I became a #vegetarian (aspiring #vegan) almost exclusively to contribute to reduce animal #suffering.

With time, I realised that the _other_ reasons to avoid animal-based foods are surprisingly strong, too.

🧵

1️⃣ Land usage:

[Crops for human consumption make up only 23% of all agricultural land worldwide, and yet they provide 83% of all calories](http://hannahritchie.com/convergence-nutrition-sustainability/).

Plant-based calories (and proteins) are much more efficient and require way less land and water than meat and dairy.

2️⃣ Carbon emissions:

Think you can stick to your steaks and omelettes and at the same time manage to significantly reduce your carbon footprint by “eating locally”? Actually, [transport accounts for a very small fraction of carbon released in food production](https://ourworldindata.org/food-choice-vs-eating-local) (be it plant- or animal-based).

Also,

> _“most food internationally comes by ship. And, actually shipping is very carbon efficient. You're going to emit 10 to 20 times less CO₂ than trucks per kilometre and 50 times less than flying. Most of your soy or your avocados are nearly always coming by ship and shipping actually has a very, very small carbon footprint.”_

— [Hannah Ritchie](https://www.econtalk.org/hannah-ritchie-on-eating-local/#audio-highlights)

3️⃣ Number of animals affected:

You could reduce quite a lot your carbon footprint by replacing all your beef and lamb with chicken and fish (big mammals emit far more CO₂ per kg of protein than poultry and fish). The problem is, then [you would be indirectly responsible for many, many more individual animals raised in industrial farms and killed in slaughterhouses](http://hannahritchie.com/meat-environment-welfare-tradeoff/).