255 grams per week. That’s the short answer to how much meat you can eat without harming the planet. And that only applies to poultry and pork.
Beef cannot be eaten in meaningful quantities without exceeding planetary boundaries, according to an article published by a group of DTU researchers in the journal Nature Food. So says Caroline H. Gebara, postdoc at DTU Sustain and lead author of the study."
Our calculations show that even moderate amounts of red meat in one’s diet are incompatible with what the planet can regenerate of resources based on the environmental factors we looked at in the study. However, there are many other diets—including ones with meat—that are both healthy and sustainable," she says.
Yes yes, I understand all that. It remains that people are using the systems argument as an excuse not to change their own lives. I’ve seen this in action and so have you. No democratic system is going to change when citizens are not lifting a finger individually.
There’s a legitimate argument to be had about the hypothesis where voters continue not to lift a finger but vote for green parties that promise to force them to. But that scenario seems to me too absurdly hypocritical and schizophrenic to be worth considering.
Of course it’s necessary to change the system, but that’s never going to happen until a critical mass of individuals put their actions where their mouths are.
I mean everyone including you does that to some level, otherwise we’d all be eco-terrorists. The small sacrifices you or I make are virtually meaningless, and are really just ways to make ourselves feel better. If you or I really put all our eggs in the basket of individual impact then we’d be blowing up oil wells. But we don’t, because we want to be comfortable just like the people “not lifting a finger”.
I would say that we don’t really live in a democratic society… More systemic change in America is driven by the will of a few powerful individuals than the voting majority.
How do you quantify lifting a finger? To reach a “critical mass” we’d still have to enact systemic change for items like education and economic safety nets. People aren’t going to “lift a finger” for something like meat consumption when they are living paycheck to paycheck in a food desert where most of their calories are coming from premade food from convenient stores.