MY VIEWS ON VEGANUARY - BY ANTON
VEGANUARY? What is it with vegans, that so many become so fixated on their dietary choice that they’ve got to foist it on others, conjuring all kinds of bogus justification?
I’d be a much happier man – and doubtless a richer one – if everyone was harangued into only eating food grown, say, within a 20 miles radius of where they were, or perchance grub that didn’t involve ploughing up the Amazon basin or being irrigated with water from ancient aquifers. I would be very happy to see folk living off the actual food they ate, rather than having to take an array supplements – when it turns out their ‘special’ diet leaves them unhealthily short of various minerals and trace elements.
One of the most hackneyed assertions about the vegan fad is that it’s better for the planet. And I think we need to take this apart, as not only is it harming my industry, but perversely it’s damaging to the planet as well. This ‘received wisdom’ is so entrenched that it now includes advice being given to the Government’s own Climate Change Committee. The chief crime is that cows burp methane, which is certainly true. And I understand that methane is a very potent greenhouse gas. Therefore, cows must be causing the greenhouse effect… surely? Unfortunately, it comes unravelled when you look at how long methane is in the atmosphere – just a few years – as part of a natural cycle. Or where the elements that make this methane – carbon and hydrogen in cows’ diets – come from… they were already in the natural cycle.
There’s scarcely any more methane in the air today because of cows than there was 10 years ago, or 50 years ago, or 1000 years ago. Blaming it on them is a disingenuous red herring, and shows a lack of basic chemistry knowledge… or perhaps some obsessed need to validate your prejudice. Then there is CO2, which is indeed a greenhouse gas we need to consider. And it’s true that chopping down the forests, burning the trees, and raising cows on the land releases carbon into the atmosphere. But here’s the thing. Again, the carbon in the trees is part of a naturally occurring cycle, having been taken in by the growing trees a few decades ago. It may be that grassland doesn’t store as much carbon as forestland – although that’s up for discussion.
But, and this is critical, they’re comparable and both part of natural systems. Compared to burning fossil fuel, which releases locked up hydro-carbon that’s hundreds of millions of years old, it’s not really a story at all.
It gets more awkward. Ne’er mind raising cows, mostly on grass. Ploughed soil, annually scratched about for growing crops, is less good at holding carbon, and poor practice can lead to it steadily losing ever more. And until the advent of electric tractors and combine harvesters, the diesel burnt to harvest your mung beans/soya/rice/lentils or whatever, is burning yet more fossil fuels. The bio-diversity of commercially growing crops is oft not far off a mono-cultured desert.
It’s frequently said the soya is being grown to feed cattle. And indeed, some of the crop is going into animal feed – the bit humans don’t want. Think on that: buying soya-based products, you are doing the damage, while livestock eating the waste product is actually mitigating some of it.
Blaming cows for the destruction of the Amazon is ill-informed hypocrisy on an epic scale.
Don’t take my word for it. Go and work out the building blocks of how food is made for yourself. You’ll find highly processed ‘meat/dairy substitutes’ are about as far from ‘good for the planet’ as you can get.
At the end of the day I have to assume a lot of the noise coming from the vegan lobby comes back to being squeamish about eating fluffy animals. But pretending that eating a soya burger might let some doe eyed calf live a happy life skipping in the meadow is just infantile fallacy. You’re destroying habitat elsewhere, while denying that calf any life at all.
It is indeed your choice.
Blaming cows for the destruction of the Amazon is ill-informed hypocrisy