Tblspn cocoa powder
* Jalapeños (with juice) (again, adds a little heat so adjust accordingly)

Instructions
1. Chop all vegetables and add to large pan
2. Lightly saute vegetables in a small amount of water, veg broth, or bean juice (aquafaba) until softened
3. Add half cup of buckwheat and stir
4. Add water and all spices and stir well
5. Mix in kidney beans and half of pinto beans and stir well
6. Add tomato sauce/passata and diced tomatoes
7. Stir in tomato paste, cocoa powder any last minute garnishes
8. Cook on low for 25 mins
9. Let rest for 10 minutes to thicken, stirring occasionally if not thick enough add mashed pinto beans or spoon of flour. Add passata if too chick. Add salt to taste.

Serve with favourite rice/grains, warm corn chips with any cheese/vegan alternative, sliced pickled jalapeños, Oatly cream fraiche, leftover pinto mash (if any)

(top the corn chips with sliced pickled jalapeños and cheese before heating through 30 or so secs in microwave)

Where are you seeing this

Pennines, Lakes.

They are probably the leading Dutch Uni working in the field of Agriculture and environmental research.

This is true, they were involved in a project I worked on.

I try to offset the non-seasonal veg that I buy in the winter months by growing as much as I can during spring, summer and autumn.
However, it does take up a large part of our spare time. This year because of covid we are at home more so are able to attend to it. We also have friut trees, fig, apple, pear and soft fruit bushes.
Our diet is varied in terms of regional foods we eat East Asian, Indian and Mediterranean are our favourite dishes and on occasion we treat ourselves to a takeaway. Our local Indian take-awake has a set menu in a chilled counter, we go in with our own tubs and reheat at home.

I’m sure there’s more we could be doing, it’s difficult when we have teenagers. I’m certainly not going to beat myself up because I’m not doing more.

Apologies for not reading the whloe thread.

We get milk from the milkman. Milk is more local and the bottles are recycled.
We grow some fruit and veg. This year we had enough compost of our own to grow cucumbers and tomatoes. I used old ‘bags for life (that customers had brought) with some holes popped in the base.
A lot of our food comes from a health food shop, where the packaging is cellophane, therefore biodegradable.
The health food shop also have smaller measures of food.
I am able to shop at a local greengrocer. Taking my own cloth bags and not taking anything away in any packaging (except maybe things such as sprouts in a paper bag and the odd yogurt pot).

Supermarkets seem to be a necessary evil of modern life, but I think a lot of people are shopping in a different way now.

In our butcher’s you can take your own containers for buying the meats, deli counter stuff eg olives and cheese.

I make my own chips (these are just potatoes sliced thickly with skins left on and drilled with British rape seed oil).

Oh and drinking tap water. Not bottles, no plastic to buy.

thanks for all the comments so far.

I cant remember the last time i bought lamb, but round here i dont expect to find much upland grazed lamb….. I also tend to avoid soya for a balance of health and environmental reasons

I have a greengrocer whom i have started to use (fruit, veg, eggs, bread) which does mean minimal packaging but still concerned about the mileage my bananas and grapefruit will have done – still searching for a suitable swap.

a random search has led me to ‘vegan tuna mayo’ using chickpeas rather than tuna… will give that a try, for taste – calculations on planet wrecking scores could take some time

tap water is fine – although i have slight concerns about the number of times you can/should reuse a plastic bottle…longer term use of any bottle renders it full of chalk and given any sunlight a nice film of algea…

I make my own chips (these are just potatoes sliced thickly with skins left on and drilled with British rape seed oil).

Almost identical except instead of drizzling the oil I put them in a small/med pan, add the oil. ymmv but I add two tblspns for two people.

I sometimes season with 2 tspns smoked paprika and 1 tsp garlic powder, so add these along with the oil.

Then hold lid on pan (with thumbs) and shake around until chips are evenly coated with oil (and seasoning if added) before spreading on baking parchment for oven.

Would an air-fryer use less oil and energy?

On the theme of chips, the thug kitchen recipe for root veg chips is amazing!

longer term use of any bottle renders it full of chalk and given any sunlight a nice film of algea…

I figure the algae is just fixing any impurities, gets them out of the water itself 🙂

I also tend to avoid soya for a balance of health and environmental reasons

That tendency could be the reverse of intended, depending on your sourcing and sources. Where did you learn that soya (and in what form) is a concern for health, please?

Still trying to get to the bottom of this. Another thread maybe.

Does Soy Consumption Harm the Planet? Depends Who’s Eating It

poultrynews says

The UK, for example, imports around 3.3 million tonnes (of soy) annually, almost 60% of which is used by the poultry industry. Most of it comes from Brazil, Argentina, Paraguay and the US…

… Global production of soybean is around 370 million tonnes (of soybean), about half of which is retained by producing countries for their own use, leaving 185 million tonnes “available”. Of that, China took a 105 million tonne chunk last year as its growing middle classes consumed more and more meat. “They’ll take another five million tonnes next year, and another the year after and so on,” says David McNaughton, director at Soya-UK, which supplies seeds and advice to UK farmer.

http://www.poultrynews.co.uk/news/feature-a-roadmap-for-sustainable-poultry-feed.html

Some more facts and figures from the UK use of Soya here..

Are dairy cows and livestock behind the growth of soya in South America?

Like in all arguments, people with an agenda can use figures to bolster their point of view, which can be pretty disingenuous.

Yes, it may be a fact that most soya in the owrld is used in meat production, but that soa is largely being used in South America and China, the UK uses a relatively small amount as we can grow so much grass in our climate, the soya is just a supplement.

