Addressing the Critics

UPDATE: This post is acting weird. Its deciding to be in different fonts throughout for some unknown reason. I wasn't able to fix this. 

As many of us have witnessed in the current political climate, the ability to interpret facts, and statistics correctly is crucial to having accurate opinions. Furthermore, the ability to sniff out those who deliberately misinterpret or overgeneralize information is essential to aligning one's opinions and beliefs most closely with the truth.

Before I decided to go vegan, I spent about a month on the fence between omnivore-ism and Veganism. For every proposed benefit to Veganism, whether it be the environmental, health, or ethical, there is always a backlash- people argue that the benefits don't exist. So, it took me a while to decide which side I agreed with. In the end, I went vegan, but it wasn't before a long time of looking at and evaluating research. Today, I'm going to offer a response to common arguments against Veganism, and in the process, show how deceptive some anti-vegan and anti-vegetarian proponents can be. (This isn't to say that vegans can't be deceptive ;) ) To do this, I will dissect an article I found online from www.sciencealert.com

Without further ado, let's summarize the article.

Article Summary
The article, "Vegetarian and 'healthy' diets may actually be worse for the environment, study finds." They begin by citing recent research from Carnegie Mellon that suggests that adopting the USDA's current recommendation- that people eat more "fruits, vegetables, dairy, and seafood"- "may be worse for the environment than what Americans currently eat."  

They go on to quote a researcher Paul Fischbeck who says, "Lots of common vegetables require more resources per calorie than you would think. Eggplant, celery and cucumbers look particularly bad when compared to pork or chicken."

They finish their argument by claiming that if you switch to a vegetable-based (not plant-based, mind you) diet off of a meat-based diet, you will have to consume a higher mass of vegetables than you would of meat, considering that vegetables have a much lower caloric density. They thus make the conclusion that you will end up using more resources on a vegetable-based diet. 

My Thoughts On The Article
I apologize if my rebuttals to this article are a little too harsh. I don't mean to be excessively abrasive. I am very passionate about this topic, so I will try to keep myself under control and remain objective. 

To begin, they contradict themselves at the start of the article! They claim in the title that vegetarian diets are worse than the typical American diet for the environment. However, they cite research that suggests that a diet including FISH is worse for the environment. Those who eat fish are NOT vegetarian. They are pescatarian. 

Secondly, their claim that common vegetables require resources per calorie than meat may be true, but this doesn't mean that a plant-based diet is worse for the environment, and here's why: 
A better measure of a food's environmental impact is its resources per gram, not per calorie. This is because people don't feel full based on the amount of calories they've eaten; rather, they feel full based on the mass of food they've eaten. Therefore, if people switch to a plant-based diet and thus demand more, for example, cucumbers and less chicken, the mass of chicken they consume will be replaced by the same mass of cucumbers, not the same amount of calories of each. Thus, they cannot make the conclusion that plant-based diets are worse for the environment based on its "resources needed per calorie." 
                                      

Moreover, they keep making the assumption that a Vegetarian diet is equivalent to a vegetable-based diet. They use this equation in combination with their "Vegetables are worse for the environment than meat" argument to stamp vegetarian diets as harmful. To be clear, a vegetable-based diet is a diet that consists mainly of vegetables. It doesn't take a nutritionist to know that if you only eat vegetables, you won't get enough protein, fat, or even carbohydrates. You must also incorporate legumes (beans), nuts, seeds, etc to be healthy. A vegetarian diet can include all of these things- not just vegetables! They don't provide any evidence in the article that legumes, seeds, or nuts are bad for the environment. So, even if the production of vegetables WAS bad for their environment, their decision to equate vegetarian to vegetable-based diets in this article doesn't prove that vegetarian diets are bad for the environment. 

To conclude, I'd like to disclaim that I don't think ALL vegan diets are good for the environment. There are certain vegan foods, such as almonds, that can drain resources almost as quickly as animal products can. However, I think that there is evidence suggesting that a proper vegan diet is optimal for minimizing environmental impact. 

Let me know what you think in the comments down below. 

Image courtesy of VeganStreet.com