Huge reduction in meat-eating ‘essential’ to avoid climate breakdown - Sensationalist Headlines

Never said it was the fault, I'm just saying it's still pretty expensive for me to cut meat out.

You can make your own curry pretty easily, as well, and you don't have to eat meat with it, you can just put it over rice

Reduced demand for meat would just increase the demand for produce, which also requires transportation. So the reduction in meat transportation would be offset by the raise in produce transport.

I'm not sure what your money troubles are or what your situation is, but I'm still having trouble following your logic sorry. No matter what, it is cheaper to cook with produce than to eat packaged foods.

How about we enact legal restrictions instead of expecting people to act rationally.

What about chicken and fish? I still eat meat for every dinner I make, but I try to keep it to chicken and fish. Is this okay in regards to climate change or should chicken/fish consumption be reduced as well?

I’m just going off of the top of my head here, but environmental concerns for poultry are less substantial than beef, eg fewer methane emissions, but there’s still the matter of land having to be put aside to grow the food for the poultry to eat, whereas that land could be used for food for human consumption instead. There’s also ethical concerns with chicken; even ‘free range’ or ‘cage free’ have been found to be misleading on occasion. Problem with fish is overfishing. If everyone stopped eating beef or poultry and moved to fish, fish stocks all over the world would rapidly deplete (they already are actually), and the entire global ecosystem would be turned onto its head.

Chicken and fish are generally less bad than cows but really because of the way we farm them they're all pretty bad. It's less about the animals and more the systems we have in place. I think encouraging people to keep their own chickens, go fishing every now and then, and grow their own veg would be pretty dope. But let's be honest, capitulating to the bullshit system of exploitation we have going on is compulsory for most people. I'm conscious that my family having the time and land to grow a bunch of vegetables and herbs is privilege. As I'm aware that being able to own chickens requires a bunch of time, money and land. That fishing requires, being close to a body of water and having a bunch of time on your hands. Shopping at shops is the only option for some people. And ultimately it doesn't all come down to personal responsibility, there needs to be systems in place that encourage sustainable consumption because just saying "buy better stuff" is far from enough. We can even try and subsidize local production, we should really be encouraging wholesale adoption of situations like back in the village I used to live in where entire streets had their eggs sold to them by a neighbor who owned chickens, and got wood and veg form a local handyman.

Anyone have any really tasty, relatively low prep (<45 mins) meat free recipes they can share? Preferably stuff that incorporates beans/legumes/etc.

Yo so I have been vegetarian all my life (religious stuff) but I have introduced people to a lot of meat alternatives, stuff like Quorn for example. Now most of my friends, while not vegetarian, buy about 50% of their meat as Quorn or other meat alternatives. Sure it probably doesn't taste exactly like meat but they say it's good in it's own way and they think it's a great alternative. I'd advise looking into something like that if you are considering cutting down your meat but don't want to make a drastic change at first; change your beef or pork sausages with Quorn sausages for example and see how it goes.

I've found Vegetarian Sausages actually taste in my eyes, better than the meat based products.

I usually put broccoli, carrots, corn, green beans, etc. into an instant pot and set it to 4 minutes. I do season it well though because I can't live without seasoning on my food.

https://tasty.co/ has a decent app that you can select veggie from https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCF-ACPYNN0oXD4ihS5mbbmw This guy does some great stuff too

I see this as something very difficult to implement in the eastern Europe, including the Czech Republic. The older generations are mostly meat eaters - my father, for example, won't eat a salad, because "there is too much green in it". My grandparents keep telling me that I need to eat more meat so I "can grow up to be a big strong man". People openly mock vegetarians and vegans, because "they have clearly lost their mind and are only doing it because the western celebrities are doing - just like feminism". And then their children grow up with this mindset and they need to have their meat too. I personally very rarely eat beef or pork, I mostly eat chicken. I would love to eat more fish meat, but fish tend to be quite expensive - same as vegetarian food. Btw. I work in a company that builds farms. More and more western companies invest money in the east. Danish companies are building several massive pig farms in Slovakia. We have recently finished building one of them. 8000 pigs. They are already planning an expansion for next year. As far as I know, tech manufacturers are attempting to make their products more eco-friendly, but the farms owners really don't care - they buy the cheapest stuff to make short term profit.

I really dislike these kinds of articles because while a reduction of meat consumption would improve the environment... It's not the proper solution. It's just another thing of "Yep! The average consumer! You guys need to adjust your lifestyles!" instead of the mountains and mountains of damage done by the huge industries and corporations. It's like saying "to fix poverty, donate a quarter of every paycheck! It's essential!" when you know damn well that's not the issue.

Chicken and fish are much better alternatives emission-wise. Here are some handy values for food (ISO 14040): Ground Beef: 2.620 kg CO2 per 0.1 kg. Ground Sheep: 2.121 kg CO2 per 0.1 kg. Ground Pig meat: 0.378 kg CO2 per 0.1 kg. Chicken Breast: 0.352 kg CO2 per 0.1 kg. Turkey: 0.320 kg CO2 per 0.1 kg. Salmon: 0.324 kg CO2 per 0.1 kg And for comparison, some other values: Chicken Egg: 0.170 kg CO2 per 0.1 kg Hard Cheese: 1.220 kg CO2 per 0.1 kg Milk: 0.120 kg CO2 per 0.1 kg. Rice: 0.480 kg CO2 per 0.1 kg Green Peas: 0.070 kg CO2 per 0.1 kg White Bread: 0.081 kg CO2 per 0.1k g Although I did pull these from Finnish site, I think they give pretty good idea. As you can see, dropping ruminant meat is one of the biggest changes you can do immediately, as well as it is easy. Of course, as sheep and cattle can graze, feed needs to be produced for pigs and poultry. There are also some solutions to help cattle's emissions, such as feeding them seaweed which apparently can reduce their emissions significantly, however, they still remain very area-intensive.

