Link: ScienceDaily: Diet With A Little Meat Uses Less Land Than Many Vegetarian Diets.
Wow. This is fascinating stuff on a number of different levels--not the least of which is journalistic manipulation. In other words: don't let the sensationalistic headline distract you from the fact, right in the second paragraph of the article, that even though the low-meat diet edged out the vegetarian diet on efficient resource use, both the vegetarian and low meat diets offered huge resource savings over the typical American high-meat high-dairy diet.
By the way, the secret of the seemingly paradoxical finding about low-meat diets being ecologically a hair more efficient than all-vegetarian diets is that grazing animals like cattle and goats can eat off of land too low in quality to grow plant food for human consumption. It's all there in the article.
But also note the cute little zinger statistic right at the end:
"According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the average American ate approximately 5.8 ounces of meat and eggs a day in 2005. 'In order to reach the efficiency in land use of moderate-fat, vegetarian diets, our study suggests that New Yorkers would need to limit their annual meat and egg intake to about 2 cooked ounces a day,' Peters said."
Wow. I'm eating eight to ten ounces of protein a day, most of which is usually meat. And here I thought I was being so ahead of that curve. And while I have no stats to back it up, I have trouble believing that low average is exclusively due to ethical by-choice vegetarianism. I suspect there's a lot of people too poor to afford a lot of meat behind that little stat. Hmmmm ...
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