What do you think is the best way to minimize the environmental impacts of eating meat and seafood?
Eat only what is available in season locally
24% (610 votes)
Choose "heritage" breeds to conserve genetic diversity
2% (45 votes)
Choose safe, humane, and certified sustainable meat and seafood
31% (783 votes)
It is impossible to minimize the impacts; we must stop eating meat and seafood
43% (1066 votes)
Total votes: 2504

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Sea food
No good answer for this many people....
Food consumption is a large part of the sustainability puzzle
Meat and Poultry
sustainable meat
Eating meat and seafood
meat & seafood
Everyone being a vegetarian will not produce sustainability.
Jack Alpert
www.skil.org
Everyone being a vegetarian will not produce sustainability. Changing meat eating habits to vegetarian habits in its most optimistic scenario can reduce a meat eating person's food footprint 87%. It is not hard to convert the released resources to "sustaining a much larger vegetarian population with the same global production."
But this could be true only if food was the predominant component of sustainability. Factoring in that the food component to the meat eater's total footprint is near 5%, we are looking at a 2% reduction in total footprint of each convert. Certainly with the meat impoverished diets of the global community, there is little chance that removing meat from the human community's diet that we can expect much more than a one percent reduction in total human footprint.
The human community's sustainability depends on reducing the total global human footprint. Some suggest by a factor 10 to achieve equity. Others when factoring in oil depletion, climate change, and soil loss, the sustainable number drops to between 95 and 99 percent of the present population. (Both these numbers depend on not damaging the environment any more than we have)
Let me suggest that converting to not eating meat is not only too little to late, it contributes to rapid population increases if the freed up grain gets into the mouths of the starving.
Lets use stop proposing solutions for sustainability that have little chance of doing more than making things worse. And start focusing on actions that actually can decrease footprint 95 to 99%. For example, the rapid population declines that is achieved when all parents on the global limit themselves to one child per family.
Could we implement this practice (establish a net birth rate of .7 per woman ) we might achieve a 95% reduction in global population in 100 to 150 years. (for more detail see www.skil.org)
Jack Alpert
sustainability of sheep & beef consumption
Sheep & beef farmed in New Zealand usually graze on lush digestible pastures that require no artificial nitrogen fertiliser because of the presence of white clover in the pasture. They spend the whole year grazing in our mainly temperate climate without being fed grain. The relatively small carbon footprint of shipping meat to other parts of the world means eating New Zealand ruminant animal products is a sustainable choice. When you consider their extremely high nutritional value, especially because of the way such animals are reared, in comparison with growing grain products, a diet of New Zealand grown meat and vegetables is probably the ideal for the future of our planet.
The question of methane emissions is being addressed, and because of our aforesaid comparatively digestible pastures, we have a big advantage over other countries in countering this problem already.
Ruminants have roamed the grasslands of the world for aeons, and I contend they have the right to continue to enjoy fresh air, sunshine, clean water, and nutritious grasses.
meat
I think the argument against eating meat is floored.The land used to grow beef cattle is generally not suitable for growing of grain. It is pasture - much of it natural pasture and this is a good way to produce food. Yes, in Australia we would be better off to eat Kangoroo and in Africa Antilope etc
I'm a Pecan grower. There is a lot of grass growing between the trees. Should I mow regularly or is it indeed better to have my cattle growing fat under them and fertilizing the trees? Should I really buy soy from 1000's of miles away? no, surely my local protein is better for me and the environment.
I have a large garden, drive a small car, produce solar electricity and collect rain water for the home.
We need to look at the full picture and each situation is different.
Eating meat and "seafood"
When I received the Worldwatch State of the World report, I eagerly turned to this chapter and was extremely disappointed. The only positions stressed in the chapter was stopping factory farming, trying to eat less meat, and trying to switch to "sustainable" species. Veganism and a plant based diet were not introduced and supported and many significant points were not made. Eating meat and other animal products are not sustainable no matter how organic and humane the farming techniques. Given the global population, the increases in animal consumption, the inefficiency of feeding of grains to animals, the forests cut down to raise more animals for consumption - the environmental, human (health and global starvation), and animal (to farmed animals as well as destruction of habitat) impacts are all severe. Yes, I ask my students to consider eating less meat and sea animals but even this cannot be sustained so I introduce them to veganism and help them get started through cooking delicious vegan foods. The article was far below your normal excellence in research standard.
Totally agree
no meat
where's the beef ?
I remember a woman on my adoptive home island telling me about her days as a child, maybe 70 years ago.
Her family would cook up a huge 50 litre pot of rukau - dark green leaves from the taro plant, a root crop - and into that one pot would go one half kilo tin of corned "bully" beef. She and her siblings would look for the smallest shreds of meat. Compare that with today. Meat often forms the main part of a meal. Children only reluctantly eat their "greens."
Less than a century ago we had free-range, small-scale animal farming with meat as a luxury, not a staple. Today hyperfactories slaughter millions of clucking, squeeling, lowing fowl and beast, in scenes like a sci-fi horror flick to feed humanity's free-market lust for dead flesh.
Where's the beef? It is this: we are living in an extreme perversion of human history. From this extreme we will need to swing to another if we are to survive as a species - back to rural-based survival on, mostly, vegetables and grain.
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jason brown
avaiki news agency
the answers are not adequate
The options for answers are not adequate. I do believe the best solution is to reduce meat and seafood consumption almost to zero - with some exceptions, we can all very well live and be healthy without it - but it's not true that we cannot minimise the impacts other way. Of course we can! Through local, seasonal, organic, ecologic, certified production. The question is: will that reduction of impacts be enough if we keep eating more and more meat and seafood? No! We need all those things and also reduce consumption.
Why did you not put that option on the poll?
Local Organic Veggies, yea right