Red meat has a huge carbon footprint because cattle requires a large amount of land and water.

https://sph.tulane.edu/climate-and-food-environmental-impact-beef-consumption

Demand for steaks and burgers is the primary driver of Deforestation:

https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2022-beef-industry-fueling-amazon-rainforest-destruction-deforestation/

https://e360.yale.edu/features/marcel-gomes-interview

https://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/stories/2023-06-02/almost-a-billion-trees-felled-to-feed-appetite-for-brazilian-beef

If you don’t have a car and rarely eat red meat, you are doing GREAT 🙌 🙌

Sure, you can drink tap water instead of plastic water. You can switch to Tea. You can travel by train. You can use Linux instead of Windows AI’s crap. Those are great ideas. Also, don’t drive yourself crazy. If you are only an ordinary citizen, remember that perfect is the enemy of good.

  • renegadespork@lemmy.jelliefrontier.net
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    1 day ago

    Here’s the perspective that helped me the most with this:

    You don’t have to quit meat (sorry for the pun) cold turkey.

    Even cutting your meat consumption by half can have a significant impact. Start by ordering a vegetarian option instead of meat every once in a while. Experiment and find veggie alternatives you actually like, there are tons of options now. I heard someone refer to this as “microdosing veganism”, and it can really help make the change less exhausting.

    Over time, you might even notice your tastes start to shift and vegan options become actually enjoyable instead of a “sacrifice”.

    • Swedneck@discuss.tchncs.de
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      10 hours ago

      what has helped me is just pivoting heavily to chicken, i used to basically just eat beef and pork, so simply eating a different kind of meat helped ease into eating non-meat meals as well.

      meat alternatives are of course great, but i also think soybeans (or similar) are very underrated, just raw green soybeans are astoundingly meat-like for being a straight up unprocessed vegetable. Great in salads.

    • Carighan Maconar@lemmy.world
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      1 day ago

      That’s meee! ✋

      I still eat meat, but quite little, and quite rarely. There’s the odd salami at home, or every few months some ham for carbonara when I get guests over, or something like that. But it’s such a small percentage of what I consume now, I feel like I’m effectively vegetarian, anyways.

      And yeah for most things I use alternatives because it turns out they’re often easier to handle. The Barista This Isn’t Milk is nice because it foams more reliably than actual milk and lasts much longer which is important as a single household.

      • JubilantJaguar@lemmy.world
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        1 day ago

        lasts much longer which is important as a single household

        This is an often-overlooked argument for veganism. If you plan carefully, you literally don’t need a fridge.

    • commie@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      1 day ago

      cutting your meat consumption by half can have a significant impact.

      i doubt it. many people have done that, and meat production grows year-over-year every year.