Personal animal product quota

[DougInAMug]

You wore in animals.me that your main concern wrt to animal products is environmental sustainability and that you can have your "fair share."

I generally share this attitude of not wanting to compromise my share of a resource because other people over consume: just because someone drives a Ferrari doesn't mean I want to walk everywhere and balance their fuel consumption.

Do you have some guidelines on what this fair share for animal products looks like?

[DougInAMug]

You wrote in animals.md

[nicksellen]

Do you have some guidelines on what this fair share for animal products looks like?

Not really. Maybe we can calculate it...

My feeling-based approach says that having a bit of meat once a week (i.e. bought/killed for you, not freegan) would be sustainable. I could be wrong of course.

Here's the outcome of a quick googling:

Yet, as environmental science has advanced, it has become apparent that the human appetite for animal flesh is a driving force behind virtually every major category of environmental damage now threatening the human future—deforestation, erosion, fresh water scarcity, air and water pollution, climate change, biodiversity loss, social injustice, the destabilization of communities, and the spread of disease.

How did such a seemingly small matter of individual consumption move so rapidly from the margins of discussion about sustainability to the center? To begin with, per-capita meat consumption has more than doubled in the past half-century, even as global population has continued to increase. As a result, the overall demand for meat has increased five-fold. That, in turn, has put escalating pressure on the availability of water, land, feed, fertilizer, fuel, waste disposal capacity, and most of the other limited resources of the planet.

http://www.worldwatch.org/node/549

The average American could cut their diet-related environmental impacts by nearly one half just by eating less meat and dairy. Working with the French agricultural research institutions CIRAD and INRA, we modelled the effects of several diet scenarios. When applied to the average American diet in 2009, the ambitious animal protein reduction scenario (which cut people’s meat/dairy/fish/egg consumption in half) reduced per person land use and agricultural greenhouse gas emissions by nearly one-half—or almost as much as the vegetarian scenario (which eliminated meat and fish, but increased dairy consumption relative to the average American). The beef reduction scenarios reduced per person land use and greenhouse gas emissions by 15 percent (replacing one-third of beef consumption with other meats or legumes) to 35 percent (reducing beef consumption by 70 percent, down to the world average level).

http://www.wri.org/blog/2016/04/sustainable-diets-what-you-need-know-12-charts

We can all eat meat every day if there are as many people as there were on the planet in, say, 1927 when there were about 1.2 billion people on the planet. Or hey, we can even stretch it to 1950 (that golden age of hamburgers), when there were just 2.5 billion people, almost 1/3 the number there are today

https://www.mnn.com/food/healthy-eating/blogs/is-sustainable-meat-consumption-possible-no-heres-why

Each year the livestock sector globally produces 586 million tons of milk, 124 million tons of poultry, 91 million tons of pork, 59 million tons of cattle and buffalo meat, and 11 million tons of meat from sheep and goats. That 285 million tons of meat altogether — or about 36 kg (80 lb.) per person, if it were all divided evenly. It’s not — Americans eat 122 kg (270 lb.) of meat a year on average, while Bangladeshis eat 1.8 kg (4 lb).

The highest total of livestock-related greenhouse-gas emissions comes from the developing world, which accounts for 75% of the global emissions from cattle and other ruminants and 56% of the global emissions from poultry and pigs.

The most climate-friendly meats comes from pigs and poultry, which account for only 10% of total livestock greenhouse-gas emissions while contributing more than three times as much meat globally as cattle. Pork and poultry are also more efficient for feed, requiring up to five times less feed to produce a kg of protein than a cow, a sheep or a goat.

http://science.time.com/2013/12/16/the-triple-whopper-environmental-impact-of-global-meat-production/

Worldwide, an estimated 2 billion people live primarily on a meat-based diet, while an estimated 4 billion live primarily on a plant-based diet. The US food production system uses about 50% of the total US land area, 80% of the fresh water, and 17% of the fossil energy used in the country. The heavy dependence on fossil energy suggests that the US food system, whether meat-based or plant-based, is not sustainable. The use of land and energy resources devoted to an average meat-based diet compared with a lactoovovegetarian (plant-based) diet is analyzed in this report. In both diets, the daily quantity of calories consumed are kept constant at about 3533 kcal per person. The meat-based food system requires more energy, land, and water resources than the lactoovovegetarian diet. In this limited sense, the lactoovovegetarian diet is more sustainable than the average American meat-based diet.

http://ajcn.nutrition.org/content/78/3/660S.full

So, what to make of it all?

• 36kg is current global meat per person average per year
• overall we eat too much meat for the planet
• beef is very intense, pig/chicken products less so

So, lets say we need to keep to 18kg/person/year, and lower the impact per kg. That's 435g/person/week = 3 quarter pounder burgers per week (ok should not always be beef), or maybe 3 chicken thighs per week.

Seems like my initial feeling-based is approach was not far off :)

[DougInAMug]

Monthly meat-feast seems fine for me. Thanks for your searches. I want to do some similar homework for fossil fuels...