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Further implications
Human impacts upon the environment are having a dire effect with species loss, mass extinctions, and the rapidly accelerating impacts of climate change leading many people to search for ways in which they can alter their lives and reduce their deleterious effect.
It is in this context that veganism is gaining in popularity; however, an examination of the facts suggests that merely turning away from animal-based products may not be enough. The manner is which food is produced, as well as whether that food is plant or animal sourced, dramatically affects its impact on the world's ecology.
In a comment published in Prospect on December 10, 2019, Hephzibah Anderson explained the complexity of the situation, arguing that how a food product (or indeed any product) was sourced may turn out to be more significant than the label, vegan or otherwise, that is attached to it. There are vegan products that have greater adverse impacts upon the environment than animal-based ones. The solution appears to reside in the detail. The following arguments are extracted from Anderson's article.
'A 2019 Imperial College study did find that your diet is where you can make the biggest difference. The trouble is, while certain facts are indisputable-for instance, the amount of soya fed to a cow to produce a litre of milk is several times that used to produce a litre of soya milk-the more granular the focus, the murkier the picture becomes. Industrially farmed soya is one of the worst crops in any quantity because it's what is known as a monocrop, one that is planted in the same field year after year, causing soil depletion and also enhancing vulnerability to famine, Irish potato-style. So, sure, you've embraced a plant-based diet, but if you're indulging every week in jackfruit tacos, prefer almond milk to oat milk [with almonds requiring much more water to grow], and aren't yet sick of avocados, then your diet is hardly carbon-neutral. Even fruitarians have been found to have a high environmental impact...
As for "clean" meat (and the term is obviously contested by livestock farmers), there are other studies suggesting that while "fake" beef would have less environmental impact than the real thing, "fake" chicken might turn out to be more impactful than real chicken. Besides, for all the hype, the technology is still not mature-much could yet go wrong...
Moreover, a vegan diet is rich in maize and grains, and those crops tend to be industrially grown using fertiliser, fungicides, pesticides and herbicides. One detail that's consistently overlooked in the vegan debate is how your food is farmed. In the rush to embrace veganism, yesterday's trend for organic foods has been all but forgotten...
The reality is that every choice to consume that we make-even if it's an alternative choice-has drawbacks. Electric cars, for instance: it turns out that their future may depend on mining critically important metals on the ocean floor. The painful truth of it is that if we are to fix a problem as vast as climate change, every choice is going to have to be thoughtful-much more about carbon and much less about what flatters our ideas about who we are.'
The same arguments can be made regarding the impact of veganism upon human health. It is not enough that a food be derived from a plant source. The manner in which it is cooked [or preferably not cooked] and the variety and quality of other plant sourced foods with which it is consumed (over a lifetime not just a day) all dramatically affect the extent to which it can be considered a healthy choice.
Veganism, to be an effective partial answer to the problems confronting the world's ecology, its climate and to those problems confronting human health, must be a highly informed and considered lifestyle choice. Consumers must act with conscious awareness of the wide-reaching impact of their food selections upon themselves and the world. Ill-informed veganism is a gesture not effective action.