Vegan Statistics

Vincent J. Curtis

23 Dec 22

RE: We need to shift towards plant-based foods.  Op-ed by Caerina Lindman.  Lindman is a retired actuary and a member of the Waterloo Region Climate Initiative.  Published in the Hamilton Spectator 23 Dec 22.

This latest cry for Veganism contains a number of fatuous and nonsensical claims.  The claim that animal agriculture uses 83 percent of agricultural land, but produces only 18 percent of total calories is nonsense, as any observation of Alberta agriculture and cattle ranching will show.  Cattle are grazed on land not suited to modern crop growing practices, and this amounts to nowhere near 83 percent of total agricultural land.  Cattle are a tasty intermediate between meadow grass and human.

Another howler is that claim that if the world adopted a plant-based diet, we could free up 75 percent of agricultural land for “re-wilding.”  If the world isn’t eating meat, then it has to get it’s food from plants, the plants eaten by the meat providing animal; so instead of animal grazing on agricultural land, it will, in effect, have to be the humans that do.  The freeing up of 75 percent of agricultural land by becoming vegan is a fallacy; and as for “re-wilding” that’s much different from leaving fallow, and it likely impossible given where that land is.

(No amount of time is going to change prairie into forest, and instead of cattle grazing on prairie grass, it’ll be buffalo - which will have to be hunted to be kept under control as the Indians did for thousands of years.  That hunted meat is going to be sold, so choose your meat source: buffalo or cattle.)

(You have to let buffalo or cattle graze on the prairie grass, or you’ll get massive grass fires.  Fires of dry grass happens often in Alberta’s cowboy country, but suppression efforts keep them from getting out of control, as would happen if “re-wilding” were to become the policy.)

It simply doesn’t follow that the destruction of forests would occur because the food industry would force the world to eat more meat, eggs, fish, and dairy; to say nothing of the claim being a conspiracy theory.  Fish don’t grow in forests, and chickens are kept in coops with small footprints.  Rising CO2 levels and chemical fertilizers will enable an intensification of plant growth on existing land.  Besides, crops consume CO2 as much as a tree does.

What people need to understand is that the real agenda of the biodiversity crowd, which they dare not say, is that they think the human herd should be culled by 75 percent by the year 2100.  Ecojustice means the same thing; and it’s where “Just Stop Oil” leads.

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