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://e360.yale.edu/features/marcel-gomes-interview
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. But, don’t drive yourself crazy. If you are only an ordinary citizen, remember that perfect is the enemy of good.
Not eating red meat is so fucking easy now. If I can be an old man who went to school uphill in the snow both ways for a second, I dropped meat 20ish years ago in the US deep south, and holy fuck talk about an impossible diet. Even the vegetables had meat in them, and that is not a joke.
This is obviously going to depend on your area and how much of a food desert you’re in, but I’ve never seen so much access to so many kinds of meat replacements in average grocery stores and not just bougie upscale places. Tofu, tempeh, fake meat everything! Which isn’t even a big part of my diet, but I love having the option when I want something new.
Ten years ago I got caught by surprise bacon in frigging Pennsylvania. I’d done the “make a vegetarian meal out of sides” thing while visiting my parents.
The restaurant named all the cheeses in 5-cheese macaroni and cheese but didn’t mention that bacon was also mixed in. My mom parent-pressured me to not send it back and I ate it, suffering the gastrointestinal consequences later.