EM Connectomics (and nanoscale connectomics in general) has really started to hit an exciting time with the release of two full-brain wiring diagrams. The future looks really promising for circuit-level understanding of the brain!
Unfortunately this pithy comment is inconsistent with the science. https://ourworldindata.org/food-choice-vs-eating-local
Most of the emissions from beef comes from negative land-use change, that is the loss of carbon-sequestering life that existed in the land for both the cows and the tons of agricultural food they eat, and methane, which is released directly to our atmosphere and is a much more potent greenhouse gas than CO2. Fortunately, if we were to phase out cattle, this methane has a half-life much shorter than CO2 and would provide important early gains in restabilizing our climate.
Cos can be grass fed. Most of the beef I have ever eaten is predominantly grass fed.
In many places cows are a natural part of the ecosystem. So much so that in rewilding parts of Scotland they have ended up releasing cattle into the wild.
Its perfectly possible for grass plus grazing animals to be carbon sink, and a provide a rich ecosystem.
Sure large herbivores were and still are part of many ecosystems.
But around where I live the majority of the grass for the grass-fed cows doesn't come from anything remotely resembling a rich ecosystem. The grass is literally 'grass': maybe one or 2 types of grass, similar amount of herbs, funghi. Hardly any insects except for flies attracted to manure. These used to be ecosystems with > 20 species of grassses and herbs per square meter.
And these are even relatively small farms; trying to upscale it beyond that to make it possible for millions of humans to eat meat multiple times a week, it won't get any better. If you're putting large amounts of cows in a much much smaller habitat then what they'd naturally use, then it's not the same ecosystem anymore.
Its perfectly possible for grass plus grazing animals to be carbon sink, and a provide a rich ecosystem.
tldr; yes, but only if you want to feed a couple of people from it.
More, per the below lifecycle assesment study: "There was little variability between production scenarios except for the grassfed, where the greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions were 37% higher due to a longer finishing time and lower finishing weight"
That link shows that twice as many emissions are attributed to farm stage vs land use change. And fta: "Farm-stage emissions include processes such as the application of fertilizers and the production of methane in the stomachs of cattle."
So not sure there is much for me to respond to you given that.
They always start with a false equivalency anyway, comparing stuff like cane sugar with cow meat, that's just extra dumb.
I don't have proper calculation, but when you add up all the processing and extra requirement to grow high protein crops, you are actually not very far from meat cost.
Which makes sense because if meat was so inefficient, then vegetal protein replacement should be much cheaper, but they are not.
Greenhouse gas emissions shouldn't be the only factor people consider for sustainability of their food. In the case of fish, this very article talks about the issues with farmed fish. Even a plant-based diet can be filled with unsustainable sources, such as plantations that destroy endangered habitats for palm oil, or industrial farming operations that spray lots of pesticides to harm the insect population and allow lots of fertilizer runoff into natural waterways. We're still polluting and depleting resources for many many vegetarian foods in the world.
I'd argue that if we're looking for a full top-to-bottom sustainable food system, animals will play a role. But we need to be cognizant of the whole system, not playing whack-a-mole with issues.
According to your source, there are 15 sources of protein that emit less greenhouse gases (GHGs) per 100g of protein than farmed fish, including poultry and eggs, and 16 sources that emit more (including items that are not known for their protein content like coffee, apples, and dark chocolate). Being highly charitable, farmed fish is squarely in the middle.
Additionally, farmed fish emits twice the GHGs of tofu, and almost 22 times that of nuts. So just comparing placements on the list paints a misleading picture.
As for "not willing to go full vegetarian": you may as well say "not willing to stop eating fish", because they are equally unserious limitations when discussing these topics. "Not being willing" is only a slightly more mature version of a child saying "I don't want to".
I don't think it's "unserious" to recognize that >85% of the world's population eats meat.
If you're quibbling about wording, all I meant was: farmed fish and chicken are among the most sustainable meat sources.
I'm not making a statement that people should eat meat, but many people do eat meat, so it's worth comparing which meat sources are better than others. I think it would be great if more people knew that beef produces 10x the greenhouse gases than chicken/fish do.
It's not "quibbling" to correct your mischaracterization of the truth.
If you'll forgive me borrowing your logic: "I'm not saying that people should eat beef, but many people do eat beef, so it's worth comparing which beef sources are better than others."
Plant-based diets are a very good answer to the problems caused by animal agriculture. If someone takes issue with that answer, I'd need a better reason than their personal pleasure to take them seriously in the conversation.
