Study Claims Lettuce Is "Three Times Worse Than Bacon" For GHG Emissions (cmu.edu) 340
davidshenba writes: Sticking to a vegetarian diet may not the best for environment — in fact, it might be harmful to it. According to new research from Carnegie Mellon University, following the USDA recommendations to consume more fruits, vegetables, dairy and seafood is more harmful to the environment because those foods have relatively high resource uses and greenhouse gas emissions per calorie. "There's a complex relationship between diet and the environment," Ph.D. student Michelle Tom said. "What is good for us health-wise isn't always what's best for the environment. That's important for public officials to know and for them to be cognizant of these tradeoffs as they develop or continue to develop dietary guidelines in the future." As you might suspect some find the study dubious at best.
If this is debunked in the summary, why post it? (Score:4, Insightful)
Subject says it all. Editors, this is literally your job. Don't give equal time to obvious lunatics.
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The title is about lettuce, the article that "debunks it" says that vegetarians will not eat only lettuce. So the title is correct.
Re:If this is debunked in the summary, why post it (Score:4, Insightful)
The article "debunking" it also claims moral high ground for it's author. Not ironically, the author actually claims that. The author actually uses the argument that she is right because she is better than other people.
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should be celibated for their contribution to the world
That seems harsh!
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should be celibated for their contribution to the world
That seems harsh!
They didn't need the meat anyway.
3x GHG emissions *per calorie* (Score:5, Interesting)
Since lettuce has far more water than calories, that's not much of a surprise. You'd have to eat a mountain of lettuce to get the same caloric intake as a couple of rashers of bacon. But few people eat lettuce for the calories; vegetarians often get most of theirs from nuts, mushrooms & soy, for example - none of which appear to be covered in the study
eating a vegetarian diet could contribute to climate change
Sure, but less so than most diets involving meat (disclaimer: not a vegetarian). The study also includes dairy foods and even seafood, which seems odd for a vegetarian diet but maybe bolsters their desired conclusion (cheese in particular is pretty GHG-intensive). The result seems to be more useful for fuelling misleading media quotes like the above, than for making informed decisions.
Re:3x GHG emissions *per calorie* (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah. Big news : mushrooms are 0 calories, so they're emitting *infinite* greenhouse gas per calorie. I'm surprised there is not an infinite quantity of greenhouse gas on earth.
Oh, wait, because we're not trying to get even 1 calorie from eating mushrooms !
Re:3x GHG emissions *per calorie* (Score:4, Interesting)
Pretty damned close actually looks like about 38cal per 100g. Compared to about 200cal per 100g for steak. Not infinite but about 5X less for the same weight. So it is quite possible on a per calorie basis mushrooms lettuce (even worse at 15cal) etc are worse for the environment than meat. But really that probably just means we should be eating the grains like we feed to the animals vs lettuce if we want to be efficient. Man does not live on bread alone, but it helps. Mah, till they make a veggie that tastes and has the texture of bacon I'll keep eating Porkie.
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Yeah, because grains have zero environmental footprint, what with the tractors, industrial fertilizers, pesticides, fuel to transport across vast distances...
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If you eat the grains that would have fed the live stock and the live stock crap, breathe, or dissipate heat, then, yes, it would be more efficient.
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Our digestive systems are not as good as cows' for processing that stuff.
Yes, but it's not orders of magnitude worse. To eat a cow, you have to grow it to the point where it's worth slaughtering before you cut it up and get some delicious sizzling steaks.
How many meals do you think the cow eats in that time?
Apparently they're slaughtered at between 3 and 16 weeks for good beef. How many meals do you think they eat in that time? Do the maths and you'll find that if reasonable food had been grown for humans t
Re:3x GHG emissions *per calorie* (Score:4, Informative)
Our digestive systems are not as good as cows' for processing that stuff.
Yes, but it's not orders of magnitude worse. To eat a cow, you have to grow it to the point where it's worth slaughtering before you cut it up and get some delicious sizzling steaks.
How many meals do you think the cow eats in that time?
Apparently they're slaughtered at between 3 and 16 weeks for good beef. How many meals do you think they eat in that time?
3-16 weeks? Cattle will be slaughtered at around 3 years age. Are you thinking of chickens?
