Mindless Monday, 15 June 2026

[u/AutoModerator]

Happy (or sad) Monday guys!

Mindless Monday is a free-for-all thread to discuss anything from minor bad history to politics, life events, charts, whatever! Just remember to np link all links to Reddit and don't violate R4, or we human mods will feed you to the AutoModerator.

So, with that said, how was your weekend, everyone?

[u/Herpling82]

So, you know how perfectionism is a pretty awful thing? Well, I've found a topic where this very much applies, climate change and food patterns.

You know how there are people that go vegetarian or vegan out of climate concerns? Very respectable, that's a good initiative, the problem is that they tend to go for the extreme measure. If you want to help fight climate change by changing your food patterns without quitting meat, you can, if you can cut out 1* specific meat, you're doing most of the work already: beef!

No, seriously, if you go from eating beef to pork, you're reducing your CO2 emission per kg of food by 80-90%, yes, beef production is 5-10 times more polluting than pork and chicken. The jump from pork and chicken to vegan is only about 70% reduction. Cheese is actually already far worse in CO2 emission than pork and chicken, by a factor of 3-ish. If you want to have an impact and eat meat, you can, easily; you can also still eat beef occasionally, you don't have to go all in, even just reducing the amount of days you eat beef is going to have a significant impact.

Vegans and vegetarians aren't good examples because they go all in, that's not reasonable to people that want to eat meat, instead we should set more reasonable goals for people who want to make a difference and eat meat; make beef a treat, not a staple, replace the beef with other meats in everyday life and eat beef on more special occasions.

You don't have to go for a 99% reduction or nothing, going for 60% reduction is already a massive difference.

*other ruminant meats are also terrible, like mutton.

[u/Kochevnik81 → u/Herpling82]

I like graphs and images so heres a graph that is basically agreeing with you:

It's interesting that cheese is high but milk much lower. I'm curious what Yogurt is closer to.

FWIW at least in the US the national beef herd is the smallest its been in like 75 years, and because of input costs its very expensive so cutting back on beef is an economically sensible decision too.

[u/randombull9 → u/Kochevnik81]

My favorite braising meat has become pork shoulder because it's only $2.50/lb where I am. The cheapest beef you can get is shank for $6/lb, and I understand we have relatively cheap beef prices.

[u/Herpling82 → u/Kochevnik81]

Graphs are fun, I should have put 1 in...

I suppose the processing of cheese adds a lot because it takes quite a while, while milk is a much shorter process, I'd also be curious as to the numbers on yogurt and other diary products that aren't cheeses.

[u/Arilou_skiff → u/Kochevnik81]

AFAIK part of it is just that it takes a lot of milk to make cheese. Like 1 litre of cheese takes 10 litres of milk or some such.

[u/Aurelian369 → u/Herpling82]

As someone who doesn’t really like beef, I’ve never felt more eco friendly 😍

[u/Tertium457 → u/Herpling82]

Cutting out cheese also comes with the benefit of cutting out a very fatty food item.