I agree it’s worth comparing beef sources! That was my point about within-category differences and harm reduction. Saying "tofu is cleaner" doesn’t make beef comparisons pointless - just like the existence of bicycles doesn’t make car fuel economy comparisons pointless. We should compare across categories and within them, so people who aren’t switching today still choose the lower-impact option.
I hesitate to use the word "quibbling" now, but it seems like a poor use of time to compare beef when even the most environmentally-friendly beef is multiple times worse than alternatives.
I think this harm-reduction approach might make more sense from a governmental policy perspective, but is otherwise silly for us to take as individuals because we have such comparatively little influence over each other's choices. I wouldn't waste that small influence encouraging someone to make a slightly less bad choice.
The comparison of food to transportation is a bad one. Nutrients are nutrients, and everything else is personal pleasure. In other words, you can easily hit your same macros by replacing animal products with plant products without even having to change grocery stores. You cannot easily transport a mattress on a bicycle instead of a car.
You started this by objecting to my wording ("among the most") when I said fish/chicken are the most sustainable meat options. They are, by a wide margin. Beef’s footprint is roughly 10× higher, so swapping a beef meal for chicken or fish cuts ~90% of those emissions. That’s not a "slightly less bad choice".
Calling harm reduction "silly" because tofu exists just shifts the target. We can hold two thoughts at once: (1) plant-heavy diets are best, and (2) for the vast majority who aren’t going vegan tomorrow, steering from beef to chicken/fish dramatically reduces damage right now. Dismissing that because it’s not maximal purity guarantees we leave real cuts on the table.
Farmed seafood is among the worst garbage you can eat. Tons of antibiotics, growth hormones, fish are fed utter cheap junk so ie salmon meat has more like pork composition than a wild salmon, shrimp are even worse. If you ever saw a shrimp 'factory' and grow pond/cage and its surroundings in a typical 3rd world country where most come from, you wouldn't eat it for a long time if ever again. Literally nothing lives around those places.
That take’s outdated. In the US/EU, routine antibiotics in fish farming are banned [1]. Growth hormones aren’t used in edible fish. Farmed salmon’s feed changed (more plant oils), but it still delivers high omega-3s and usually less mercury than wild [2].
OK thats a good development. But overall difference in quality of meat is even visible - farmed salmon looks like a completely different fish than wild one (if you even can get one) - akin to difference between say boar and domesticated pig (lean muscle vs tons of fatty wobbly tissue). It doesn't scream 'healthy' but that may be just emotions playing old tune.
Also what I wrote about shrimp from any 3rd world country is valid - I've seen such place this summer in Indonesia, and from what I've heard whole south east Asia is exactly like that, or worse. Getting shrimp from some western democracy with strong consumer protection rights ain't possible in many parts of Europe, not sure about other places
This stands against the evidence. Beef is causally linked with the largest killers of Americans, including heart diabetes, diabetes, and obesity in general. "a mostly plant-based diet could prevent approximately 11 million deaths per year globally, and could sustainably produce enough food for the planet’s growing population without further damage to the environment."
A "Mediterranean diet" is more healthy than the average American diet because it is more plant-based.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01406...https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/with-a-little-planning-v...
Not all processed foods are created equal. Almost all of the elevated health risk from processed foods comes from processed meats and sugary drinks.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/06/well/eat/ultraprocessed-f...
Whole grain breads are ultra-processed, and I don't think many are arguing against those.
Beef has absolutely devastating effects on human health including elevated cancer risk, diabetes risk, dramatically higher incidences of heart disease (the greatest killer of Americans). Plant-based substitutes are scientifically shown to lead to better outcomes. Better yet, soy based whole foods are excellent for human health, contrary to the bro-science talking points. Turns out, beans are good for you!
https://hsph.harvard.edu/news/the-bottom-line-on-ultra-proce...https://www.uclahealth.org/news/article/health-benefits-soy
Tangential to the point, I think we should be careful about the almond talking point. Insofar as it is used for milk, almond milk uses almost half as much water as dairy milk, uses 1/18 the land and emits 1/5 the amount of carbon. As food, it is eaten in such a vanishingly small quantity compared to other water-hungry foods (meat) as to be insignificant. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/environmental-footprint-m...
I thought the problem is that that growing almonds is usually done in arid regions, so the issue is not that it uses lots of water, but that it uses lots of water in areas that frequently experience droughts. This is an honest question (I truly don't know, although I suspect I can guess): are dairy farms also common in those areas?
Just for a single point of comparison, California's alfalfa consumes 15% of the state's water. All that alfalfa is going to feed cattle. California only produces 9% of the USA's alfalfa so it's easy to say that this is a tremendous amount of water.
