getreal, It really has little to do with palate preference, at least for a good amount of the people I know. One day you may wake up amazed with yourself when you find out that either: 1. you’ll need to eat some flesh to make it through a winter; or 2. you realize that animals indeed have died as part of an intricate, delicate, and elegant system to grow the plants you devour.

Stewart, I disagree with the numbers because they are painted with a broad brush. Your studies are not representative of new grassroots local and regional food systems where people eat mostly fruits and vegetables but also realize that sustainable survival depends on long-established relationships between humans and animals. I’m ok with the conclusions the researchers make based on the variables given, but these studies are completely blind to the many varied food systems thriving in localities around this country. You see, science is useless without reason and interpretation. It ain’t all just pure objective numbers. Nothing is.

We can’t switch to veganics even little by little, unless someone comes up with some new amazing method that I or the farmers I’m familiar with have never thought of. Possible? I guess anything is. Reality? Not in the foreseeable future. But feel free to tell me all about it in detail, including the numbers; I’m fairly interested in soil fertility.

People will eat less meat when they find that their local economy will not support large amounts of meat production. That’s part of what rebuilding a local food system is all about. It’ll never get all the way to vegan, because that’s practically impossible, but it will get us part of the way to where you want to go, Stewart, all without shipping crap across the globe and back.

I know you’re arguing for something that’s dear to you. But the premises cannot be fudged to generate the desired conclusion. We need animals and they need us; we’re not very different. Same as it ever was.

It continues to amaze me how so many people blindly refuse to accept the benefits of a plant-based diet.  The science is there supporting it, yet so many argue against it…all for a mere palate preference.  Shame on you for your lack of compassion and lack of concern for the earth and all sentient beings.

If you are going to live somewhere with a tourism based economy, then you can expect certain things.  Hotels would be one of them.

Thanks again, Velouria, for keeping the conversation where it belongs.  My commentary was about making better individual choices while considering the bigger picture.  Whether I or someone else eats 30%, 50%, or 75% local food doesn’t change the conclusion of the study, which is that consumers should modify their diets by eating foods that require less energy to produce in the first place.  When these foods come from local sources, that’s an added plus.  I’m not going to fall into that trap again of responding to “My food comes from here, where does your food come from?”  It’s a waste of time and is designed to obfuscate the topic at hand. 

One of the reasons I went into accounting was that I liked the certainty of numbers.  Funny how people keep avoiding the math questions I pose because they know the answers don’t support their arguments.