Would it make more sense to compare based on calories and not weight? Since you need to eat more tofu than beef for the same calorie intake. If my math is right, tofu is about 760 kcal per kg while beef is 2500 kcal per kg so that makes it ~34 grams of CO2 per kcal for beef and ~3 grams of CO2 per kcal for tofu.
Definitely tofu is still better obviously, just wanted to compare with that metric. Not sure if it makes more sense or not.
The carbon that we dig out of the ground and put in the air, that is the ony one relevant to global warming. Everything else is just a change of phases in a cycle.
Also carbon sinks around the globe are being replaced by systems that are at best carbon neutral. Every acre of carbon sequestering rainforest cleared to farm cattle is a net decrease in our ability to process atmospheric carbon.
I’m all in for reducing beef consumption, not just because of the green aspect but also health… having said that, this is yet another fool’s errand the masses have been set to follow:
we could curve global beef consumption significantly by realign massive sectors of the supply chain, agriculture and education OR
we could get rid of the Kardashian (sp?) that likes to take private jet hops to avoid minutes of traffic
You know who says changing beef consumption is impossible so it’s meaningless to even try? Beef industry spokespeople.
I mean, what’s more impossible - changing Western dietary habits or changing the entire structure of capitalism and representative democracy that allows rich people to own private jets?
I mean, what’s more impossible - changing Western dietary habits or changing the entire structure of capitalism and representative democracy that allows rich people to own private jets?
I don’t know, do you?
All I’m saying is eliminating bad habits from literally a few individuals would have a greater effect than curving the habits of millions
they take a myopic view of the inputs and outputs for food sources, not considering, for instance, that much of what is fed to animals would otherwise be wasted. the beef doesn’t produce all that CO2, poore & nemecek were calculating all the co2 that goes into the inputs. i mentioned elsewhere cottonseed, but frankly i know that only takes up a minute portion of what they’re calculating. instead, they are also counting soy, and that’s almost as dishonest as you can get. nearly all soy is pressed for oil, and after that, the waste product is what is fed to cattle and other livestock. technically, you could eat it, but most people don’t and don’t want to. feeding it to livestock actually reclaims waste products. and even the calculation for the soy itself is skewed since it often also counts the deforestation that has already taken place as an emission source, regardless of whether that particular plot of land has been deforested for decades.
Yeah that seems like it’s pretty flawed. Even just going down the soybean oil byproduct rabbit hole the Internet says most of it is “acidulated” to prepare it as an ingredient in lubricants and plastic. So beef production isn’t even the main use of the byproduct.
Do we have any better studies? Or is this like the infamous self defense with a handgun study, bad science and all we have at the same time?
I'm afraid they're straight up lying. The paper doesn't mention cotton even once. See for yourself in the paper here or the database here. It doesn't even specify one type of feed for the beef cattle, because it is a meta-analsyis of hundreds of others papers about specific practices in specific areas. It takes a weighted average of those depending on how much of the world's production the area studied in each one accounts for.
I can just tell you: they did some looking at each production process and the inputs and outputs, then extrapolated it out to global scale.
The problem is that inputs and outputs vary wildly from place to place, that’s why some places are all corn and beans and others are cattle and yet others are something else. Given those differences are because of the economic inputs varying as opposed to the environmental inputs and outputs varying.
You can’t just go around to all the beef producers in the county and figure out how their operation works then multiply it by however much to fit the world scale because the rest of the world might be doing it wildly differently.
Although while I see the criticism of their methodology I think it means things are actually way worse, not better in terms of the environmental impact of beef.
The original paper says that they weighted each measure to the country's national production and then weighted those by the country's share of global production. They didn't just average each result they got for beef with no regard for location.
I think their point is that scaling to the volume of beef production of other countries isn’t correct because the methods of production vary widely enough to produce much different results. As in, some countries likely produce more or less CO2/kg of beef so it makes no sense to simply scale the number they got from a single county to global scales.
Not the guy you’re replying too though, so I’m not certain.
Right, but they didn't do that. It's a meta-analysis, so they took the value that each study got for a given crop in a specific country and then weighted all of the values by the share of global production that that country is responsible for. So if we pretend that the only three countries are Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, they did the following:
Found three studies from Estonia, two from Latvia, and two from Lithuania
Averaged the values of the three Estonian studies
Did the same for the two Latvian ones and the two Lithuanian ones
Found that Estonia is responsible for 60% of the world's beef, Latvia 25%, and Lithuania 15%
Took their three national averages and weighted them 0.6 for Estonia, 0.25 for Latvia, and 0.15 for Lithuania to get the final value for beef
Repeat for each other crop
The dataset was 1530 studies across 39,000 farms in 119 countries
Yes I was wildly oversimplifying the methodology using a hypothetical intended to help people who might not have a background in either research or beef production understand.
