Very few people seem to talk about how not all plant based diets are equal and how some common favorite luxuries can be almost as bad as meat.
For example it requires about 1.1 gallons of water to grow a single almond. Worse yet not all water is created equal. An almond requires 1.1 gallons of California water. An area where water is pretty much the most significant environmental factor.
Not only that but that almond was most likely grown by the Resneks, who are the wealthiest farmers in the US, who have through corruption and political connections stolen 50% of California’s water. Stealing it from residents, the environment, municipal uses (needed to fight fires), and other smaller farmers.
And it doesn’t stop with almonds. Some of people’s most favorite hyped plant foods have some of the worst environmental impacts when compared to the broader collection of plant based foods.
Avocados are another high water demand item that is grown in arid regions like Mexico or Chile.
Pistachios fall under almost the same circumstance as the almonds, also being a crop dominated by the Resnecks. Pistachios are actually how the Resnecks got into farming, seizing on the opportunity when sanctions on Iran blocked imports.
Two notes here that go against popular diet trends that I suspect are manufactured. One is that the cost of food often reflects loosely the resources (and the scarcity of resources) that went into it. Very expensive, sometimes labeled superfoods, are often not environmentally efficient. Sometimes those superfood claims are bunk. The other which is a similar argument is that many have been sold on a Mediterranean diet. There is some evidence that the Mediterranean diet is quite good. But that does mean for everyone to partake in that diet growing things in arid regions at scale that our environment might not actually support. Yes the Greeks classically ate a Mediterranean diet quite naturally. But that was before there was 8 billion people on the planet all trying to adopt what popular consensus tells them is the best diet. Do we have the resources for everyone to eat a Mediterranean diet?
And the reason to consider that our favorites might be manufactured goes back to the Resnecks. The wife of that family is one of the most skilled marketers humanity has ever seen. This family has also owned Fiji water and created POM wonderful. Remember when Pomegranate juice was the health fad? All science seemed to say this was super juice and if you drank it you would automatically be healthy. That was all manufactured by Mrs Resnek. She funded many of those studies, many of which now fall flat.
Fiji water? It’s not special. You’re just taking water from Fiji residents who need it, to have it shipped by boat across the pacific in a boat. Just so you know the fuel needed to move a boat at constant speed through water is roughly proportional to the boat’s displacement. Meaning basically shipping fuel scales with the weight of the good being shipped. Last I checked water is heavy. The cost of Fiji water is the fuel being burned to push water through water.
Long story short, a lot of the most green people I know have entirely bought in on one family’s marketing hype that if you buy their over priced luxury foods that you will be healthier and be a better more green person. When in reality you are buying the highest resource demanding foods per nutrition offered, that aren’t that much better than meat.
If you really want to save the environment eat the cheapest diet possible. If not to save money then to consume a less resource demanding diet. Look at what more traditional people who eat plant based diets eat, often on some of the tightest budgets. One of the best places to look is India. The major bottleneck to human nutrition on such minimal resource diets is protein. This is why in Indian cultures which sustain hundreds of millions on plant based diets use lentil and chickpea in everything. If you want to save the planet eat lentils and chickpeas and rice. Some diversity is good for the sake of health. But if you want to eat the most environmental diet at least give yourself a baseline of lentils, chickpeas, and rice, and add from there. Then besides that there is endless produce besides almonds and avocados that are many times more efficient. Again look at the price tag. A low price tag means that it took few resources to grow, or grew in an area that isn’t resource starved where the environment has resources to spare, and the fuel used for distribution is low.
Find a more environmental place to spend your money than luxury foods. Or don’t. Save it. A dollar saved pays dividends every month in the sense of security in not living pay check to pay check even before it returns interest. Just don’t waste it on hyped non-green green foods. Does anyone think avocado toast is actually good? No. It’s just some California Resnek propaganda bullshit that you were told to like to seem cool. Aka manufactured bullshit.
The next time someone tells you to start eating an expensive food to unlock your health, at least double check that the Resnek’s aren’t growing it. Because if they are it might be some bs they floated out there. Pay a small number of health shills very little to all start saying the same thing around the same time, then other health influencers jump on the bandwagon just looking for something to talk or blog about for want of content. It’s very easy to hawk some specialty food.
