Spyke
Zombie
feddit.uk

Average person eats six times more chicken than in 1961, and also, there's 2.67 more people (~3.1 billion people in 1961 versus ~8.3 billion today).

So the real terms increase is huge!

10
Watermark710reply
piefed.social

I'd like to see the stats on beef consumption. Cows are way worse for the planet when it comes to climate change. People eat more chicken than they used to because beef prices have skyrocketed. I wonder what the actual change in carbon emissions looks like.

5
Watermark710reply
piefed.social

Ah, I had tried to, but there was a giant popup asking me for money, so I thought it wasn't available for free. Turns out, my PiP window was covering the button to collapse the popup. Apparently beef has stayed steady, which is nuts IMO. Most people I know eat a lot less beef than they used to. My best buddy used to have a steak every Friday, now he only eats it on his birthday.

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usernamesAreTrickyreply
lemmy.ml

Graph from the article:

Per capita beef consumption is down slightly, but not as much as chicken / poultry consumption has increased. People are generally eating much more meat overall per capita. Chicken and poultry still have a pretty heavy emissions profile, it's just that beef is somehow worse. The net increase in meat consumption is still a massive net negative on the climate

In terms of ethics, switching to chicken results in significantly more induvidial chickens being killed because of their lower slaughter weight. The factory farms that house the vast majority of chickens keep growing larger and larger and quite disturbing. This is true around the world. For example just in England alone, there are at minimum over 700 factory farms for chickens, four of which have over a million chickens

2
Tenebris Noxreply
feddit.uk

Plus there's all the damage caused by these chicken "farms": nutrient overflow killing rivers is only one aspect.

2
queermunist she/her
lemmy.ml

Obviously just statistical error. The average person eats about the same amount of chicken. Chicken Georg, who lives in cave & eats over 10,000 each day, is an outlier and should not be counted.

4
pirc_loverreply
feddit.uk

I knew I’d find this here! Only critique is you forgot the ‘adn’ typo

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usernamesAreTrickyreply
lemmy.ml

The FAO, unfortunately, has quite a history in downplaying things and sticking their thumb on the scale in favor of the meat and dairy industry on things like this

In a sign of the atmosphere in the FAO at this time, a fourth veteran insider, “Mary Wagyu”, claims to have been admonished after preparing Meatless Monday leaflets for distribution in the cafeteria of an FAO heads of state food security summit in 2008. “Remove and destroy them,” a senior FAO executive said, according to Wagyu. “These will not be put in people’s trays.”

In 2009 a second FAO report called Livestock in the Balance was delayed for several months while the FAO’s leadership tried to dilute references to harm caused by the meat industry, arguing that this had already been covered by Livestock’s Long Shadow. When the research team resisted the pressure, management stepped in and manually rewrote key passages over their heads, sparking what Steinfeld called “a mini-revolution”. About a dozen staff members involved in preparing the report withdrew their names from the paper in protest.

[...]

Between 2012 and 2019, “the lobbyists obviously managed to influence things”, Holstein said. “They had a strong impact on the way things were done at the FAO and there was a lot of censorship. It was always an uphill struggle getting the documents you produced past the office for corporate communications and one had to fend off a good deal of editorial vandalism. You had to accept relatively small steps forward in changing the narrative on livestock.”

Steinfeld added that meat lobby representatives and diplomats would talk to senior FAO managers and encourage them not to invest in work that dealt with environmental impacts.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/oct/20/the-anti-livestock-people-are-a-pest-how-un-fao-played-down-role-of-farming-in-climate-change

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Tenebris Noxreply
feddit.uk

Wow. But not surprising. I really don't think most people realise how catastrophically damaging to the world's environment the meat industry is (or the whole agricultural industry, really).

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usernamesAreTrickyreply
lemmy.ml

Animal agriculture is especially worse because it plainly demands much more agriculture to happen due to it's inefficiencies. It requires growing huge amounts of animal feed where most of the energy is lost. Even it's best case is bad compared to the worst case for eating plants directly

Transitioning to plant-based diets (PBDs) has the potential to reduce diet-related land use by 76%, diet-related greenhouse gas emissions by 49%, eutrophication by 49%, and green and blue water use by 21% and 14%, respectively, whilst garnering substantial health co-benefits

[...]

Plant-based foods have a significantly smaller footprint on the environment than animal-based foods. Even the least sustainable vegetables and cereals cause less environmental harm than the lowest impact meat and dairy products [9].

https://www.mdpi.com/2072-6643/14/8/1614/html

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anarchaosreply
lemmy.ml

those claims rely entirely on poore-nemecek 2019, a poorly methodized paper. you could be right, but this paper can't support your claim.

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SubArcticTundra
lemmy.ml

It's so easy for people to do when the chickens are so conveniently tucked away out of sight

3
AwesomeLowlander
sh.itjust.works

Yeah that's what happens when developing countries experience a rise in prosperity, they get access to meat and decent diets. Meat consumption may be slightly on the drop in the west, but that's far outweighed by the rise everywhere else

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Average person eats six times more chicken than in 1961, UN report finds | Agriculture is the second most polluting sector of the global economy | Spyke