Honest question, why is cheese so high but milk isn’t?
YSK that apart from not having a car, the single greatest thing you can do for the climate is simply eating less red meat
Submitted 3 weeks ago by Wulri@lemmy.world to youshouldknow@lemmy.world
https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/3041d99b-25ff-4dac-8c2f-21bda6a1210d.png
Comments
shplane@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Torben@feddit.nl 3 weeks ago
Because it’s per kg of product. It takes about 10 kg of milk to make 1 kg of cheese. Plus a bunch of extra production steps.
Strawberry@lemmy.blahaj.zone 3 weeks ago
That’s also why coffee looks so high. But a kg of coffee makes around 75 cups of coffee while a kg of beef is 2000-3000 kcals
skisnow@lemmy.ca 3 weeks ago
Then kg is a poor choice of metric. They should’ve gone with dietary calories.
usernamesAreTricky@lemmy.ml 3 weeks ago
Cheesemaking uses even more dairy than it being in liquid form. Varies depending on what you’re looking at but it can be around a 10:1 ratio. Butter from dairy milk has an even worse conversion
Have to make up for the lost water when turning it into a solid and other stuff you strip from the milk and that’s going to be from even more dairy going into it
Goldmage263@sh.itjust.works 3 weeks ago
I predict goat and sheep cheese is better than cow cheese in emissions, but is it about the same 10:1 ratio for output?
Kolanaki@pawb.social 3 weeks ago
What if I eat ostrich and emu?
huppakee@feddit.nl 3 weeks ago
Likely depends a lot on what you feed them, but since chicken and turkey are better for the environment than beef, i’d put my money on ostrich and emu being the better choice.
potate@lemmy.ca 3 weeks ago
Perfect is the enemy of good only if you WAIT for perfect. I eat minimal meat, get my veggies from a local farm share, have solar panels, an EV that charges only off excess solar production, a heatpump, have re-insulated the attic, ditched the gas range for induction that runs off solar, etc. My footprint is less than anyone around me, but probably still way higher than your average individual living in the global south.
I’m trying to hit net zero and once I hit it, I’ll keep going because Canada (where I live) is rich and I want to continue to reduce my footprint (the dream is net negative in my life) because I’m privileged and have the resources to push harder. I make it a game - figure out what’s my best opportunity to reduce my footprint, do it, move on to looking for the next thing I can do.
Giving up (most) red meat and patting yourself on the back is severely minimizing what you COULD be doing. I’m a long, long way from perfect, and am exceedingly lucky to have the resources to play this game - but carbon reduction is a way of life, not a checkbox IMO.
JubilantJaguar@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
First, well done for taking it seriously and doing your bit.
The point of the post (I think) is simply to illustrate that certain actions are much, much more important than others. Anecdotally, there are still plenty of people out there who believe that, say, turning off a couple of (low-energy) lights, or “recycling” a plastic bag, are somehow major good deeds that allow them to kick their feet up and celebrate with a steak. There’s still way too much ignorance about all this, IMO.
In reality (as you seem to understand), some gestures are far more important than others. Ditching red meat (and dairy) really is a big deal. Everyone who claims to care about this problem should at least consider doing it.
then_three_more@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Isn’t not having kids more impactful than anything as that’s entire person’s life of co2 you’re not creating.
Brkdncr@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Idk, I feel like if you could do something to prevent a mass polluter from polluting further that would do a lot more than giving up meat for yourself.
Catoblepas@piefed.blahaj.zone 3 weeks ago
Doing neither while hinting that other people should do the work sure is revealing of the problem, though.
Swedneck@discuss.tchncs.de 3 weeks ago
People on lemmy will really be like ‘you believe in individual action? that pales in effectiveness to my strategy, firebombing an oil rig’ and then not firebomb an oil rig.
Sniatch@feddit.org 3 weeks ago
Eating meat also means lots of animals have to suffer just for yout pleasure. I know people get triggert real fast if you mention how bad eating meat really is. It’s like a drug for some people.
Echofox@lemmy.ca 3 weeks ago
And not having any children!
Angry_Autist@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Fun fact, antinatalists are literally insane!
brown_guy45@lemmy.zip 3 weeks ago
Nothing can stop me from eating pork, chicken and ark chocolate
slaneesh_is_right@lemmy.org 3 weeks ago
We can always hope for a heart attack
brown_guy45@lemmy.zip 3 weeks ago
I won’t be surprised if i get a heart attack in future
ZeffSyde@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Lucky for you, the upcoming Slim Jim Darque line of meat style snack product is coming soon. You can destroy three different ecosystems with a single snack!
Antti@sopuli.xyz 3 weeks ago
Am I blind or isn’t chicken on that list?
ZeffSyde@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
For non English speakers, poultry is often used to refer to any edible bird: including chicken, duck, goose, turkey.
It may not be correct, but it be what it be.
Knock_Knock_Lemmy_In@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
It’s poultry.
salasin@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Its under the name poultry
remon@ani.social 3 weeks ago
“Poultry”.
Appoxo@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 weeks ago
Damn I am good.
