I'm a vegan who's motivated by opposition to animal agriculture, so I enthusiastically support research like this (and think it's the most promising path I've heard of to a vegan human future). I went to a vegan advocacy organization event a few months ago where this topic came up, and other attendees shared my enthusiasm for this kind of research, but the diversity of views and motivations in the vegan community makes me wary of claiming that that means this is mainstream.

To answer your correlation question, probably yes -- but vegans' attitudes toward "tampering with nature" vary widely from the view that it's the worst possible thing humanity can do, on through to the view that it's the best possible thing humanity can do (e.g., David Pearce), with a broad spectrum in between. (I don't have an ideal example of the former group in mind, but I could mention Sea Shepherd's Paul Watson, who advocates deep ecology and opposes GMOs.)

I think we will see sharper divisions between environmentalist vegans (especially advocates of deep ecology) and animal rights/animal welfare vegans over time. I don't know how the population breaks down in the west today, or how many people have even had to think about it that much.

Your last sentence is pretty interesting to me. After months of prodding from my girlfriend to go vegan, the book 'Abundance' and the chapter on the water inefficiency of factory farming is what finally turned me. It was reasonably easy for me to justify carnivorism as naturally occurring, harder to justify water waste with so many humans going thirsty. Without even starting down the emissions road.

That said, looking at it now (and especially once synthetic meats come online, out of cost efficiency if nothing else), I think our children might look back on the practice of animal slaughter as being pretty horrifically barbaric.

>with so many humans going thirsty

Where are there humans going thirsty? Honest question.

In places where they don't have water purification plants. Also in places that are becoming uninhabitable to humans. Think expanding deserts and such.

Isn't that an infrastructure problem? If we use less water in California that doesn't mean less people will be thirsty in South America.

Exactly. California's drought has literally zero effect on anybody else. Maybe a bit on people downstream of California's rivers and such.

So the consideration that "people are going thirsty" should have zero effect on how Californians deal with their problem. It serves nothing more than as an emotional device to make people feel bad.

I'm not convinced by the water argument as a large-scale issue, for two reasons. First, water transport is expensive, in a relative sense. This means that as long as you're not farming in direct competition with people that lack water, stopping the farming won't help them. Second, the price of meat is high enough, and the price of desalination low enough, that all else equal we could easily feed cows by using infinite salt water.

In California water is a little bit fungible because of the California Aqueduct (and other aqueducts in the California water system), and because of some farmers' water rights claims over particular sources that might otherwise have been available to other users for other uses. But it's not completely fungible by any stretch of the imagination.

I don't know enough about the water system and the patterns of shortages to understand the prevalence of direct competition between sets of users. Of course a weird thing is that municipalities may have locked in particular sources, so there may not be anyone in competition with us at all (for example, we in San Francisco have near-exclusive access to Hetch Hetchy, so water demand from farmers elsewhere in the state isn't likely to threaten our municipal water supply, at least not very directly).

I guess I need to learn more about the extent to which different users actually compete with one another. Clearly livestock farmers in the Central Valley are in competition with crop farmers there for the same water resources, but their competition with city dwellers for sources of what might have been human drinking water is a thornier question.

California water issues are very complex as you state, but one big issue is going somewhat unaddressed by government - use of non-renewable underground sources. Currently, farmers are able to even increase production in the drought, but few know how long they'll be able to keep this up because underground water is not unlimited.

California could go the desalination route, but so far that progress is painfully slow and the methods being selected may result in significant harm to local marine ecosystems: http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/04/15/us-usa-desalinatio....

Something like this would be much better: http://waterfx.co/. Unfortunately, last update in their blog is a year ago...

Isn't agriculture (crop farming) the biggest reason of the water problems in California right now... it seems to me wasteful water usage applies to plant growth as much as animal farming.

Most modern styles of animal farming just use more water (per kg or kcal of resulting human food), especially those that are growing human-edible crops like corn and soy in order to feed them to farm animals.

Children already think animal slaughter is horrific. Then they get greedy about meat.

Some vegans are anti-GMO, like some Ohioans are. But "Vegan" has no relation to "GMO"

Just a feeling, but I think there is quite some correlation between veganism and being anti-GMO, although there are certainly also vegans who are expressly pro-GMO. Would there be any research on the subject?

It looks like people are studying it quite a bit, but the nutrition and diet literature is less open-access than the math and CS literature. I searched on Google Scholar for "vegan attitudes GMO" and found several articles, often in the journal Appetite, that seemed relevant but were behind a paywall. The first result is "Attitudes towards genetically modified and organic foods", by Saher, Lindeman, and Hursti.

I also did a Google web search for the same terms and found, among other things, several articles by pro-GMO vegans complaining that it was common for other vegans to be anti-GMO (based on their personal experience, not studies). The former felt that widespread vegan opposition to GMOs was unfortunate because it would make it less appealing for people to go vegan (for example because the range of available foods would appear more restricted), or because it could make vegans appear indifferent or hostile to scientific progress, among other concerns.

Correlation, sure. But even as a non-vegetarian, I can understand the argument for not raising animals directly or indirectly for food, due to inefficiency. Vegans who believe that but don't really care about food being "natural" would still want this stuff; not all vegans are motivated to be vegan by the same things.

Indeed. Ideological eaters are and probably always will be a minority. Economics based eaters on the other hand.....

There are plenty of anti-GMO vegans. But I'm sure there are plenty of vegans who'd be fine with it. After all, there is a scientific case for veganism too.

Even the ethical case for veganism doesn't have much to say about GMO. The idea that hurting animals is wrong doesn't in any way entail that creating genetically engineered plants or microorganisms is wrong.

I am speaking from personal experience, but most of my vegan friends are also vocally anti-gmo... it just seemed to me that man vegans are also anti-gmo so it might be a self-defeating effort to target a subset of a subset market.

I would expect there's a stronger-than-average correlation there — mainly because they have the common prerequisite of caring about what you eat — but my hunch is that most vegans wouldn't object to this. I can personally say I'd buy it.

They are also not the most rational crowd.

True enough.. I just mean it seems to me their target market is self-destroying based on how the stuff is made. That said, I think it's hard enough to get cheese that is simply cheese, let alone crafted/aged cheeses that I'll keep with cow/goat based cheeses for the foreseeable future.

That is a pretty broad generalization.