I wasn't even referring to high protein meals, just normal amounts of protein. And that within a long term... In US or EU where purchasing power is higher this is more doable but outside of that... How? You have a somewhat limited amount of complete plant based protein so outside of that you sort of have to match the right incomplete proteins to get every essential aminoacid with consistency. In the long term doing that for a vast majority of the population is simply impossible. It's at a minimum a logistical and food security nightmare because plants for the most part grow in specific conditions and it's unrealistic to expect most places to have the conditions to grow everything they will need. And to that the social and cultural implications for this.
On the infant formula front the situation is pretty simple, no milk, no whey, no formula. Reduce milk production and infant formula becomes less available. There's no alternatives. To keep the price of milk down (this keeping it available, baby formula is expensive enough as it is) you need to keep production up at least until an acceptable replacement is available. At least to these day soy based alternatives are still overall strictly inferior and people who use formula should use it only as a last resort if normal formula is for whichever reason not available...
Now, I am not making the case that climate change isn't real or that nothing should change. But as far as I can tell this is not a transition we could make even in the long term without causing at least widespread malnourishment. And you could argue that this is an acceptable cost to pay but it is entirely unreasonable to expect individuals to not do absolutely everything in their power to fight this. We are probably closer to science figuring out how to reduce emissions from cattle than we are to worldwide functional plant based diets.
Well, first of all, it really isn't like the consumption of nonvegan products is higher in the third world than it is in Europe and the US. Meat consumption in those parts of the world that are facing malnourishment are very low and obviously it would be easier to feed people there if there wouldnt be so many resources going into meat and other nonvegan products.
Most of the nonvegan products we use are products we wouldnt need and most of these are bought and consumed in richer countries. With meat, that is easily provable:
List of countries by meat consumption - Wikipedia
If you take a country like Ghana, they consume roughly a tenth of the meat the US consumes. When I am saying that we need to turn to plant based diets, i am not talking about the third world as a priority. I am really talking about the richer nations because those are the countries that actually have such consuming habits.
If we would all consume a tenth of that (and there really is no healthreason or logistical reason not to do that, it would make things a lot easier).
And it is not much different with Milk:
List of countries by milk consumption per capita - Wikipedia
These are the numbers not for Dairy on a whole, JUST for milk. Even that basic product sees the US and Germany having 3 times the consumption of the highest nation on the lower half (Kenya) of that list.
People in the third world live plant based to a high degree, not out of choice but out of necessity. They often do not get their baby formulas, they die. Today.
So if the west takes a decisive step towards a plant based diet and only uses the remaining nonvegan products for baby formulas and some few health products for people who need it, that would free up A LOT of resources to actually fight the malnourishment that already exists today.
This is not making things harder, that would make things easier.
And you really cannot ignore the alternative. How are you going to save up these 15% (actually more, 15% pure emissions ignoring the destruction of natural habitats) of emissions? And what will happen regarding malnourishment when agriculture becomes less and less possible?
couldn't find the word water, lol... in cattle, there is a good portion of the land is used for native pasture or improved pastures (grass fed meat particularly). you use fodder crops for weaners more so. you need a lot of land for cattle but fruit and veg tend to be thirstier per hectare. we're well off topic now, this might even be moved to a more suitable thread.
Oh sorry, mixed things up. You can read up about the water footprint of cattle here:
Water: thirsty animals, thirsty crops | Heinrich Böll Stiftung | Brussels office - European Union (boell.org)
Producing a kilogram of beef takes an average of 15,415 litres of water. The same amount of sheep or goat meat takes almost 9,000 litres, a kilo of pork 6,000 litres, and of chicken 4,300 litres. In all, 92 percent of the global water footprint goes towards agriculture, 29 percent of which is used in animal production. According to another calculation, agriculture uses 70 percent of all available fresh water, three times as much as 50 years ago.
That means that animal production would use rougthly 26% of all water worldwide. And it also depends on WHICH water it uses, if you keep reading that article. Farming animals the way we do (in large factories) leads to water pollution and the destruction fo ecosystems:
Problems for the ecosystem and for soils arise in dry regions if blue water is used to grow feed crops, which are then removed from the regional cycles. Ruminants fed with feed grown under irrigation are found mainly in the USA, China and India. Pigs raised under industrial management – which uses a lot of water – come mainly from the northeastern USA, Europe and China.
The consequences for rivers, wetlands and groundwater levels in these regions are devastating. According to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, the midwestern USA and western China suffer from soil salinity due to irrigation with groundwater. Nitrogen and phosphorus used as fertilizers are washed down rivers into the sea, where they give rise to dead zones. In these marine deserts, explosive algal blooms use up all the oxygen. Deprived of oxygen, marine animals and plants die. There are around 400 such dead zones around the world. The biggest is in the Arabian Sea, covering almost the whole of the Gulf of Oman. In the Gulf of Mexico in the USA, pollutants carried down the Mississippi create a dead zone each year that covers over 15,000 square kilometres. And whenever land-based water reservoirs, such as forests in Brazil and peatlands around the world, are converted into cropland, the overuse of water resources is especially severe.