I do like some meat products but I naturally lean towards a vegeterian diet simply because noddles are love and I dislike preparing meats.Worstdriver@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
I wish I could afford red meat…
FlashMobOfOne@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
I don’t buy it.
In 2008 when the travel industry crashed in the wake of the market crash, and again in 2020, we saw significant decreases in pollution.
Meat isn’t the problem. Fossil fuels are.
CXORA@aussie.zone 3 weeks ago
More than one thing can contribute.
BussyCat@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Are you comparing that to a time that everyone stopped eating beef or how are you using that information to make the claim that meat isn’t the problem?
FlashMobOfOne@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
I’m pointing to observable cause-and-effect.
commie@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 weeks ago
Are you comparing that to a time that everyone stopped eating beef
like the mid-90’s mad cow scare?
EndlessNightmare@reddthat.com 3 weeks ago
There is not one thing that is the problem. It’s a bunch of big problems adding up into a colossal one.
dan1101@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
I agree with the sentiment, but a small percentage of individuals doing this will make no measurable difference. If billionaires and corporations made similar changes that would make a difference.
Miphera@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
It really wouldn’t. If a corporation reduced their production of for example red meat, another one would simply scale up their production, because the demand of the market would remain unchanged.
Also, there’s already more than just a “small percentage” of people who have dropped red meat from their diet. All vegetarians, vegans, pescetarians, and people who eat meat but stopped eating red meat due to the environmental impact add up to several percentage points, which is absolutely measureable and impactful.
VictoriaAScharleau@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
If a corporation reduced their production of for example red meat, another one would simply scale up their production
how can you prove this claim?
KairuByte@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 weeks ago
If you don’t have a car and rarely eat red meat
To be fair, only one of these is a choice in many parts of the world.
Octagon9561@lemmy.ml 3 weeks ago
How is dark chocolate so high? :o
PlantDadManGuy@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Slash and burn Cocoa farming
Notyou@sopuli.xyz 3 weeks ago
Ikr. That’s my favorite type of chocolate.
sin_free_for_00_days@sopuli.xyz 3 weeks ago
I heard a similar news report on PBS a couple weeks ago. Aside from the obvious, and already mentioned, don’t have kids. Both for the environment, and to not put your kids through the coming bullshit.
Senal@programming.dev 3 weeks ago
I would assume a competently executed strategy of eliminating the worst offenders (and/or the managing infrastructure thereof) would probably have more impact, they probably meant legal things though.
For instance, a solo campaign of taking out the biggest data centers would probably work. Difficult though.
jwmgregory@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 weeks ago
you could firebomb every data center on earth today and global energy usage would go down like, 10-12% at most.
a lot, yes, but literal peanuts compared to other industries like shipping and agriculture.
frankly am sick of seeing people dressing their ignorance up as environmentalism. if you actually care about the environment then stop chastising things like people eating meat or data centers that create much more value per kwH than anything in the other top energy hungry industries, and start directing your anger at the people who are really responsible for the status quo. jane down the street streaming netflix and eating a weekend steak has fuckall to do with climate change when companies like duponte or cargill or nestle are continually allowed to rape our planet on the daily. it’s not even close and acting like they’re remotely comparable is corpo propaganda to shame people who are victims.
Senal@programming.dev 3 weeks ago
If you’ll notice I mention the biggest offenders and/or the the underlying management infrastructure.
Private jet owners getting systematically luigi’d would also fall under that remit, I was just using data centres as an example.
Oil rigs, Nestlé, blackrock etc would also all work , with varying degrees of efficacy and difficulty.
To address your argument directly, before you get all preachy think of the actual consequences of major data centres going down, all the critical infrastructure running on said data centres would also go down.
That’s air traffic control, shipping and logistics ,and yes, agriculture; any system relying on cloud services running those data centres
If you pick the right ones and do it properly (a competently executed strategy, if you will) then you could cripple most industries, with all the consequences that brings.
usernamesAreTricky@lemmy.ml 3 weeks ago
For agriculture at least, the differences are often quite categorical. The best cast production will not get you the same differences as reducing meat consumption
Plant-based foods have a significantly smaller footprint on the environment than animal-based foods. Even the least sustainable vegetables and cereals cause less environmental harm than the lowest impact meat and dairy products [9].
www.mdpi.com/2072-6643/14/8/1614/html
It’s an even larger difference than eliminating all food waste (which we should also work to reduce)
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.
Senal@programming.dev 3 weeks ago
I think you meant to reply to the other person.
droopy4096@lemmy.ca 3 weeks ago
this only holds for industrial red meat. I love it when everything gets lumped together and presented as “evidence”. Non-industrial, small scale farming actually can have reverse effect. But we don’t talk about avoiding industrial products, because… why? 100mile diet that includes sustainably raised meat (white, red blue - whatever) from local farm will have minimal impact on environment. Shall we talk about avocados in Canada or Almonds? Study lack nuance and produces flashy headings with no substance.