Likewise, a kilo of beef may need 1000s of litres of water to produce if the animals are kept in a sand floor feed lot in the US and fed only a diet of concentrates and alfalfa from irrigated fields. Again, the UK situation is completely different.

And yes, factory farming of pigs and chickens is abhorrent and should be outlawed around the world, but while there are alternatives in the form of high welfare, outdoor reared, grass fed, organic etc, unless people who disagree with factory farming actively seek out those alternatives and support them, then it won’t be long before the only farms left are the industrial units. Not eating something because you disagree with the way it is produced in parts of the world will only lead to more (relatively) of that type of production, not less, as the more expensive, but better options cease to have a market.
Not only that, but you should try producing animals for meat production on a small scale and to the absolute highest welfare standards possible. And when their time comes, take them (very reluctantly) the short distance to the local abattoir, only to then be abused at the check-in gate by a bunch of militant Vegans& Peta supporters. For someone like me, it could easily lead to me not bothering. For the artic driver bringing in 450 lambs at a time, he isn’t going to give a shit.

Anyway, that is my opinion.

That is a stupid and misleading comparison. It is just comparing the amount of soya used to produce dairy milk vs soya milk.
It is ignoring all of the other food that the cattle eat. How much of that is imported palm kernel meal, or other grains from elsewhere in the world? It is ignoring the land use for cattle grazing. How much of that grazing land could be used to grow soya instead? It is ignoring the fossil fuels used for processing milk, and carbon emissions etc.

Like in all arguments, people with an agenda can use figures to bolster their point of view, which can be pretty disingenuous.

*edit – I’m lost for words. It seems as if you are blaming vegetarians for the increase in animal-farming/demand for cheaper meat?

[strong]Malvern Rider[/strong] wrote:

It seems as if you are blaming vegetarians for the increase in animal-farming/demand for cheaper meat?

To a certain extent I am. If you are vegetarian because you don’t like the taste of meat, then fair enough. If you are vegetarian because you disagree with factory farming methods, then you are putting those farmers out of business who also disagree with factory farming methods and farm in an ethical and sustainable way. Who else is going to buy their more expensive meat if not those who disagree with factory farming? With those farmers gone the only ones left are the ones who treat animals as commodities and consumers who don’t give a monkeys where their meat comes from, so long as it is cheap.

Plus I said relative. Say 5% of farmers produce meat in a way that many that many vegetarians would find acceptable, while 95% are factory farmers. By going vegetarian rather than supporting those 5% it is fair to assume that they will go out of business. Thus there may be a few less farmed animals out there, but the remaining 100% will be produced by factory farmers.

[strong]CraigW[/strong] wrote:

It is ignoring all of the other food that the cattle eat. How much of that is imported palm kernel meal, or other grains from elsewhere in the world? It is ignoring the land use for cattle grazing. How much of that grazing land could be used to grow soya instead?

But it using the UK as the case study. How much concentrate do you think dairy cows in the UK eat. The average cow would get at most a couple of kilos a day while in the parlour, awhile she will consume 10’s of kilos of grass while out grazing for 23 hours of the day. Grass that grows so well because of the conditions where dairy is done on a large scale in the UK, places like Somerset, West Wales and Cheshire. You will not be growing much soya or grain in those same areas as the soils wil be too heavy and the rainfall too high.

Of course it is different in other countries, I do not dispute that. But we have a choice in what we buy and where we buy it from. Using examples of worst practice from other countries to diss completely different local systems should be called out.

When calculating the energy required to produce milk, are they also factoring in the meat and I guess leather that comes from the process? Or is the energy being double/triple counted?

When counting the environmental cost of sheep, do we also factor in the wool?

As in many areas, the US is leading the way in absoultely ****-up-ness. The government wanted to (or were lobbied to) support dairy farmers in other parts of the country than the dairy heartlands. So the system they came up with was to give a subsidy based on how far a farm was from Eau Claire, Wisconsin. So people in California where it’s hot, dry and not suitable for dairy are being paid loads of money to raise cattle anyway, in environmentally un-sound ways. But people in the best place to raise dairy, central Wisconson, are struggling and have to turn to industrialised processes anyway.

Talk about arse backwards.

I reckon they should reinstate the vast buffalo herds across the barren plains where they’re ideally suited, then farm those herds like reindeer farmers do.

From Welshfarmer’s link:

humans use c. 100% of the oil (80% in food)

Are cows fed from the leftovers of making soy oil?

“If you are vegetarian because you disagree with factory farming methods, then you are putting those farmers out of business who also disagree with factory farming methods and farm in an ethical and sustainable way. Who else is going to buy their more expensive meat if not those who disagree with factory farming? With those farmers gone the only ones left are the ones who treat animals as commodities and consumers who don’t give a monkeys where their meat comes from, so long as it is cheap.”

Sorry this is utterly risible. One can make a living from abusing and exploiting animals for one’s own benefit. Their pretty much free to do that in this society, but to blame those of us who abdicate on ethical grounds for the continued and systematic abuse and murder of other living creatures just shows how warped your worldview is.

“Traditional” farming methods are a subsidized hangover from the last economic system and within another generation they’ll be pretty much dead and buried – and hopefully with it the abomination of industrial farming.

For the 80 billion slaughtered animals each year, which endure unspeakable suffering, it won’t come soon enough. How many hours of suffering is that collectively? So people can stuff cheap burgers into their mouths while they scroll Facebook in some fast food restaurant. It’s truly the worst crime in history.

Do you have a local veg box delivery?
There’s a couple that deliver in my area, it’s local and seasonal as they can get and you can also add dairy, fruit and meat for an additional charge. The downside is that other than the staples you can’t choose what you get, but it does encourage you to expand your recipe repertoire.