Should you give up meat, or at least eat less of it? There is good evidence that eating a lot of red meat reduces cardiovascular health, but also that avoiding meat is the better choice for the environment and animal welfare.
Simon Sarris, on The Map is Mostly Water, attempts to challenge this. He lists several reasons why eating meat may not be as bad as vegetarians assume on both counts. Here is one fact that I wasn’t aware of:
It is worth a reminder that creating any food at scale involves both death and environmental impact. It is commonly noted that a lot of mice, porcupines, snakes, fawns, frogs, etc. are killed as incidental bystanders in the preparing and harvesting of almost any row crop. Less commonly noted is the more intentional killing, for instance Australian farmers successfully kill ~40,000 ducks a year to protect their rice crop. Australian pea farmers poison millions of mice to protect their peas, with total mice poisonings during “plague” years reaching to the billions.
I believe Sarris agrees with me, and with almost everyone else, that it’s important to avoid unnecessary animal suffering and environmental degradation. It’s important to know if eating meat really is worse than a vegetarian diet. Given the complexity of this question, the only way to do this is to take into account all the pros and cons of carnivorous and vegetarian diets, develop a metric, and see which fares better. This has been done (example). Along multiple dimensions, including greenhouse gas emissions, land use, and water use, a vegetarian diet scores better than a meat-based diet.
Pointing out exceptions and discussing possible reasons why meat may not be so bad after all, like Sarris does, is an important part of getting the models right, but it doesn’t replace them.
I’m not vegetarian myself, although I eat less meat than most people. I don’t have strong feelings either way, but in this context, I agree with Dominic Cummings statement that instead of discussing words and stories, we should discuss interactive models. The only way of convincing me that eating meat isn’t the worse choice would be to create a rigorous new model taking into account Sarris’ criticisms, and then using it to show that meat came out ahead. I think this is unlikely to succeed, but I challenge anyone who feels like it to try.
Nehaveigur 