Diet Choice
In terms of diet, I suppose I’m a flexitarian. I’m at the point where I guess that I’m eating about 70% vegan, and maybe 90% or higher vegetarian. I still eat small portions of chicken and turkey (not because I’m any less horrified by how those animals are treated, but because it’s just so hard to avoid in our society and the environmental impact of their production is significantly lower than other meat sources) and things containing byproduct animal proteins, but for the most part, I try pretty hard to avoid meat itself. The World Wildlife Fund’s, “Livewell”, matches pretty closely to what I try to practice.
I’d prefer to eat more vegan, but putting this into practice in my daily environment and routines, and for my caloric requirements is more effort than I feel like I want to exert.
I’m not religious about this - if I happen to get a meatball in my pasta or something, whatever. I also don’t force my choices on others in overt ways. But if people ask, I try to explain to them as concisely as possible that my strongest motivation for eating this way is that anything else is simply uneconomical and unsustainable in the most basic physical way. It just doesn’t make any sense to me to waste so much resources and energy to cultivate so few calories. Furthermore, humans simply don’t require as much meat as we’re eating today. The ability to metabolize meat evolved as a backup plan for lean times. My choice is also a response to the fact that most of the people around me appear to feel required to eat meat at every meal. That is to say, if the rest of society was eating meat that wasn’t industrially produced, and far less of it - treating it as a special event or delicacy - I might even find it more acceptable to eat it more often myself.
In one episode of The Great Simplification podcast, guest Will Marshall gave what I thought was a good summary of my diet motivation. Here’s the transcript of the relevant part of that discussion, lightly edited for clarity:
[01:07:21] Humanity has flipped on many issues like smoking and others that we
discussed earlier. It literally in a few years, you can go from "Everyone smoking" to,
"no one's smoking in bars", "in whole regions the world". And it's kind of crazy how fast
humans can change behavior. So, we've gotta change our behavior in a few key areas.
[01:07:44] you know, diet's one of them, I often talk about this, that if an alien came
down to the earth and discovered that we were spending 60% of our agricultural
land - the size of Canada, the United States, and China combined - on one source of
food that gives us less than 5% of our nutritional value that is beef, they would go,
what the heck are you smoking?
[01:08:06] Nate Hagens: Or that 96% of the weight of all the animals on earth are
humans and are farm animals.
[01:08:13] Will Marshall: Yeah. And the rest, the four are now three, unfortunately,
percent is all of the rest of mammals. Yeah. Is insane. Right. It's an incredibly insane
use of resources, especially since it's agriculture that's driving deforestation and,
overfishing that's driving, you know, biodiversity loss, the oceans.
[01:08:35] That's a diet choice. You know, that's a crazy simple choice to
significantly reduce your impact on the environment. Yeah. Like there's a 10 x for
the having there, like, no problem. So okay, let's y you know, and it doesn't mean
even having to stop having meat entirely, just reduce it. It's not that hard. And yet
it can have a 10 x impact on reducing our, driving of biodiversity to destruction.
[01:09:04] That's the dominant source of biodiversity loss.
