Lemmings and caribou taste good, too! You can use the lemmings like you might use diced carrots or capers (pickled lemming). So you could have Caribou Stew with Lemmings. Or Caribou Loin Garnished with Lichen and Lemming. Or Caribou Flank Steak suffed with Heath Berries and Lemming.

I care about the environment. I just think that real world practicalities are more important than the feel good appeal of only eating veg to save the planet.

Some are now being passed along as internet urban legends and like all legends get bigger with each telling. As I recall, that one about the Prius and chickens started out as beef in Japan and cars in general.

First I checked to see if the energy used to make animal products like eggs and dairy were similar to meat and they were. So you can’t limit just meat. This knocks vegetarianism off the pillar because a commonsenseavore who includes some meat in her diet may have the same impact as a vegetarian who includes cheese, eggs or milk. No, to reach the top of the food purity pyramid you have to go vegan. This chart sums up how the impact of livestock is distributed:

http://home.comcast.net/~russ676/Graphics/img0.gif

According to that chart, if all 350 million Americans kicked the eating of animal products (meat, eggs, dairy) cold turkey (no pun intended) we would in theory reduce global contribution to greenhouse gas from livestock less than one percent and total greenhouse gas emissions five times less than that. The classic vegan/vegetarian/commonsenseavore holier than thou pissing match is hardly worth the vitriol it usually generates.

http://www.biodiversivist.com

I am all for cutting back/out the factory farmed meats. After a trek through Nebraska, factory chicken, for example, is impossible for me. After managing to smell one farm, almost sixteen miles out – ick!

But you won’t find me cutting out meat any time soon, thank you very much.

I don’t actually eat a lot of meat though. Love good vegetarian cooking and do quite a lot of it – having a lot of vegetable friends, I learned to cook a lot of it.

Perversely though, I have been known to season TVP with beef broth…

Speaking as a vegetarian convert who grew up on an industrial pork and dairy farm, I have to say, we already MAKE a lot of this additional food. We just feed it to livestock in abundance for very, very small returns in meat form.

The hidden elephant in in the ecology debate, that few are willing to talk about anymore, is population. There are too many people, we need to cut down. Now I wonder what kind of global warming statistics I could generate, if instead of having everyone go vegan we have everyone have a few less kids.

Probably not a whole lot, actually.

Resource consumption has a far bigger effect than simple population size. India and China had the same per capita energy consumption as the US, we’d be in far bigger trouble. If they wanted to eat corn-fed meat the way Americans do, we’d run out of land to grown grain rather quickly. Similarly, if Americans cut their resource intake by 10% it would have a far larger impact than if 300 million people in sub-Saharan Africa cut back on their resource consumption by 10%.

People are having fewer children, and have been for a long time. But we’re a long-lived species and there’s a long lag time on reproduction. And the countries with high per capita rates of resource consumption have low birth rates.

Now add to that the issue of energy loss along food chains. The basic rule of thumb in ecology is that 10% of energy consumed by members of a given trophic level is available to the next trophic level. That’s lower in warm-blooded animals (since they have to spend more energy maintaining their body temperature). To make matters worse, there are all sorts of “cow bits” that we don’t use. Using that rule of thumb, and >90% of that energy is unavailable to the people who eat these animals. But grain-fed cattle is a luxury that’s mostly consumed by people in wealthy countries…which already have very low birth dates.

Ms. Freston fails to account for all the additional resources that would be required to produce the vegetarian foods needed to replace meat

Most of the meat in the US is grain-fed. Grain that isn’t fed to cattle (or pigs, or chickens) it would be available for human food.

those animals are not going to suddenly disappear for a day, they are still going to drink water, shit and piss

Um, Doug, you seem to be assuming that (a) everyone would give up meat on the same day, and that either (b) the people who didn’t eat meat today would eat double tomorrow, or (c) that the meat they didn’t eat would all be discarded.

If you skip eating meat today, the meat in your freezer is still edible tomorrow. Eating less meat drives down demand, which will drive down production. And that drives down the number of animals raised. Which would reduce resource consumption associated with raising them.