"Veganism is eco-friendly" gets spanked

Brilliant brilliant post by Monica over at FA/RM on carnivory -vs- veganism and the impact on the environment.

"First, the assertion that humans evolved as vegetarians, or that their most recent common ancestor was vegetarian, has been blown out of the water. [snip] should people have the right to eat the diet they are designed evolutionarily to eat, the diet that is in their own best interest? Or should they eat a vegan diet to "save the planet"? [snip] If you believe a vegan diet is optimal, that's fine for you, but there are serious issues with the scientific basis of such an argument from an evolutionary and nutritional standpoint. And certainly such a diet shouldn't be foisted on humans everywhere for political reasons"

(Emphasis mine) Hear, hear! Its bad enough that our own government actually presents an absurdity like the food pyramid as fact (and foolish people eat it up, literally, and grow fatter and more unhealthy each day) without them wanting to legislate how we eat.

"How does the caloric intake differ between vegans and carnivores or even vegans and meat-heavy omnivores? If Good Calories, Bad Calories is any indication, those with carb-heavy (read: plant-heavy) diets are driven to ingest more calories. I've certainly found this to be true in my own experience. A meat-heavy diet, at least as far as my own personal experience, results in spontaneously reduced caloric intake of as much as 800 calories daily. That's something that is never accounted for in the "carbon footprint" calculations. And honestly, what quantity of greenhouse gases are produced by grain- and legume-fed vegetarians? Beans, beans, the musical fruit, the more you eat the more you toot. Seriously, eating high-carb plant foods causes the production of more intestinal gas. I'm not sure what the chemical composition of that gas is, but the presence of the gas is something everyone who has switched from a high carb to a low carb diet, or spends a lot of time around bean-eating vegetarians, can amply attest to."
 
And what about the millions of beloved pet dogs and cats - once top predators - who now eat diets composed primarily of grains? Are they not all contributing to methane production now?
 
"Another problem is the simplistic assumption about modern-day vs. ancient production of CO2 and methane from cattle. Actually, I'm not even sure the vegan "climate change" activists or their followers want to consider this. There are currently about 100 million head of cattle in the United States. Most of our cattle are grain-fed for at least part of their lives and grain-fed cattle produce about twice as much methane as grass-fed cows. However, they are not grain-fed their entire lives. My best estimate is that at any given point, around 25 million head are being fed this way. Estimates of the number of bison present in pre-settlement times is also as high as 100 million head, with bison being about twice as big as cows. [snip] I'm not sure how many head of bison were turned over yearly to predation or hunting. Today, approximately 1/4 of the national herd of cattle makes its way into the food chain yearly. But assuming that grass-fed bison produce similar amounts of methane to grass-fed cows, and that there could have been twice as much bison biomass as current cattle biomass, that means there were probably very similar amounts of methane being produced all along and that this hasn't changed much historically. This pretty much blows away the argument that we should consider cattle per se a significant problem when it comes to global warming."
 
And that's just the United States and just considering buffalo, not any other large herbivores that used to be abundant.
 
But her best points were about Soybeans and how much mechanation is required to process them into food products. I guess all those huge machines are eco-friendly?  NOT.
 
The best point is this: "Soy is often shipped up from South America, grown on land where rainforests once grew." I wonder how many veg-heads who constantly sneer at us meat-eaters know this? Acres and acres of primal forest are being cut down every day to grow the soybeans (which contain phytoestrogens, antinutrients, and toxins) that make up their fake so-I-can-feel-like-I'm-eating-a-REAL-burger faux Frankencrap.



Thanks to Richard Nikoley over at his Free The Animal blog for the link!