Becoming a vegetarian (or at least, cutting down on meat) by eating beans and other legumes, whole grains, and the like can easily be cheaper than a meat-centric diet. You can probably make a decent pot of?split pea soup, that will feed a family of 4 (or feed one person for 4 days) for less than $4. 4 calorically equivalent servings of, say, hamburger will likely run you more like $5-6, minimum, even if you get the cheap stuff.
And you don't need to become completely vegetarian to have an impact. 2 people cutting their?meat consumption?in half would have about the same impact as one person becoming a complete vegetarian. Even if everyone just had, on average, one meatless day a week, it would improve the?environmental impact?of the American diet.
Alternately, if you eat grass-fed rather than grain-fed meat, especially local grass-fed meat, you'll have a much lower environmental impact. Grazing, in moderation, actually helps maintain the health of grasslands.
What are you really looking to achieve? This is the second posting of the same rather long question and so already is not part of the YA format. Do you intend to keep re-posting this question until your account is pulled?
You present an argument that is more formally known as the straw man fallacy. It suggests an absurd example which is quickly knocking down and is supposed to prove the entire argument false. It doesn't.
There are 4 or 5 very different reasons why some one might decide to be a vegetarian.
1 It is not usually about the money in developed countries
2 it may or may not include "fake" meats
3 it may have nothing at all to do with global warming or energy.
But, there is a basic law of biology formulated as the "food chain" or "food pyramid" that only about 10 % of the sunlight energy that is received is available. The first level is somewhat less as photosynthesis is only 1% to about 5% efficient. Animals that eat plants will only gain about 10% of the energy available in the plants. What this means is that to survive a person needs 10 times the land area at a minimum than if they just ate plants. Other resources like water are also wasted. Cows are also especially high C02 emitters while plants are C02 absorbers. It is therefore more conservative to be a vegetarian.
Seeing that many are becoming vegetarians and foreseeing a time when global population will force most to eat lower on the food chain, companies are marketing vegetables packaged to look like meats. This is likely to be made from some of the most controversial GMO products like soybeans and corn. Because of the processing these will, 1 cost more, 2 use more energy, 3 produce more CO2 than eating plants directly. Additionally we are replacing biological processing in a Cow with machine processing. You could get more food value with less processing using a blender. Not every vegetarian will find this acceptable. It entirely depends upon the rational for being a vegetarian.
If you find that being a vegetarian requires constant "self control" you are more like a meat eater who happens to eat some veggies than a vegetarian who has no interest in meat. Do what you have to do and don't complain about what you can't do. All in all the manifesto you pose as a question suggests a highly developed psychology but may fail a test of sincerity.
you need to consider 2 things;
1) how 'carbon neutral' are they because generally this is not the case, in relation to biofuels, they say that the co2 produced in burning it ir cancelled out by the very plants used to make it has they consume it. however the power plants, the vehicles used in processing will not be carbon neutral, meaning the whole process isn't really carbon neutral.
2) global warming on a whole is still a 'theory' indeed the earth is warming up, but we are also still in a ice age, i believe the term is semi-glacial, could be wrong, but in one we are. Scientist are still trying to determine whether the increase in temperature is infact a regular or irregular pattern has it has fluctuated over the course of earth's history.
Holy reposted question! Instead of buying pre-made salt-filled veggie products why not buy, you know, actual vegetables? It is sure a heck of a lot cheaper than buying that pre-made crap and, depending on where you live, may even be cheaper than eating meat every meal.
Prices for where I am from:
4 chicken breasts - $12 - Good for half a week.
4 salmon fillets - $12 - Good for half a week
2 spinach bunches, bunch of celery, bag of carrots, box of strawberries, bag of new potatoes, 6 tomatoes, bunch of plums, bunch of apples, bunch of kale, bunch of mint, 12 bananas - Roughly $20 - Lasts 1 week
It is because you aren't buying wise.
Edit: And a response from the last time this question was posted. Yes, eggs are good for you. 1 egg per day instead of eating something like ground beef. The reason being is that they increase your HDL, or good, cholesterol as opposed to your LDL, or bad, cholesterol.
http://www.heart.org/HEARTORG/Conditions...
Many recent studies have shown that eggs can increase your good cholesterol.
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/art...
and have little effect on heart disease if taken in moderate, or 1 a day, amounts.
http://journals.cambridge.org/action/dis...
Note: Regardless of what type of animal products you eat you will be getting cholesterol.
If you still plan on eating red meat I would go for roast beef as opposed to ground beef. Red meats are a good source of amino acids, though they are very high in bad cholesterol. Some amino acids can be taken from beef in quantities 1000% higher than other products. It is, however, extremely high in saturated fats as opposed to monounsaturated or polyunsaturated fats which help to lower cholesterol levels.
http://www.cdc.gov/nutrition/everyone/ba...
Everything, of course, should be used in moderation and other products should be taken to get your complete RDA for your profile.
Kano: Everything is not a conspiracy as you would have everyone believe. http://www.health.harvard.edu/newsweek/U...
Once again you are talking from a viewpoint of limited understanding.