I always find the comparison between tofu and meat a bit unfair, as it wasn’t invented for that purpose. In many asian cultures it is simply a thing in its own right, only we in the West have popularized it as a meat substitute and I don’t think that does tofu justice.
Tofu is not a meat substitute. Tofu is just tofu, unless someone specifically picks it as a substitute for meat and sticks to it, in which case I guess it’s their personal substitute for meat.
I was curious and went looking because I suspected it was low emissions but not how low. Research seems to suggest Kangaroo meat is significantly lower GHG per kg than tofu!
In our calculations we use 1.30 CO2 equivalents for one kilogram production of kangaroo meat which is an average of the estimates reported in the literature
From a quick glance, it seems they didn’t consider emissions coming from exporting kangaroo meat abroad. Though I fancy the total will still be way lower than the alternatives.
The biggest difference here is not related to the animals themselves, but the scale.
Much of beef’s emissions has to do with land use changes and diet which are both a necessary (but unfortunate) part of managing 1.5 billion cows to serve as a primary protein source for billions of people. In comparison, there’s somewhere on the order of 30 million kangaroos on the planet (2% of the number of cows) and I’d wager the overwhelming majority of them are wild, not farmed for meat.
The difference in footprints here shows the differences in management practices and the downside of commercial ranching. If everyone on The planet switched their 0.5 servings of beef per day for 0.5 servings of kangaroos, nothing would be fundamentally different in the environmental outcomes. We’d still be clearing forests in the Amazon, just now it would be for kangaroos.
Sustainable meat consumption is only achieved through dramatic reductions in consumption. People don’t have to quit meat, but it does have to become a thing reserved only for special occasions. Like it or not, the only path to sustainable food consumption requires everyone eating veggies (including the dreaded tofu) most of the time. Getting beef fed things like seaweed increases the portion of yearly meals that can include red meat sustainably, but does not somehow eliminate the fact that there majority of people’s meals need to avoid red meat (sorry folks).
You have evidence that farming 10 billion+ kangaroos (it would probably have to be closer to 15 billion, based on the weight differences, ~200 lb/roo vs ~2000 lb/cow) can be done without any compounding burdens, e.g., land use changes, increasing the CO2/kg?
Are there a lot of studies in industrial-scale kangaroo farming? I’m very much interested in evidence on how we could sustainably manage and farm tens of billions of animals to feed a global population at today’s levels of meat consumption.
If you’re comparing the footprint of wild caught kangaroos with industrially farmed beef you’re comparing apples to oranges. One cannot be a substitute for the other because they exist on tremendously different scales. Unless of course you have evidence on how we manage wild kangaroos to feed 7 billion people. If you do, please oh please share. I am definitely interested in the evidence!
In not disagreeing with what was presented, that wild caught kangaroo is lower carbon intensity than industrially farmed beef, I’m only disagreeing with the clear implication of that statement and its context; that we could somehow swap one for the other and not have to change our levels of consumption. So please, show me the data on global-population-feeding scale kangaroo farming, I’ll retract my previous statement and issue a formal apology in the Australian Times.
I don’t recall saying that kangaroo could or should replace beef globally. You’ve taken my observation of a single data point and practically built an army of straw men.
Congratulations it is entirely clear that you are so blinded by whatever ideology you possess that you cannot critically assess new information or meaningfully participate in any discussion.
it’s basic physics: animal products consume more energy (calories) than they produce in food because they exert energy on living - moving, eating, converting food to energy, etc.
Eating a plant directly (or with comparable processing to meat) means less wasted energy (as in calories burned compared to calories produced as food) simply because you’re going one step higher (lower?) in the food chain to obtain that energy.
I think just because dairy cows live longer. Beef cows are killed younger, you don’t need to wait until their milk production dwindles. It’s not clear if accounting for the milk carbon footprint was taken into account or not.
I am all for meat free (or lab grown) alternatives and they’re getting better but honestly in their current state if I had to eat tofu instead of beef I’d just eat neither. (Maybe I’ve just been unlucky and only tried really bad tofu?)
Tofu is really easy to prepare poorly, it’s important to season it heavily as bland tofu doesn’t really taste like anything. But this makes tofu extremely versatile, it can even be used in smoothies.
Exactly. There are so many who don’t like tofu. Like my mother in-law, who just took a bite of raw tofu and came to the conclusion it’s not for her. Yeah, no shit.
My wife and I then spent some time serving her various recipes, where tofu is one of the main ingredients. And now she likes it.
I like, what my wife says about tofu: it’s like a blank canvas. You have to paint it with spices and various cooking methods to make it beautiful.
