By now everyone knows that intensive farming has a terrible impact on the environment.
Stopping eating meat can therefore be a way to reduce damage to the planet, but even alternative diets aren't all that beneficial to the ecology.
On the other hand, if we wanted to focus on a food that is present in abundance and has a low impact, we would only have to eat corn, but it would be a catastrophe for our body.
With a study published in the journal Scientific Reports, a research team may have found the balance between the right diet and environmental protection.
The research team, led by Gidon Eshel, calculated the changes that would occur if all Americans replaced their consumption of beef, chicken and pork on a vegetarian diet.
What would happen
Stopping eating meat would bring an immediate cut of 280 billion kilos of carbon dioxide per year. It is almost double the emissions that all Italian cars produce every year.
Get the meat away
Cows, sheep and poultry alone contribute to a fifth of all greenhouse gases released into the atmosphere. That's more than planes, ships, trucks and cars combined on the entire planet.
Intensive farming also contributes to deforestation and to the consumption of water and soil (30% of the world's soil is used for livestock and its feed).
Eshel's team therefore calculated the consequences of a sudden switch to plant foods of equal nutritional value. Land consumption (calculating that obviously more vegetable food would be produced) would decrease overall from 35% to 50%.
In numbers
A cut of 29 million hectares of cultivated land, 3 billion kilos of fertilizer.
All right, in short? No, not everything. Water consumption, for example, would grow by 15%.
The green alternative
The equivalent plant diet model, which would replace the consumption of carne offering the same nutrients (including proteins, vitamins and fatty acids) it would include soy, green chillies, asparagus, tofu and buckwheat.
These last two vegetables in particular require only 12% of water and fertilizer and less than 22% of the land used for the nutritional equivalent of meat.
The “impossible” revolution
These figures (combined with the effects of climate change) make us understand why the "vegetable" meat or synthetic hamburger industry is growing.
In 2019, this market has grown enormously, and it is estimated that it could reach a value of over 6 billion dollars by 2023.
According to the analysis company AT Kearney, by 2040, 60% of "meat-shaped" products will actually be made up of vegetables.