Re: 3x GHG emissions *per calorie* (Score:3)
It's not quite that simple. Cow digestive systems can make use of plant material that we can't digest at all. Industrial cattle operations tend to feed them grains that we can at least partially digest, but it's quite possible to arrange a situation where a cow is raised on nothing human digestible at all. Some animals are often fed scraps and waste that we could, but won't eat.
It would be interesting to see where the optimal point actually lies. Natural herbivores, like bison on the plains of North America
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Yeah, because grains have zero environmental footprint, what with the tractors, industrial fertilizers, pesticides, fuel to transport across vast distances...
What on earth are you talking about?
The comparison was feeding the grains to cows versus eating the grains directly. All your list of things required to make grains are the same in both cases.
Except of course to get 100 calories of cow, you have to feed it enough grains to grow it to the point it's worth slaughtering it, rather than just eating those 1
Re:3x GHG emissions *per calorie* (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem with the study is the selective use of calorie as a measure instead of nutrient.
Re:3x GHG emissions *per calorie* (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem with the study is the selective use of calorie as a measure instead of nutrient.
There are many problems with this study. Comparing cucumbers to pork is silly, since people don't eat cucumbers as a substitute for bacon. If you want to compare something to bacon, then you should compare tofu, beans, tempeh, or peanuts. But then you would find that per calorie or per gram of protein, the veggie option is far better for the environment, and then there is no shocking headline to generate clicks.
Re:3x GHG emissions *per calorie* (Score:5, Insightful)
Comparing cucumbers to pork is silly, since people don't eat cucumbers as a substitute for bacon
Actually, it isn't. Comparing the GHG per calorie of any two foods isn't silly, it's basic research. However, drawing conclusions about different diets based on unrepresentative samples of the components of the diets is silly, and that's what a lot of the people writing the articles around this study seem to be doing. It is important, however, to always remember that it's the job of those writers to get us to click on the links and see the ads, not provide us with rational analysis.
The original study compares the USDA recommended food mix to the current American diet and finds that the USDA recommended diet would increase GHG emissions and energy usage, even if the number of calories was reduced to the recommended amount to maintain a healthy weight. It should be noted that the recommended diet is not vegetarian, and that a vegetarian diet was not considered in the study, so anything about how vegetarian diets compare to omnivorous diets is trolling for clicks.
Re:3x GHG emissions *per calorie* (Score:5, Insightful)
It's not 0 when I sautee them in butter and eat them with bacon.
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And if you get the right ones, they can be quite "enlightening" ;-)
Re:3x GHG emissions *per calorie* (Score:4, Insightful)
The problem is not that people eat meat, the problem is there are so damn many of us eating anything at all.
No, the problem is: anout 50% of all food offered in supermarkets is thrown away. Directly at the supermarket. They don't even iffer it to the poor.
The ideacthat there are to many people is an american urban legend.
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Do you have a source for that 50% claim? I've looked around and see it at 10% for the stores and 20% for at home.
Re:3x GHG emissions *per calorie* (Score:4, Informative)
This is a german source: https://www.zugutfuerdietonne.... [zugutfuerdietonne.de]
Obviously in your country it might be different.
In the US it seems 30% - 40% : http://www.worldfooddayusa.org... [worldfooddayusa.org]
Quit the wishful thinking. Story ain't debunked (Score:2, Informative)
In fact, IF you'd THINK about the amount of energy used in collection, transportation, and preparation of a vegetarian diet, and consider how much you have to eat to get the calories and nutrition you need to survive then consider the calorie density of BACON, it's quite plausible that the entire process of putting bacon in your belly requires the generation of less greenhouse gases per calorie than it takes to put lettuce inside you.
Because calorie wise, 4 oz of bacon is like 4 KG of lettuce. And the lett
Re:Quit the wishful thinking. Story ain't debunked (Score:4, Insightful)
You're ignoring the debunker's point, which is that meat-eaters don't just eat bacon, and vegetarians don't just eat lettuce.
In order to compare the environmental effects of diets, you need to do a full inventory of the foods in them, not just a comparison of two items.
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You're ignoring the debunker's point, which is that meat-eaters don't just eat bacon...
I would, if my wife would let me.
I, for one, am willing to accept this study's results at face value.
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I agree lets start will all the brown people.
