• Question: how would becoming vegan positively affect the environment

    Asked by anon-241420 to Ross, Natalia, Martin, Gabriela, Ellie, Chukwuka on 10 Mar 2020.
    • Photo: Ross Alexander

      Ross Alexander answered on 10 Mar 2020:

      Hi Beth,

      That is a great question with a really complicated answer. Hopefully I wont bore you too much with my answer. Are you thinking of becoming vegan?

      Basically if you look at the environmental impact that mass produced meat farming produces, you have to say, “hey thats not great for global warming and cutting that out would be a good idea”. And in theory that would be true. But if you cut out all animal products from your diet you have to replace it with something else.

      And in this case that would be plants( fruits / vegetables / cereals / etc). So here is the complicated bit.

      So the first thing to think about is, where would you grow these? In the fields that the cows were in? Probably not as that land is not good enough to sustain plant life as it doesn’t have the necessary nutrients.Its good enough for grass , that is why the cattle graze there (we cant eat grass as we cannot break it down in our guts). To get it up to scratch it would require lots of input from man and this would have a huge environmental cost. This would be through fertillsers / chemicals and physical labour with machines.
      Then you have to look at the worlds population, it is predicted to get to over 10 billion in 30 years. And the challenge facing farmers is they have to produce more food in those 30 years than has ever been produced EVER, and do this on less land (maybe as much as half).

      Which is a huge challenge. So coming aback to your original question, there would be a positive impact but it would not be as big as you think. A diet that is a mixture of the two with reduced meat consumption would possibly the better way to go at this time.

      At least until us plant scientists can figure out how to grow more plants with less space and inputs.

    • Photo: Gabriela da Silva Xavier

      Gabriela da Silva Xavier answered on 11 Mar 2020:

      I agree with Ross Alexander’s well-made points. I chat with friends who are ecologists and the basic message I get is that we don’t have the numbers which will definitively tell us what the impact will be if we were to switch to a completely plant-based diet, but the data do indicate that reduced meat consumption would be overall a good thing for the environment. For example, if we start favouring certain types of plant-based food, that could lead to “bad” production practices, plus the environmental burden of transport etc, the potential “good” that switching to a completely plant-based diet could bring to the environment would be lessened. In short I think we need to take a more holistic approach and look at consumption as a whole and what that means in terms of the real cost of production.

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