JubilantJaguar@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Apart from the methane problem, all livestock farming takes, by definition, a massive amount more land than arable farming to produce the same amount of food. On a stressed planet of 9 billion people, there simply is not enough land to feed everyone with red meat.
droopy4096@lemmy.ca 3 weeks ago
Incorrect. In certain areas (like mine) only grass grows very well and is very prolific chocking off any other species. Grazers make a lot more sense and a lot less impact. Including soil build-up for future crop raising.
minorkeys@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
I’m not voluntarily giving up jack shit unless the wealthy who devised and profit off the systems that make carbon footprints matter, are brought to heel. If the wealthy can’t be stopped, we’re all dead anyways. It’s their fucking mess, they can be the ones to sacrifice to fix it.
JubilantJaguar@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
This is a nice articulation of nihilism.
The paradox being that the attitude is both justified and… certain to only make the problem worse.
minorkeys@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
We could all stop them. What’s the hold up?
Sterile_Technique@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
…fuck, my coffee habit by itself is probably responsible for a solid 0.01 *C global temperature increase.
Sorry all… I didn’t know.
Swedneck@discuss.tchncs.de 3 weeks ago
you get a lot of cups from one kg of coffee
obinice@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Really? A greater effect than not having children, or tireless activism against one billionaire until they realise the error of their ways and turn to the light side?
LovableSidekick@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Back in the 1990s I did a thought experiment using 1990s industrial cost figures and production volumes, that were readily available online. Turned out Americans could save the Brazilian rainforest by cutting our beef consumption by 10%. I don’t have the math on hand but the gist was that if demand for beef dropped 10% so would demand for cattle feed, which was mostly corn. Reducing corn production by that much and devoting the land to hemp cultivation (which would work) would produce enough hemp fiber to replace all the wood pulp being imported from Brazil to make paper. At tha time most trees being logged in the Amazon region were being pulped and exported to the US to make paper. So boom, demand for Amazon pulp logs drops to zero, rainforest saved!
Admittedly this was simplistic and did not account for pulp producers selling to other countries that may have been competing with the US to buy the pulp. But they would have to compete with whatever other pulp sources those customers already had. Anyway, just the fact that the numbers worked out so well gave me a little understanding of how a tend in one area can affect seemingly unrelated areas.
FlexibleToast@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Not true. The single greatest thing you can do to have a lower carbon footprint is to not have any children.
commie@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 weeks ago
your tulane link is not exactly good science. it relies on Clark (2019) which itself relies on Poore-Nemecek (2018). Poore & Nemecek built their data by combining LCA studies, a practice which is specifically discouraged by the studies themselves and the guidance on LCA studies generally. we can’t really rely on those conclusions at all.
they also rely on Behrens (2017), which shares a problem with poore-nemecek, though a more nuanced one: they myopically distill data from input-output to calculate environmental impacts like water and land use and ghge. this seems reasonable at first blush, but in fact it overlooks the complexity of our agricultural systems. for instance, one of the things farmers feed cattle is cottonseed. cotton is grown for textiles, and the seed is largely waste product. feeding it to cattle is a conservation of resources, and doing so should in no way count against the land, water, and ghge statistics for cattle.
but that’s not really here or there, as it turns out, because the thrust of the paper is not “these foods are bad for the environment” or “these foods are good for the environment”. the actual claim made in the paper is “there is not actually sufficient data sources available to determine which foods have which impacts”.
peaches@sh.itjust.works 3 weeks ago
The statistics probably come from the farms where they keep the animals in one place and they bring their food there. Cattle can be successfully used in land regeneration with the rotational grazing systems. I do agree many eat too much meat, but not anyone does well on a vegan diet. I don’t. I rather eat it moderately and buying quality meat from happy animals.
Meat is a highly dense food source and has lots of essentials elements to human health. And in case of the cows, if they are fed as they should with grass, they transform a not digestible food for humans into a highly digestible one.
People that raise them for their own consumption will not overeat meat probably, because they know how much it takes to raise them well and they have a different kind of respect for the animal than someone buying pieces of meat in a supermarket.
I am very skeptical about statistics like these, because they are not nuanced, as the reality is. It’s like when they said eggs raise cholesterol. What they did not say is that they tested it by giving rabbits(a herbivore) egg yolks. And people then start spreading the misinformation.
MITM0@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Suuuuure buddy red-meat is the problem here. www.youtube.com/watch?v=iMErlqYmgsE
WrenFeathers@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Affidavit@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
That is a lazy response. OP is talking about actions individuals can take and you provided a single word response with a link to overall climate change sources, most of which individuals have no control over (beyond voting).
WrenFeathers@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
I provided a link that directly disproves what OP is saying. How is it not helpful?
Agriculture is provenly about 10%. That still a lot, sure… but it’s not close to what these people would have you believe.
You’re totally fine to keep eating meat if that is what you enjoy in your diet. Don’t let them stonewall you into changing what you enjoy just to meet their standards.
If you want to seriously fight greenhouse gases, go after big industry. Agriculture barely scratches what they’re doing.
pleaaaaaze@lemmings.world 3 weeks ago
Voting is guilt. If you vote for fake ass liberals and their posturing ecology you’re no better than a rich guy with a yacht