Sources:
https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2010/09/ftc-complaint-charges-deceptive-advertising-pom-wonderful
https://www.motherjones.com/environment/2015/01/almonds-nuts-crazy-stats-charts/
https://watercalculator.org/news/articles/fiji-water-locals-dry/
I feel like people buying trendy food are going to do it whether they’re “plant based” or not.
Besides, by the wisdom of the grifters, meat based is clearly the trendy choice at the moment.
baseline
Rice is fine, but all dry grains have a similar cost (less per unit of nutrition than everything else you would eat). I personally prefer oats as my base.
This seems to be above all a hit piece against one rich Californian family.
But I think you make some good points.
Yes the Greeks classically ate a Mediterranean diet quite naturally. But that was before there was 8 billion people on the planet all trying to adopt what popular consensus tells them is the best diet. Do we have the resources for everyone to eat a Mediterranean diet?
This is reasoning that I share, but almost never hear from others. It is never “sustainable” to do something (anything) unless you are sure that everybody else could do it too. I’m always surprised by how many people, otherwise thoughtful and responsible people, do not really seem to get this. There’s an awful lot of solipsism.
To live in the countryside with one’s own farm and raise one’s own animals, etc - maybe it’s counter-intuitive but none of this is sustainable. There are simply too many of us, there’s simply not enough land. We need economies of scale.
Something worth repeating is that animal products still come out worse even comparing to some of the worst offenders of plants. Should we try to pick better plants too, yes, but getting people to pick plants at all is going to matter much more
Plant-based foods have a significantly smaller footprint on the environment than animal-based foods. Even the least sustainable vegetables and cereals cause less environmental harm than the lowest impact meat and dairy products [9].
https://www.mdpi.com/2072-6643/14/8/1614/html
Cattle feed is also actually the largest drainer of Colorado river, not almonds. Yes, almonds are worse than other plants, but it still pales in comparison to Dairy & Beef water usage
One graph even has California’s animal feed water usage so large it actually goes off the chart at 15.2 million acre-feet of water (it is distorted to make it fit as it notes). For some comparison, the blue water usage of animal feed is larger than all of almonds water usage of ~2 million acre-feet of water
https://pacinst.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/ca_ftprint_full_report3.pdf#page=25
Correspondingly, our hydrologic modelling reveals that cattle-feed irrigation is the leading driver of flow depletion in one-third of all western US sub-watersheds; cattle-feed irrigation accounts for an average of 75% of all consumptive use in these 369 sub-watersheds. During drought years (that is, the driest 10% of years), more than one-quarter of all rivers in the western US are depleted by more than 75% during summer months (Fig. 2 and Supplementary Fig. 2) and cattle-feed irrigation is the largest water use in more than half of these heavily depleted rivers
https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1064&context=wffdocs
Per liter, dairy milk requires 628.2 L of freshwater vs almond milk requiring 371.46 L of freshwater. If you use something like oat milk instead that does get you down to 48.24 L. But it’s not as clear cut which plant-milk is the best across all environmental metrics - almond milk has the lowest emissions for instance. What is more clear is that dairy is the worst across all metrics
OP still has a point that from a resource standpoint almonds are ludicrously ineffective compared to many other foods
I love a good macaron but I rarely eat them and I generally avoid nut milks because they are unnecessary and still terrible from an environmental standpoint. Yes, they are better than animal products, but that is a low bar.
I’m not saying one should avoid them entirely of course, but making them a key part of your diet is probably a bad idea, especially on a large population sized scale
Switched from almond to oat milk, partially because of that. I’m not vegan, but I try.
Oat milk just goes the hardest anyway, even more so than milk
I have a serious problem with oatmilk and Kashi peanut butter protein cereal. I can’t stop eating it.
Chapo had a recent episode (ep. 899) about the Wonderful brand in light of the California wild fires that I think people should listen to; they interviewed the creators of the documentary Pistachio Wars and get into the many many problems with the industry.
Good thing my walnuts are local and completely unproblematic.