There is a huge amount of land that hasn't been agriculturalized yet. We still can make enough food. I agree we don't really "need" to have as many people as we have but I think we are more than able to produce for them. The problem is growing land and population density doesn't always align very well. People want to live in cities but we need rural to grow the food. Etc. Things get complicated really quick.
Heart attacks (Score:2)
Bacon is even better for the environment than the study suggests, because you getting a heart attack will cut your carbon emissions to zero.
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Were you aiming for Funny points? Because as a serious statement it's just a stupid one, along with the idea that a low-fat diet is healthy.
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They ignore the real villain: Water causes FAR MORE CO2 emissions per calorie than bacon. It is so large that we can't even quantify it.
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The degree of processing required to feed true herbivores is highly variable. Some of them can survive entirely on their own without any human intervention. Much of the American interior was once covered with them.
On the other hand, Humans are very poor at exploiting plant material. Most of what is grown to feed humans can't even be digested by a person. That's not even getting into the waste associated with plant production at all levels of the supply chain.
On the other hand, Pigs in particular are omnivor
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They can eat all kinds of leftovers and industrial byproducts.
stop, you're making my mouth water.
Ha (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Ha (Score:5, Funny)
The simple fact is that if animals weren't meant to be eaten, then they wouldn't have been made out of food. Besides, there is plenty of evidence that shows that animals are, in fact, delicious.
Re:Ha (Score:4, Insightful)
Not only that, they provide a concentrated source of necessary nutrition, some of which is really hard to find in just plants...
Can you Say vitamin B12?
However, even though I'm not a vegetarian, or a vegan, or an environmentalist who's into saving the world from global warming, Count me one of the folks who hold this study in low regard.... If you set out to arrive at a conclusion, it's always possible though careful weeding out of the data you use. Just ask the global warming crowd..
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Not only that, they provide a concentrated source of necessary nutrition, some of which is really hard to find in just plants...
If I feed an animal 2000 corns/kg over its lifetime, then consume the animals flesh and gain the energy content equivalent of 100 corns/kg, then each kg is indeed concentrated. But it is also an extremely lossy way of using that corn (or its originating land area).
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Or, you could let ruminants eat their natural food (grasses and other vegetation) and then kill it after it's been a great lawnmower and soil improver for an adequate amount of time, say 1500 lbs worth of time.
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... then your greatest accomplishment is clearly having created a new unit of measurement, to wit,corns/kg.
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Exactly why TDD [agiledata.org] is so important when designing a diet! ( Ducks )
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I'm not a vegetarian because I love animals; I'm a vegetarian because I hate vegetables!
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Pro-tip: You're made of meat. Feel free to come over for dinner sometime, and leftovers.
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You're going to have to trim off a lot of fat.
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The truth is, if vegetables were meant to be eaten, they wouldn't be made out of carbohydrates.
And damn /. would respect the "ads disabled" checkbox and stop showing me ads.
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I don't know about you, but I actually like the occasional carbohydrate.
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I'm sure you eat whole trees, not just apples, right? And you just pluck them straight out of the ground?
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I leave the rest of the tree to continue providing sustenance, shelter, etc., generally without my intervention and mostly likely long after I die.
Animals in general do the same.
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See. Nothing unique about apples. It works with critters too!
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Actually, most of the animal is edible. Other than the outer covering and the hard skeletal part, it is all good, and as mentioned before, delicious. The long bones are especially nutritious once you crack them and extract the gooey greasy insides. As for cooking them, that is very much optional, yes, even for humans. For a civilized example, see beef tartar, sushi, sashimi. Insects too are animals and they are quite nutritious though arguably less delicious.
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"Other than the outer covering and the hard skeletal part"
Not even that: you can eat deep fried pork rind and bones go into soups.
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"and then carefully prepare the minority that is "food""
Minority? Ha!
There's very little you throw away from a pig. Basically everything, from snout to tail, is edible.
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The simpler fact is that if animals were made to be eaten, you wouldn't have to chase them down
Chase them? Nononono, you got it all wrong. Nobody chases animals. Granted, kids tend to chase animals of course, especially at the petting zoo, but petting zoo animals aren't ready for eating yet. Animals ready for eating get chased by bullets.
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Until there were rings there was no term "ring finger". Like the term ring finger, rings are a human creation. Teeth, animals, humans, vegetables, and everything else in this discussion is natural, and your attempt to introduce the artificaial as pure is obvious and has failed.