Forget about cholesterol, it is another myth, our bodies make 75% of the cholesterol in us, the other 25% comes from what we eat, if we eat more the body makes less, they wont tell you this because statins are a billion dollar industry, yes statins lower cholesterol, but statistically they dont lower heart disease.
Scientist don't know the CO2 % from a million years ago . There is no million year
storage of CO2 .
Global warming (man made) us a lie. If you want to go vegetarian do it for compassion for animals and your health
-The animal agriculture industry is the leading cause of pollution - more than all automobiles combined.
-More than half of all water used in the U.S. is used to raise animals for “food” (yes, quotes).
-A vegetarian diet requires maybe 300 gallons of water per day, while a meat-eating diet requires more than 4,000 gallons.
-Cattle-ranching is the number one cause of Amazonian deforestation. In Central America, two-thirds of the rain forests have been cleared primarily to raise cattle.
-Raising animals for “food” requires more than one-third of all raw materials and fossil fuels used in the United States.
-The meat industry causes more water pollution in the United States than all other industries combined.
-More than 10 billion animals are raised and killed for “food” every year in the U.S. alone; they have to eat, and their waste has to go somewhere.
-20 vegetarians can live off the land required by one meat eater.
-If they continue to clear American forests to raise cattle at the present rate, in 50 years there will be none left.
-1 acre yields 165 lbs of “beef” or 20,000 lbs of potatoes.
-Pressure on land due to meat farming leads to soil erosion 6 billion tons a year in the USA.
-If everyone went vegetarian, up to 90% of land used for animal farming could be taken out of production and used to replant woodlands, leisure activities, etc.
-Between 1966 and 1983 alone, 38% of the Amazon rain forest was destroyed for cattle grazing.
-Overgrazing by cattle is destroying the land & increasing desertification, nearly 430 million acres in the USA alone has suffered a 25-50% reduction in yield since first grazed .
-An inch of topsoil takes 200-1000 years to develop - yet in the USA they have lost around 1/3 of their prime topsoil in 200 years (around 7 inches) due to animal farming.-Land will be lost due to rises in sea level due to global warming due to animal farming.
-The destruction of the rainforest by cattle farmers is destroying the lungs of the planet & reducing the worlds capacity to replenish our oxygen supply.-The 1,300,000,000 cattle in the world emit 60,000,000 tons of methane per year (methane is a greenhouse gas & leads to global warming).
-It takes 25 gallons of water to produce a pound of wheat while it takes 2500 gallons to produce a pound of “meat.”
-Bloody waste water and the excrements of farm animals end up in our rivers, and from there into the seas.
-Nitrates and pesticides used on crops grown to feed livestock end up in our rivers.
-The water used to produce 10 lbs. of steak is equivalent to the average consumption of water for an entire household for an entire year.
-Aquifers (stores of underground water) in the San Joaquin Valley in the US are being drained at the rate of 500,000,000,000 gallons a year to produce “meat.”
-Meat and dairy farming uses billions of gallons of oil to run tractors, fuel ships and lorries (to move animal feed and animals), pump billions of gallons of water to irrigate fields and run slaughterhouses, power refrigeration units to prevent the corpses from decomposing, and to power sewage plants to try to clean up some of the pollution produced.
-A pound of “beef” takes a gallon of oil to produce. :) :)
See my last answer to this question, here: http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index;...
They have been talking on the news about how the atmosphere has more than 400 ppm of carbon emissions now, the most in a million years. I have known for over a decade that global warming was a serious problem, but just recently decided to try to do something about it.
I started driving 100 km/hour instead of 120 km/hour, which saves me 7 litres of gasoline a week as I drive 1 hour a day. That might amount to half a ton of co2 emissions in a year. I fixed a leaky faucet I'd allowed to leak for a year which was probably wasting 5 gallons of water a day. The carbon emissions of the heating of said water and loss of filtered water would be 0.20 tons of co2 over a year.
I would have saved myself 300 dollars with the driving speeds in a year, and 50 dollars energy bill for the heated water in a year.
I was reading how eating meat is very carbon intensive, and although number vary wildly nobody seems to dispute that all meat is much higher in co2 costs than veggie alternatives. Having been Vegan for 1.5 years for ethical reasons in my past it seemed an achievable goal to go vegetarian and save 1-3 tons of co2 being emitted by my diet.
Knowing my habits, I went to the store to buy veggie meat slices, veggie burger, veggie dogs to replace the meats I have been eatting, but then came to the realization that picking these foods would cost me an extra 2-3 dollars a day extra, every day. In a year that comes to 700-1000 dollars spent just so i don't eat meat, plus the self control I would need to exert.
Then I thought about the sites advertising achieving carbon nuetrality by donating money to renewable energy projects and carbon negative projects and how they say if you are trying to negate 1 ton of co2 you would need to donate beween 15-25 dollars. This means that it would be FAR more economical to donate 75 dollars to a renewable energy project than to be vegetarian.
Is there some reason I am not understanding that this would be untrue? Why would ANYONE spend 700 dollars a year more to do something they could achieve otherwise with 1/10 the money?
