Vegetarian and “Healthy” Diets Could Be More Harmful to the Environment

Carnegie Mellon Study Finds Eating Lettuce Is More Than Three Times Worse in Greenhouse Gas Emissions Than Eating Bacon

This study looks at things like lettuce and eggplant that require a whole lot of water and tending to grow.

Vegans and the like often talk about how raising food-critters is inefficient because they need to be fed corn and whatnot that could feed people directly. The thing that occurs to me is that they don’t *necessarily* need to eat plants that could feed humans. Sure, in feedlots cows and such get fed highly nutritious (i.e. processed) feed… but out in the west they tend to graze free-range on stuff like grass. Grass requires no effort on the part of humans to grow. No water, no planting, no fertilizing, no nothing. So at least in that case, feeding cattle costs approximately nothing, and in fact is a *better* use of the land for feeding people than growing crops would be.