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If we weren't meant to eat meat, we wouldn't have these teeth called canines
That is maybe the most ridiculous argument I've heard in the past 20 minutes.
You must have been someplace other than Slashdot, then, because that was not a ridiculous argument. No matter what kind of animal with teeth you look at, those teeth tell you what they evolved to eat. We have both sharp and blunt kinds of teeth because we evolved to eat both meat (for which you need sharp teeth) and plants (for which you need flat ones) and it shouldn't surprise anyone.
There are lots of other signs that we evolved to be omnivores, most of them within our digestive system and not right on ou
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It just ain't true. Gorillas have big, sharp teeth (including more impressive canines than humans have) but they don't eat meat.
False. I should not have to remind you to use google before making declarative statements. You Slashdot plenty.
Also, do not forget that this argument is about what something evolved to eat, not what it eats. Gorillas could have evolved to eat meat, and then stopped eating it, and they'd still have the same-shape teeth.
Finally, Gorillas' big pointy teeth are not the same as our canine teeth. They're more useful for fighting, less useful for eating meat. But ours aren't useful for fighting, only for eating. T
Feed Lettuce to pigs (Score:3, Funny)
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Or just genetically modify lettuce to taste like bacon.
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That's a superpower!
https://static.spiceworks.com/... [spiceworks.com]
See price per calorie (Score:2)
Now, it's not always the case that the price of something corresponds to its resource use. But things that use a lot of resources tend to be more expensive. Food for thought.
The actual paper says nothing of the sort (Score:5, Interesting)
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The paper simply cites that on a per calorie basis many vegtables like lettuce, cucumbers, celery, etc are worse for the enviornment. It's actually obvious because these foods have no nutritional value with respect to calories, yet require water and other resources to bring to the table. The same paper states nutrition rich plant materials are actually better. The "debunking" article is just a knee jerking response and addresses "issues" that were never brought up in the paper. What we need to help fix this planet are people that run off of logic, not emotions.
Maybe if the paper were not behind a $40 paywall, more people could read it and make more reasoned comments.
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What we need to help fix this planet are people that run off of logic, not emotions.
But then what will we talk about on slashdot?
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I am a vegetarian, have been for over 2 decades now but not because I care for animals or some such nonsense. I am running an experiment on myself, my position is that it is a healthier lifestyle choice and I could not give any number of rats asses whether it is good or bad for the environment.
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What we need to help fix this planet are people that run off of logic, not emotions.
How about we start by not saying "fix this planet" as if the concept of "fixing" the planet were serious?
Perhaps it's just a short way of saying what you mean, but there are lots of emotion-driven arguments to "save the planet". But the planet is oblivious. And what we really need is a way to live the best lives we can -- for a definition of "we" that respectfully includes people in the future.
Portion / waste control (Score:2)
It does not make much sense to compare various foods so long as we overeat like crazy and throw away half of the food we buy. Start by making sure everyone lives within walking distance of a supermarket. Then people don't have to buy gigantic portions on weekly trips and have half of it get spoiled. Said daily walking trips will also help you lose weight, and then you don't need as many calories to sustain the bulk of your body. AND less greenhouse emissions from driving.
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Start by making sure everyone lives within walking distance of a supermarket. Then people don't have to buy gigantic portions on weekly trips and have half of it get spoiled.
The members of the Amalgamated Grocer's Union of Montana, Idaho, and New Mexizo loves you; Frigidaire hates you.
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This sounds good, except for a couple things.
First - how do you force the creation of supermarkets so that there is one within walking distance of everyone? Also, what is "walking distance" - 2 miles is walkable, that's probably a 30 minute walk.
Second, I (and many people) don't want to spend a portion of my time every day foraging for food in the supermarket. I'd rather have one big trip a week than a small one every day.
Third: There's this thing called a refrigerator. If you have food that spoils in the
Bacon sales down? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Right, because the only time they would do this is "when sales are down". Companies have absolutely no motive to increase revenue when sales are not down. Thanks for the insightful conspiracy theory though!
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Kind of like when wine sales are down, a scientific report is released about health benefits of occasional glass of wine.
Since the recent terrorist attacks I have eaten rather a lot more pork than I usually do.