Another comparison are Mozzarella cheese or noodles. Bland and boring on their own, but great in combination with sauces and spices.
… Now I wan’t to eat the “scrambled tofu”, my wife sometimes cooks. It’s fucking delicious.
Adding here - have people ever had plain, microwaved chicken? If that sounds disgusting to you, but that’s how you expect veggies (/tofu) to be prepared, you may be failing to grasp the concept of cooking vegetables with the same care and attention that one would prepare a piece of meat.
Literally every time I cook for someone who says “I’ve always hated X veggie” they come out of it going “wow, I’ve never had it cooked like that, that was really good, nothing like how (parent) used to make it”.
99x out of 100, all I did was roast it with some seasoning (+salt), exactly like I would treat a piece of meat, and they act like their whole childhood was a lie.
The other comments are right, but if you don't like tofu there are absolutely other options. Legumes in particular are really good for the same kind of role in many dishes, and in my opinion are generally far more enjoyable. Get some mushroom and/or seaweed flavours in there for the umami and butter beans for the texture and all the nutritional goodness and I'm a happy man
Yeah i find that frying tofu in a fatty oil like olive oil helps a lot with making tofu taste better. Once you get a good “meaty” tofu its way easier to move to other styles of tofu, at least anecdotally speaking.
Did I have some sort of a stroke or something? Am I hallucinating graphs that don’t exist? Is OPs chart only showing tofu as an alternative and I just imagined the dozen or so other foods on the list that can be mixed and matched to build a nutritious meal with a significantly lower carbon footprint than beef?
Someone please send help, because all of these beef shills have me convinced that there are only two foods and we must all choose just one in the great food war
The answer isn’t to change the ancestral diet of an entire species (everyone going vegan is simply not going to happen, even less likely than degrowth), it’s to degrow into numbers that are sustainable for the planet (i.e. eliminate the exploitative economic systems that drive this population growth).
Sadly, what’s almost certainly gonna happen is neither of our choices because we’re going to continue our population explosion AND eat meat until famine or something like that wipes our unsustainable societies.
So you’re saying it’s easier to get an entire population to dramatically reduce their rates of procreation than to give up some of the meat in their diets? Not sure I buy it
What I’m really saying, is that if a solution depends on everybody becoming a good person and doing the right things forever into the future, it’s a non-starter. How are you going to ensure nobody eats meat? Gonna have global enforcement? What’s the punishment? Humans are hard-wired to crave meat, that isn’t going away and telling people not to eat meat is akin to telling people not to have sex.
Instead, if the economic system and the culture changes then the motivation to do certain things changes. Maybe our culture changes so that getting married and having kids is no longer the expected route and you don’t become the weird aunt/uncle for doing so, happening already. Maybe flexitarianism becomes more popular and reduces damage and cruelty from animal agriculture without expecting radical shifts in ancestral diets?
I’m not sure how old you are, I’m nearly 50 and trans and I’ve seen massive cultural change and that’s really the key to changing the world. For example, I’m a trans woman, when I transitioned 20 years ago it was viewed as absolutely bonkers by everyone around me, and that was in California. I lost most of my family and friends and had no right to employment or housing. Now, it’s common and though there are outspoken right wingers, liberals are like “oh, you want to be girl, sure, also the state protects your right to employment and housing”.
I think GP is suggesting that, for a better picture, you also need to include stuff like the CO2 emissions from the vitamins you’ll need to eat to balance the nutritional deficit. Given how bad meat is for the environment, it wouldn’t surprise me that the total balance is still way worse for meat.
Somehow I feel the need to clarify I’m not shilling for beef, but extra vitamins is something that my vegetarian SO constantly has to be keep in mind.
Way to be a dick about someone pointing out a bad comparison. I bet your mom is proud of you.
If you prepare a meal with tofu (or any combination of foods) instead of beef you need to substitute nutrients by adding a lot more weight, which add CO2e to the equation. Comparing by CO2/kcal would give a more appropriate comparison. Tofu is still far more CO2 efficient taking that into account, I know because I made that comparison myself after not finding any sources for it. But if Tofu was 20kg CO2/kg it would be worse than beef, even though posts like this would suggest it wasnt.
Everyone knows Tofu is more environmentally friendly than beef and we should start using the appropriate data to show it instead of exaggerating and giving deniers the chance to dismiss it.
In this paper, we show that plant-based replacements for each of the major animal categories in the United States (beef, pork, dairy, poultry, and eggs) can produce twofold to 20-fold more nutritionally similar food per unit cropland. Replacing all animal-based items with plant-based replacement diets can add enough food to feed 350 million additional people, more than the expected benefits of eliminating all supply chain food loss.
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