Almonds also consume 15% of California's water. But California produces 80% of the world's almonds. We're talking about an order of magnitude difference in water consumption, almonds are far more efficient and beef is both far more wasteful and far more common.
The comparison you are bringing up actually just gets to the heart of the issue.
California agricultural water is so fucking cheap, you can buy foreign land, start a farm, grow a bunch of grass, and ship it over to your country.
And that's cheaper than just growing grass locally.
That's insane
Most problems California has are the same: Systems that were initially designed and built a hundred or more years ago to support a state of like a hundred people, and an utter refusal to update those agreements because it would slightly inconvenience some really wealthy farms.
Growing Almonds and Alfalfa in California would be fine if they paid market rates for the water, and would therefore be more conscientious about using it and not wasting it, and that would dramatically improve the water situation of California and upstream places.
But it's way cheaper to pay for people to run absurd narratives on Fox News to make it a culture war issue so that you never have to care.
The situation is so fucked up. It's a war of the rich against the richer. Wealthy farm corporations all have lobbying groups, and instead of lobbying for a more free market distribution of water, where they could have all they want as long as they pay for it, they run political campaigns to ensure California never reforms it's water rights system and continues to die of thirst while giving away 90% of it's water for rates decided 100 years ago. All the political agitation about water in California is over an absolute minuscule fraction of the water distribution, because actually fixing the problem would mean these farms paying market rates for water, which they do not currently do.
World beef production is approx. 60x almond production by mass, and that doesn't include dairy. That isn't the whole story, because cattle use more water than just what is used to grow alfalfa, but you are comparing apples to oranges here.
I was drawing a point of comparison in response to the question about almonds disproportionately using scarce water resources in arid areas, which is a different question from overall water usage. My point was that almond water usage is literally only an issue in California, and that their water usage is not that extreme given the size of the market California serves.
It’s been some years but I recall that at one point probably around 2016-2017, California produced 80% of the world’s almonds. This was notable because at the same time, California was experiencing historic droughts.
Yes- about half of the total water siphoned from the Colorado river goes to cows. This number astounded me when I first read it, and I hope it has a similar effect on you. I don't like almond milk, for what it's worth, and I don't think we should ignore plant-based foods with a high climate impact, but animal agriculture is the most environmentally devastating institution we have individual power to transition from. https://www.npr.org/2024/09/09/nx-s1-5002090/colorado-river-...
GP's point works just as well if you substitute almonds with diary milk or hamburger meat though. The specific water use of almonds is indeed completely tangential
I've read here for a long time but just made my account because I have been feeling very compelled by the data surrounding the huge economic effects of the animal agriculture industry and how otherwise pro-science and pro-data people find themselves with deeply entrenched unscientific viewpoints. Should I link my Google scholar to prevent people from seeing conspiracies everywhere??
I think the almond talking point takes hold because, like a lot of complaining about LLM usage, large parts of the blame gets directed elsewhere rather than the choices that we're all way more likely to be making and could influence. Like, it's 2025. Even the people most likely to be drinking almond milk have largely moved to oat, whose water usage is great.
But it's okay. This has been solved very recently as in last week. We are going to now be getting our beef from Argentina. Not only has the prices of beef issue been fixed, it'll also fix the country's water shortage issue as a bonus. /s
Almond milk is not dairy milk, but it is absolutely "milk", in the sense of a white liquid derived from plants - a definition that has existed in English for hundreds of years.
The name "almond milk" has been used since at least the 1500s.
I don’t drink ‘almond beverage’ but given the amount of uses it has substituting milk (and the amount of people that accept them) it seems like a very relevant comparison. Maybe I’m not sofisticated enough but I’m yet to see a candy corn mlik latte be ordered.
> “Almond milk” is not milk. You know what else is less carbon-intensive than milk? Candy corn. But that is also _not milk_, and so equally irrelevant!
While almond milk is an incomplete substitute for bovine mammary secretions, it is so much closer than candy corn that it has been used as a substitute for the last 800 or so years, and shared the "milk"-ness in the name before we had an English language:
The word “milk” has been used since around 1200 AD to refer to plant juices.
For example, I grew up in the UK, where a standard Christmas seasonal food is the "mince pie", which is filled with "mincemeat". While this can be (and traditionally was) done with meat derivatives, in practice those sold in my lifetime have been almost entirely vegetarian. The etymology being when "meat" was the broad concept of food in general: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mincemeat
Further examples of this: today we speak of the "flesh" and "skin" of an apple.
Personally, I don't like almond milk. But denying that something which got "milk" in its name due to it's use as a milk-like-thing, before our language evolved from cross-breeding medieval German with medieval French, to argue against someone who said "Insofar as it is used for milk", is a very small nit to be picking.
