TerryChews @TerryChews

Ethical omnivore. Environmentalist. Animal lover. I like long walks in the countryside, heavy music, good food and real beer! 🍻 Surrey, England Joined December 2018

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TerryChews @TerryChews

8 years ago

@Brownsvilleted Beautiful! I love the mouse.

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TerryChews @TerryChews

8 years ago

@Wily_from_Phily @awright4645 @JoannaBlythman @tracy__e That’s got nothing whatsoever to do with my question.

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TerryChews @TerryChews

8 years ago

@cgcaldwell1 @Bewyds @Rev0lvingDoor @sundstrom_lars @saladeaufromage No guilt trip here, I just expect people to take a look at their own decisions before judging other people.

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TerryChews @TerryChews

8 years ago

@awright4645 @JoannaBlythman @tracy__e Looking at those graphs and the associated figures I would assume seitan would land somewhere around poultry regarding ghgs and land use.

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@awright4645 @JoannaBlythman @tracy__e The problem with that graph is it doesn’t give us much information. If by meat substitute it means Quorn then I wouldn’t doubt that had a smaller footprint than pulses. I would doubt that seitan or a seitan/soya mix would be lower than pulses.

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TerryChews @TerryChews

8 years ago

@awright4645 @JoannaBlythman @tracy__e But I agree. We need more data on food in general. Doing a bit of working out in my head I think seitan for example is very inefficient based on how much raw ingredient you need to make very little final product. I suspect it’s approximately 4kg of wheat to make 1kg.

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TerryChews @TerryChews

8 years ago

@awright4645 @JoannaBlythman @tracy__e The numbers there seem odd, unless I’m misreading them. They suggest 100g of protein in beef (so say 400g of beef) produces at the lowest end 20kg co2 eq/kg, yet we have farms in the UK that produce less than that per kilo.

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TerryChews @TerryChews

8 years ago

@awright4645 @JoannaBlythman @tracy__e So if a product is made mainly of seitan, with some soya and then a bunch of other ingredients it stands to reason that the overall footprint would be much higher than the sum of its raw ingredients. I’d be interested to know by how much.

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TerryChews @TerryChews

8 years ago

@awright4645 @JoannaBlythman @tracy__e What I was saying was that I would be interested to know the footprint of a typical crop-based vegan meat vs a whole food. E.g, based on how much flour we get from an acre of wheat & how much gluten we can get from that, 1kg of seitan has a much higher footprint than 1kg of wheat

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TerryChews @TerryChews

8 years ago

@awright4645 @JoannaBlythman @tracy__e I would be curious to know by how much the transport of different ingredients to a processing facility, and then the processing itself raises the footprint of one of these products vs a whole food alternative (like just eating pulses).

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TerryChews @TerryChews

8 years ago

@awright4645 @JoannaBlythman @tracy__e It would be interested to see data regarding the footprint of some of the crop-based vegan meats. I’m making no assumptions here, but I notice that many contain multiple crops (usually wheat & soya) which are likely from different countries plus various other ingredients.

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TerryChews @TerryChews

8 years ago

@awright4645 My point is that from an agricultural perspective there are large areas of land not suited to growing crops or vegetables. Therefore the best use of the land from an economic and food security perspective is to raise livestock on it.

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TerryChews @TerryChews

8 years ago

@awright4645 Sheep grazing, especially in the highlands, isn’t necessarily the best example of a managed grazing system. With regards to grazing farmland; if a farmer has a choice between rearing livestock for profit or letting the area become overgrown they’re going to choose the former.

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TerryChews @TerryChews

8 years ago

@awright4645 Which brings me back to your original tweet which I agree with - veganism can be better for both the reasons you’ve given, but so can other non-vegan lifestyles.

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TerryChews @TerryChews

8 years ago

@awright4645 people understand that there are always other factors to consider. As you know I choose not to eat imported food and I am careful to find animal products with the lowest impact on the planet and animals. I then obviously do other high impact actions such as not driving etc.

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TerryChews @TerryChews

8 years ago

@awright4645 Given the % of UK land associated with growing grain for human and animal production you could get a similar (I admit lesser) effect by turning that to natural vegetation. The problem in either case is that you’d be expecting farmers to stop profiting from the land.

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TerryChews @TerryChews

8 years ago

@awright4645 Indeed, there’s a lot to learn about this method of farming, but it offers a potentially more sustainable option than current systems. And I imagine more innovation in this line of thinking is just around the corner.

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TerryChews @TerryChews

8 years ago

@awright4645 My point is simply that other lifestyle changes can achieve an equal or lower environmental footprint to that achieved by adopting a plant-based diet. As we’ve discussed, not driving, not having children, not flying etc.

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TerryChews @TerryChews

8 years ago

@awright4645 I’ve never disputed the fact that plant-based foods have a lower overall impact. Although we can still expect to see the ghg emissions associated with livestock reduced past the low impact numbers cited with better management.