Things we shouldn't eat (to save the planet)
Apart from avocados, what nice things should we not eat because of their environmental footprint? My nomination world be almonds, given that almost all of them come from California, and use a ridiculous amount of water in an area that doesn't have any to spare.
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Why?
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Potatoes, they come from South America. ;)
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2017 Cube Attain GTC Pro Disc 2016
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The way British lamb is farmed vs NZ lamb is generates massively more carbon emissions, so much so that the energy spent shipping NZ over to Britain is really negligible in the overall cradle-to-plate carbon footprint.
Currently, NZ absolutely smashes all other countries for emissions because they have so much grazing land, the animals don't need to be fed manufactured feed, and so that hugely reduces the emissions.
Plus, in Britain, in the winter the lambs often need to be kept indoors, so they're both fed and heated. In Spain it's even worse, they need to be cooled, etc etc.
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Meat in general surely?
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Is this just not an example of poor regulation - if this was a proper problem and they weren't effectively subsidised, it would be so expensive to farm the almonds in Cali that they would be farmed elsewhere, where it is not so water intensive?
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We're talking lambs, right? I don't recognise any of what you are talking about. Lambs (the ones that are eaten) don't do winters.
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Beef & Lamb, but yes, lamb especially.
Guy here owns a few farms in the UK and NZ and was telling us all about it - data backs it up if you want to look it up.
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Tell me you grew up in an arable area...😁
Lambs are born in the spring. By the next winter they are already 🥩.
1985 Mercian King of Mercia - work in progress (Hah! Who am I kidding?)
Pinnacle Monzonite
Part of the anti-growth coalition1 -
shrugs go look up the emissions and tell me I'm wrong :)
I appreciate globalisation is not the usual go-to solution for sustainable food, but it probably is going to be.
Works even better if we price in the environmental cost appropriately.
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I'd imagine their parents do have to survive the winter though!
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Beef is more from an emissions perspective as is all dairy really, but milk in particular. Palm oil and soya are terrible with regards deforestation and found in many products. Prawns are also a big environmental disaster with the destruction of mangrove swamps.
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I am intrigued by this - I grew up in lancashire on the edge of the pennine moors and the sheep are generally out eating grass on the moors where I can't see many other options for food production.
Lambs are born in spring and you're generally eating them before winter, after a year it's no longer lamb, its hogget.
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I think we need to get some more fundamental points on livestock farming and animal life cycles straight first.
I've had a quick look and it appears that the Saunders study into NZ lamb production (which is 18 years out of date) has some methodology criticism and that emissions vary far more between individual farms than they do between countries. I'm curious how you think sheep farming in the UK varies from that in NZ.
1985 Mercian King of Mercia - work in progress (Hah! Who am I kidding?)
Pinnacle Monzonite
Part of the anti-growth coalition0 -
And except in exceptionally bad winter weather, most sheep are left outside for the winter. There's a reason they grow a thick woolly fleece.
Rick's assertion (just for a change), really doesn't sound correct, or logical in the slightest.
and I think winters on NZ's south island are pretty horrible too.
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Ditto lots of the marginal land around the country. Not so much Cambridge.
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Looks like Rick is having a bit of a mare on this one. Speaking of which, horses? 😉
Furry coats in action.
The above may be fact, or fiction, I may be serious, I may be jesting.
I am not sure. You have no chance.Veronese68 wrote:PB is the most sensible person on here.0 -
Yum.
1985 Mercian King of Mercia - work in progress (Hah! Who am I kidding?)
Pinnacle Monzonite
Part of the anti-growth coalition0 -
May 2021: chrome-/https://beeflambnz.com/sites/default/files/levies/files/LCA_Lit_review.pdf
and the actual bit from Channel 4 news which made me look into it:
I mention it because it is counter-intuitive. If it wasn't, it wouldn't be worth mentioning.
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AFAIK, it's generally only early-lambing ewes that come indoors, and that's just briefly for lambing.
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I did read that Harrods git into hot water for selling line-caught wild Atlantic salmon, as it's illegal to line-catch them. Suddenly they remembered that they weren't line-caught after all.
Anyway, salmon is another thing I very rarely eat. If you read all the stuff in Private Eye about salmon farming in Scotland, you'd be put off supporting the industry by eating farmed salmon.
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They do, but they get thick wooly coats from somewhere which helps them survive. It's an interesting subject which is based on the idea that shipping meat from NZ isn't that carbon intensive.
Here is a discussion on the comparison. Essentially, one bias source criticising another one. So no real conclusion.
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Ha, yes, I stumbled on that one. The NZ report was commissioned by NZ lamb and beef producers, but I'm sure that didn't have any effect on the conclusions.
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First article says something rather different than your original claim.
C4 has a pretty shaky record on scientific rigour.
Yes, planting more trees on farms gives you some offset and improves the biodiversity of the farm, and breeding to reduce methane emission is a no brainer, but these are not exclusive to NZ.
1985 Mercian King of Mercia - work in progress (Hah! Who am I kidding?)
Pinnacle Monzonite
Part of the anti-growth coalition0 -
One of things I learnt from Covid is that it is surprisingly hard to compare even something really simple like total deaths in a country (not total deaths from Covid).
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I think the assertion that transport makes up a negligible amount of the overall carbon footprint is not remotely contentious, and so it stands to reason the places where it is more carbon efficient to farm, for whatever reason, will almost certainly be the most carbon efficient place to buy your meat from.
People love to argue over methodologies, especially when it is a counter-intuitive conclusion, but unless you can come up with a better way of measuring, dismissing it out of hand because it runs counter to your intuition is not likely to be correct.
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That's fine, but not really consistent with this over the top comment which didn't show much knowledge about lambs.
The way British lamb is farmed vs NZ lamb is generates massively more carbon emissions, so much so that the energy spent shipping NZ over to Britain is really negligible in the overall cradle-to-plate carbon footprint.
Currently, NZ absolutely smashes all other countries for emissions because they have so much grazing land, the animals don't need to be fed manufactured feed, and so that hugely reduces the emissions.
Plus, in Britain, in the winter the lambs often need to be kept indoors, so they're both fed and heated. In Spain it's even worse, they need to be cooled, etc etc.
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I mean, a quick google suggests it's not as mad as you're making out. ?
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Anything that can't easily be grown here which consequently gets shipped. Farmers get paid to have some or part of their fields for wildlife. The priority should be to grow crops, you can't get more environmentally friendly than that. Yes, hedgerows are a good idea, but beyond that !?
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RC seems to be basing his view on one shaky study commissioned by the producers who benefit from its findings.
This paper suggests that the methodology and rigour of lamb production studies is not well developed generally, and it gives a decidedly lower figure for English and Welsh lamb than the NZ report does, and suggests that within the industry there are big variations https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0308521X1300125X
Anyway, I don't eat much lamb... not that I don't like it, it's just rather expensive.
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