I don't eat meat and cook primarily vegan at home while also working full time and its neither a timesink nor expensive - If you do want 'bits' be it premade stuff or meat substitutes they aren't that much more expensive than buying a similar weight of meat anyway unless you go for the overpriced overbranded stuff?? Me and my gf spend less than £100 ($130) on groceries every month in our main shop and probably another £20-30 throughout the month to top up stuff that goes off/is consumed faster, and a lot of our friends are surprised at this considering they easily spend 2-3x that. Cooking wise the vast majority of vegan cooking ingredients you can bulk buy tinned or dry which makes them both far cheaper and keep for a very long time. I eat a lot of legumes/beans and incorporate them into most of my cooking, off the top of my head: If you can do a basic pasta tomato sauce (Chopped tomatoes, some dry herb of choice, some garlic/onion or powders of those, some stock or soy sauce), you can just add in red or green lentils (Dry red or wet green, or pre-cooked green as they take a while), or any kind of beans you want and they go great. This might be an odd one for the US but mince and dumplings was one of my favorite childhood dishes so I do this regularly - I make up a gravy using celery, carrot, onion fried with some sugar for 20 mins then mixed with 2 cups of stock, a teaspoon of flour and some thyme/tomato puree. While this is going on I just make some standard dumplings that take 5 minutes and you can find recipes for (Using vegan butter or some kind of vegetable spread for butter dumplings, or sometimes vegetable suet, or sometimes 50/50 suet and butter). Takes 20-30 mins prep then I dump it all into a oven dish alongside a tin of chick peas, a tin of green lentils, sometimes a handful of red lentils and lots of frozen peas. 30 or so minutes in the oven until the dumplings are done and its ready. Chilli is just about the easiest thing to bulk cook, just find a recipe you like then instead of using meat, dump in as many different kinds of beans you want (We sometimes do a 10+ bean chilli) Korma is quite easy to make or you can buy a premade paste and add in the ginger/coconut milk and some chickpeas/garden peas, homemade nans are very easy to whip up and make alongside these as well and you can pan fry them in a few minutes Sweet potato curry is another favourite of mine and one I always serve up to meat eating friends. You can find recipes online but we basically add in a bunch of sweet potato, onion, carrot, stock, curry powder/turmeric/ginger and a load of red lentils (Chick peas can also be added too), easy to toss in and let it simmer for 45 mins then add in 1/2 a cup of coconut milk or cream and its good to go.

If there wasn't such a demand for meat, there wouldn't be as much supply causing pollution. You can't blame it entirely on companies for providing people what they want.

We really should be doing both improving our own lifestyles whilst holding the most guilty accountable. My only problem with articles like this is that they draw attention away from the main causes. The healthiest thing is understanding it's totally the fault of major companies, but that doesn't mean we can't do anything in the short term to at least signal you want change.

You know it doesn't really matter what people in the west do, the developing world is overpopulated and has new tastes for meat, consumerism and materialism. China and india alone are a huge peoblemproblem because of the size of their populations and lack of infrastructure, education and ignorance to global warming.

The developing world still outputs far less CO2 per capita than the West. Even if their growth is an issue and efforts definitely need to be made to alleviate that, us Westerners are the ones with the most individual power to reduce emissions currently.

Vegetables don’t have as much bio available protein so for a lot of people they’ll need to consume a lot more food. I cut meat out where I can but I also work out a lot and on the veggies days, I eat way more food than I want to because it’s not filling. We should reduce meat consumption but we also have to recognize not everyone will thrive on that diet.

If anyone has a trader joes nearby they have this stuff called jackfruit although you can likely find it other places. It comes in a can and looks kind of like chunks of pineapple crossed with artichoke maybe, but when you cook it it shreds like shredded chicken. I've been trying to replace some of my meat consumption along with eating less meat in general because i find it actually does take on a pretty close texture to shredded chicken or pork and can be flavored very easily to fit any dish. Definitely give it a shot if you're trying to find some alternatives.

Picked up this cookbook on Amazon. Will have a go at it!

I like to think of what the next generation of conservatives will be, and it's looking like they'll be people very adamant in eating "real" meat. Basically take Texas's BBQ culture, and multiply it tenfold. You'll have people purposefully and solely eating "real" meat to own the libs.

The free market will do what the free market wants to do, slap regulation down on that bitch already. Crossing fingers and hoping that the average person's consumption will change is folly; time for a meat tax.

It does absolutely matter what people in the west do, we are the biggest contributors to the problem by a country fucking mile. Continuing to try to find new people to shift the burden of responsibility onto is not going to help. We are the problem, and we need to be part of the solution.

Just applying a carbon tax on lot of livestock would go far - otherwise environmental costs of ex. beef are largely externalized and forgotten People in India and China consume much less per population/GDP. But it is true, as their infrastructure and quality of life improves, meat consumption will also rise. However, developed countries stress resources much more significantly and it is not sustainable. We are in best position to cut our consumption, improve our technology and food, and educate and lead developing countries to more sustainable practices.

Food delivery is indeed a portion of emissions; but recall that even if you were to remove meat from the equation, it would need to be replaced with a nearly equivalent mass of non-meat alternatives. I believe. Here is a graph from the same source. https://i.imgur.com/wHgOSpc.png Agriculture is definitely part of the issue, it's just a smaller cut of the pie. Light duty vehicles alone account for nearly double of what agriculture does on its own.

We need to be really careful when raising taxes and lowering incentives for farmers. This will just encourage imports and other countries will see a sharp rise in revenue, and ride that train until they are 10 foot underwater. Whatever is done domestically needs to hit the trading hubs too, or it's not going to work.