If you're all worried about things like this (Score:2)
You're probably not reading the real news.
If you want to eat your veggies and own land, grow your own. Local farmers markets also contain large amounts of inexpensive fruits and vegetables some of which are locally grown.
Lettuce isn't Food (Score:2)
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Now that I think about it, I'm not even sure I even know anyone who eats iceberg lettuce. I mean, maybe somebody who puts some red leaf or radicchio on a sandwich for crunch, but I get the feeling that the only people still using iceberg lettuce are fast food joints who put a wilted leaf on your nasty burger.
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Now that I think about it, I'm not even sure I even know anyone who eats iceberg lettuce.
Yet there is a whole wall of the stuff in every supermarket I've ever been in. Somebody can't live without it apparently, not just at the fast food places - the must have iceberg lettuce in their refrigerator. In the middle of winter, I can walk into the supermarket and pick up a head of iceberg lettuce, grown in California (I live in Massachusetts). What. The. Fuck? Why? Who needs this? People feeding their pet rabbits, what?
Iceberg lettuce has NO redeeming value whatsoever. No calories to speak of, or vit
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Have you noticed that the Wall of Lettuce keeps getting smaller? Used to be bins of iceberg heads, and now it's a much smaller part of a shelf of iceberg heads wrapped in plastic. It's wrapped in plastic because it's going to sit there longer. They don't wrap bunches of tasty vegetables like swiss chard or collard greens in plastic.
Plus a larger section of the lettuce department is taken up with romaine and red leaf and green l
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I think iceberg's days are numbered.
I hope that's true. I'm just curious why it was given any days to begin with. I don't see how anybody could make money selling that crap, especially having gone through all the expense to grow and ship it.
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I drink water (Score:2, Insightful)
It takes 1800 gallons of water to grow the food cows eat to produce one pound of meat. Plus what the cows drink. How many gallons of water does it take to grow a pound of lettuce?
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Solution (Score:2)
Volunteers?
Thought not. There's your problem.
The eco-balance of meat is abysmal. End of story. (Score:3)
WTF is this suposed to be??!? Some half-assed attempt to blurr the real issue? The new epitome of the Chewbacca defense? Seriously?
Who the fuck cares about some marginal greenhouse gas per calorie consumed ratio when meat 'production' is proven to have an abysmal eco-balance-sheet over all??
Water polution, megacorp-driven livestock food monoculture [overgrowthesystem.com], pathogens, the meat-industry driven anti-biotics disaster [youtube.com], etc.
Water polution with meat production alone is actually close to that of a chemical plant.
The truth is, no matter how you spin it, the eco-balance of meat production is abysmal. Period.
Letuce is a filler - you don't eat it for calories. Calories per weight wise letuce is a serious underperformer.
That's what potatoes or plant proteins are for. Or meat, if you prefer.
More and more people are cutting back their meat consumption and vegan is the new vegetarian. Because our planet is going to hell and meat [dw.com] and its production has become [wikipedia.org] dangerous [wikipedia.org] for your [wikipedia.org] health [wikipedia.org].
Bottom line:
This article is meat industry propaganda non-sense and beyond pointless for any reasonable debate on the real issues of mass-meat production.
Re:How about... (Score:5, Interesting)
Let's focus on truly man made emissions, you know shit coming out of cars, coal plants, etc and stop trying to figure out how much a cow farts or how much is generated by eating lettuce. What a waste of time and money. All of the cows and lettuce eating people on the planet pail in comparison to one coal plant.
Those cow farts are pretty much just as man made (and damaging) as your car when you look at a typical cattle (or chicken or hog) farm and the amount of mechanization that goes into turning grain and other feed into the meat in your supermarket.
http://www.independent.co.uk/e... [independent.co.uk]
But in almost every case, the world's 1.5 billion cattle are most to blame. Livestock are responsible for 18 per cent of the greenhouse gases that cause global warming, more than cars, planes and all other forms of transport put together.
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Is there a way to capture said cow fart methane and burn it for energy?
Not economically, though prototypes [dailymail.co.uk] do exist. There is some effort to capture methane emissions from cow manure.
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No, but they eat their own shit.
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Brawndo's got what plants crave. It's got electrolytes
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You should probably wait. You're just showing your vegan friends you're too dumb to do basic logical reasoning. They are going to make fun of you.
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