Good on you. I've drastically reduced the amount of meat I eat to about once a week, for many reasons including environmental. I feel western society almost worships meat (especially in America - bacon, anyone?) and links it to masculinity. I think most people would rather watch the world burn than give up meat.

To my mind, if you are concerned about your impact on the environment, what kind of food you eat is not nearly as important as how much money you spend.

It's a coarse grained rule of thumb, but money basically represents a share of the world's abundance. When you spend money, you are claiming a part of that abundance for yourself. And the more you spend, the larger share you are claiming.

So if you eat a vegetarian meal at a restaurant at $40, that is worse for the environment than eating $10 worth of meat at home.

Things are further confounded by what kind of non-meat products you eat. For instance, fruit and most leafy-green vegetables have a similar cost per calorie to meat. Thus, I would argue that they have about the same environmental impact as meat.

So really, if you want to tread lightly on the environment, I think you want to be eating a lot of grains, vegetable oils, nuts, milk and (less expensive) cheese. You want them all to be non-organic. And you want to be preparing your meals yourself.

"fruit and most leafy-green vegetables have a similar cost per calorie to meat. Thus, I would argue that they have about the same environmental impact as meat."

Unfortunately, this is provably false. For beef, you need to grow 12,000 calories of plants to produce (i.e. feed) 1,000 calories of beef. About 8 to 1 for pork, 6 to 1 for turkey, and 5 to 1 for chicken.

In many places (such as Wales and Iceland) sheep are allowed to roam grassy, mountainous wilderness that is otherwise not arable land; surely such meat actually has less impact than, say, fields of corn?

The beef you buy in stores is not fed leafy green vegetables or fruit.

You're absolutely right, it is fed 12,000 calories of alfalfa. Even if alfalfa were less energy intensive to grow than leafy green vegetables, it will never be 12 times less intensive. Almonds or blueberries requiring 2x more energy per calorie than alfalfa? Mabye. Never gonna be 12 times.

Perhaps you misunderstood me. I agree that meat in general, and beef in particular, is input intensive. What I'm saying is: so are fruits and leafy green vegetables.

Someone up above was saying that meat should be avoided because producing it is hard on the environment. What I'm saying is that targeting meat is targeting the wrong attribute. People should be targeting cost per calorie.

If you replace a meat-only diet with a fruit-only diet, it's more or less just as bad for the environment. Since meat and fruit cost about the same per calorie, they have about the same impact on the environment per calorie consumed, since the cost of food is a good proxy for the cost of the inputs to that food. (Yeah, I know cows emit a lot of methane; I'm aiming for a rule of thumb here.)

"the cost of food is a good proxy for the cost of the inputs to that food." An "organic" apple probably has a lower energy cost than a factory farmed one even though it costs much more. It is more likely to be harvested by hand instead of by gas powered tree-shaker and net, it is more likely to be pesticide free than have a gas powered plane spray it with pesticides, etc. I don't see any evidence for "cost" and "energy required to produce" being as correlated as you claim. Also it doesn't matter because, at wholesale prices, $5 in beef is ALWAYS fewer calories than $5 in apples or carrots or lettuce or whatever plant you pick.

Here are some calories/dollar calculations (and you can verify them using the links below):

1. Ground Beef

- $3.725 per lb (in June 2016, according to the BLS[1])

- 971 calories per lb [2]

- 260 calories per dollar

2. Lettuce

- $2.029 per lb (also from the BLS, same link as above)

- 77 calories per lb [3]

- 38 calories per dollar

3. Apples

- $1.444 per lb (also from the BLS, same link as above)

- 235 calories per lb [4]

- 162 calories per dollar

The math doesn't lie. Lettuce is almost an order of magnitude more expensive per calorie than ground beef. And you can go look up other fruits or leafy green vegetables (I used two of the examples you provided), they basically all fall in this range. Some meats (mostly seafood) are more expensive per calorie than beef, some are less expensive (mostly poultry and pork).

What it all boils down to, though, is that if you want to feed more people with the same amount of land/energy/whatever, you need to be looking at dairy (500-800 calories/$), oils (1200-2000 calories/$), and especially grains (> 2000 calories/$).

There's a reason why the dawn of civilization coincided with agriculture and domestication of grains: grains are an incredibly cheap source of calories.

Also, FYI, in the U.S. at least, organic food is not usually pesticide free. It just means that only "natural" pesticides are used. And harvesting things by hand is terrible for the environment. Humans are incredibly expensive and use tons of resources. After all, human generally want things like cars, climate controlled dwellings, and latest gizmos and gadgets, whereas a tractor could care less about these things :P.

[1]: http://www.bls.gov/regions/mid-atlantic/data/averageretailfo... [2]: http://nutritiondata.self.com/facts/beef-products/6197/2 [3]: http://nutritiondata.self.com/facts/vegetables-and-vegetable... [4]: http://nutritiondata.self.com/facts/fruits-and-fruit-juices/...

> So if you eat a vegetarian meal at a restaurant at $40, that is worse for the environment than eating $10 worth of meat at home.

This is just so completely false and what you are really doing is trying to simplify it too much.

Sure if the vegetarian meal was grown where there used to be a rain forest, flown across the world and driven in trucks then maybe it would be worse for the environment than a small local farm that don't have a lot of animals would.

But that is _never_ the case and to get that $10 meat the meat have to eat a lot more than my vegetarian meal. Everything is of course depending on the conditions, but there is no need for any denial on how bad meat production is for the environment. It is unsustainable for the humans to eat as much meat as we do today.