You mean “Livestock’s Long Shadow” produced by the UN’s FAO?

Yes, but carrying capacity has NOTHING to do with earth-friendliness. Carrying capacity of land includes cropland and grazing land in this study. The vegan portion makes use ONLY of cropland, while all the other scenarios use both. Under this scenario, in the vegan scenario, all grazing land would go unused and…

What about water usage? The water used to care for livestock is astronomically higher than that of water used for growing crops folks can eat. Then there is the case of methane emissions from livestock, which is awful for the ozone.

I appreciate the thought but this is so much bullshit. Remember the ‘Save the Rainforests’ campaigns of the 70s and 80s? Those South American rain forests were being clear cut to create grazing land for cattle destined for North American consumption. Sure, the wood from the trees was used for lumber and pulp, but the…

The paper purposely handicaps the vegan simulation to only use 70% of arable land so as to be on equal footing with the other diets. The other graph clearly shows that as more arable land is used to feed people instead of animals, all three vegetarian options tie for first place.

“perennial cropland is best for growing and regrowing the sorts of plants that feed livestock, such as hay. All the acres of dirt best suited to growing grass and hay wouldn’t make great cultivated cropland”

My favorite is when, after pestering you to talk about why you’re vegan, non-vegans recoil in horror at your “audacity to shove your beliefs down people’s throats.”

The logic here is “animal products could hypothetically be sourced (for a small percentage of the world population) without destroying the planet, so you’re a sanctimonious asshole if you don’t consume factory farmed animal products every day.”

This study is a bit questionable. Not in results, those are clear, but in practice. This is more a study in land management theory than practical use. It solely examines land production rates, specifically “per capita land requirements and potential carrying capacity.” We are already farming things in locations that…

I’m no preachy vegan but when someone asks why I am vegan I don’t lie and tell them that it’s because it’s ‘good for [me]’. I tell them that I think that the industry treatment of animals is unethical. Of course people don’t like to hear that something they do is wrong, but that’s not a good reason not to tell them.

There’s always one who brings logic to the vegan-bashing party.

If “anything mass produced is shitty for the environment,” then mass produced dairy is bad for the environment. That means eliminating it would be better for the environment. The study is about what serves carrying capacity, but the title of this article is about what’s best for the earth. Feeding the most people is…

“Sustainable” animal products are a luxury and, frankly, a status symbol only available to the few. You can’t feed 6 billion+ people a regular diet of animal products without factory farming.

Lazy click-bait. The question of what sort of diet would make best use of US land assuming 100% compliance is interesting, but it doesn’t tell you that this would be the most ethical ideal scenario, never mind whether or not it is ethical to be a vegan given the world as it actually is.

I don’t know this study, but it seems to be saying that these animal products in the model are coming from grass fed animals. The reality of food production is that many animals are not being grazed, to meet demand for meat they are being fed from the “cultivated cropland.” Which decreases the food/land ratio…

‘all-natural, all-organic farming’ =/= veganism

yeah, I’m not vegan but I’m not buying this

So for real, is the Jezebel staff ever going to come out and explicitly state why they beef with veganism so much? Out of all the lifestyle choices to strike against, this seems like one of the lowest in priority.

According to the chart, everyone being vegan misses out on 70 million people worth of extra food from lacto-vegitarian, but it still gains us 330 million, which I’d consider pretty great. Pretty misleading title.

We absolutely could not use that land to build affordable housing, community green spaces, schools, libraries or anything. Useless indeed.