this post was submitted on 23 Jul 2024
3 points (54.1% liked)

Movies

7429 readers
240 users here now

Lemmy

Welcome to Movies, a community for discussing movies, film news, box office, and more! We want this to be a place for members to feel safe to discuss and share everything they love about movies and movie related things. Please feel free to take part and help our community grow!


Related Communities:

!books@lemmy.world - Discussing books and book-related things.

!comicbooks@lemmy.world - A place to discuss comic books of all types.

!marvelstudios@lemmy.world - LW's home for all things MCU.


While posting and commenting in this community, you must abide by the Lemmy.World Terms of Service: https://legal.lemmy.world/tos/

  1. Posts or comments that are homophobic, transphobic, racist, sexist, ableist, or advocating violence will be removed.

  2. Be civil: disagreements happen, but that doesn’t provide the right to personally insult others.

  3. Spam, self promotion, trolling, and bots are not allowed

  4. Shitposts and memes are allowed until they prove to be a problem.

    Regarding spoilers; Please put "(Spoilers)" in the title of your post if you anticipate spoilers, as we do not currently have a spoiler tag available. If your post contains an image that could be considered a spoiler, please mark the thread as NSFW so the image gets blurred. As far as how long to wait until the post is no longer a spoiler, please just use your best judgement. Everyone has a different idea on this, so we don't want to make any hard limits.

    Please use spoiler tags whenever commenting a spoiler in a non-spoiler thread. Most of the Lemmy clients don't support this but we want to get into the habit as clients will be supporting in the future.

Failure to follow these guidelines will result in your post/comment being removed and/or more severe actions. All posts and comments will be reviewed on a case-by-case basis. This means that some content that violates the rules may be allowed, while other content that does not violate the rules may be removed. The moderators retain the right to remove any content and ban users. We ask that the users report any comment or post that violates the rules, and to use critical thinking when reading, posting or commenting.

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] James_Fortis@lemmy.world 0 points 3 months ago (1 children)

The study is a meta study over 38,700 farms constituting 90% of global calories consumed though; would this still be considered a single metric? I'm looking for something else I can send to people if not this.

[–] commie@lemmy.dbzer0.com 0 points 3 months ago (1 children)

if I told you that I went to 38,700 farms myself and cataloged exactly how much land it was using, that doesn't tell you what that land could be used for. it might not be useful for anything except farming. so the bare metric of land use isn't helpful. and then we consider other footprints: water use, ghg emissions, lca's.

none of these is able to give you an actual understanding of how the water is used or where the emissions come from or how LCA's stack up against each other.

My favorite example is cotton: cotton is raised for textiles. it is very thirsty. it takes up some amount of land. The farming of it emits some amount of greenhouse gas. there is also waste product from the production of cotton: cotton seed. Cotton seed is fed to cattle. Even if we take the weight of the cottonseed that is fed to cattle and we take that portion of the crop by weight and we say that some portion of the crop by weight is responsible for a certain amount of water use and land use and greenhouse gas emissions, the truth is that cattle aren't responsible for that. In fact feeding that cottonseed two cattle is a conservation of resources.

All of these metrics, all of the sources of the material, they all need to be reevaluated in a holistic manner. that doesn't mean a meta study where you compare LCAs, a metric that itself is not supposed to be transferable between studies. it means actually doing the hard work of figuring out how to make every individual agricultural operation operate at its peak efficiency for the metrics that we want to see improved: water use, emissions, land use, run off, etc.

ideologically opposing animal agriculture is just going to leave a hole in the agricultural space where products had previously been diverted after becoming industrial waste now need to be used or become waste again.

[–] James_Fortis@lemmy.world 1 points 2 months ago (1 children)

I would agree with you if the metrics were even close. Beef being like 100 times less efficient than legumes in many metrics makes it absolutely clear it's better to grow legumes than beef, regardless if people want to consider, say, leather as a waste product.

[–] commie@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 2 months ago (1 children)

given that beerf cattle can simply graze, that when they do make it to the feedlot they are fed fodder and crop seconds, what metrics do you think can meaningfully inform the "efficiency"?

our food system is so complex and interconnected that it makes no sense to claim any individual food product has a particular impact: each operation must be evaluated individually and improved in its own context.

[–] James_Fortis@lemmy.world 1 points 2 months ago (1 children)

This would be true if the foods weren't so extremely far apart in terms of efficiency. The least efficient legumes are still much more efficient than the most efficient beef, per gram of protein. Please see table one in the largest meta study ever done on the topic below, constituting 38,700 farms and 90% global calories consumed (also included in the documentary): https://globalsalmoninitiative.org/files/documents/Reducing-food’s-environmental-impacts-through-producers-and-consumers.pdf

[–] commie@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 2 months ago

you already linked poore-nemecek 2018, and I explained some of the problems with the methodology. citing it again doesn't resolve this