80% of the population will starve to death if we do this. Is that what you want?
Long term we could have farming that has zero environmental impact, like vertical farming with fully contained and controlled environment. It would cost huge amount of money and with the current economical system it would be impossible to feed everyone on the planet, but the technology is technically there.
Right now however, a person should to take into account the environmental impact that different food has. Going into a store and buying a avocado will leave the buyer with some blood on their hands. They can try to reduce the amount of blood by making a difference choice depending on how a specific food is produced, but it will be more complex than just looking if it contains meat.
There ~are some plant products with well publicized ethical or sustainability scandals like coffee, chocolate, date palm, and avocados, that are worthy of looking into once you've already gone vegan. By all means look into those and try to source them carefully if you can or add them to your boycott, but be careful not to buy into the greenwashing false-equivalence that because some plant products ~are wasteful, it's OK to eat meat.
Being a mass murder of fewer victim than some other mass murders can be an important distinction for some people.
Still I would highlight that a small scale farmer or hobbyist who raises his own animals has likely less blood on their hand than a vegan who live in a city and eat imported fresh veggies.
There is also the aspect of long term strategies. Vegan diets are not sustainable and long term we do need to change how we produce food. Shell fish and seaweed are one of the few sources of food that we could produce in very large quantities without harming the environment around us. Insect farms would be an alternative, but those seems much less likely to be effective in term of changing the world.
There is a lot of green washing in crop farming. Practically all production of artificial fertilizers uses natural gas, and leaks from those operations is one of the major contributors to global warming. We have waters as large as the Baltic ocean being turned into a desert from runoff. People may feel happy to not eat fish, but fish were killed in order to produce the food that people eat. The deaths "just" happen to be a byproduct that accumulate slowly under the surface, and slowly moves towards mass extinction.
Animal farming in EU is reliant on Brazilian soy from Amazon. Nowhere on the packet you'll read this. But sure, blame avocado toasts, and ignore the fact that avocados grow on trees and as such are (may be) very sustainable. Just don't do the same stupid stuff as californians do with their almond monocultures.
> small scale farmer or hobbyist who raises his own animals has likely less blood on their hand than a vegan who live in a city and eat imported fresh veggies
https://yourveganfallacyis.com/en/vegans-kill-animals-too
https://ourworldindata.org/food-choice-vs-eating-local
> Vegan diets are not sustainable
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/may/31/avoiding... - Avoiding meat and dairy is ‘single biggest way’ to reduce your impact on Earth
https://ourworldindata.org/land-use-diets - if the world adopted a plant-based diet we would reduce global agricultural land use from 4 to 1 billion hectares
https://talkveganto.me/en/facts/suitable-for-all - a well planned vegan diet is suitable for people of all ages
https://plantbasednews.org/news/plant-based-lifestyles-imper... ... Plant-Based Lifestyles Now ‘Imperative’ For Survival, IPCC Climate Expert Says
https://www.ox.ac.uk/news/2021-11-11-sustainable-eating-chea... - Sustainable eating is cheaper and healthier - Oxford study
https://www.tech-paper.com/2022/07/plant-based-meat-by-far-b... - Plant-based meat by far the best climate investment, report finds
https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aaq0216
"Moving from current diets to a diet that excludes animal products (table S13) (35) has transformative potential, reducing food’s land use by 3.1 (2.8 to 3.3) billion ha (a 76% reduction), including a 19% reduction in arable land; food’s GHG emissions by 6.6 (5.5to 7.4) billion metric tons of CO2eq (a 49% reduction); acidification by 50% (45 to 54%); eutrophication by 49% (37 to 56%); and scarcity-weighted freshwater withdrawals by 19% (−5 to 32%) for a 2010 reference year."
https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aaw9908
"In total, the “no animal products” scenario delivers a 28% reduction in global greenhouse gas emissions across all sectors of the economy relative to 2010 emissions (table S17)."
https://doi.org/10.3390/su142114449
"Our study finds that all dietary patterns cause more GHGEs than the 1.5 degrees global warming limit allows. Only the vegan diet was in line with the 2 degrees threshold, while all other dietary patterns trespassed the threshold partly to entirely."
> There is a lot of green washing in crop farming.
Sure.
https://www.salon.com/2022/11/11/the-meat-industry-is-borrow... - The meat industry is borrowing tactics from Big Oil to obfuscate the truth about climate change
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2022/dec/09/academy-nutr... - group shaping US nutrition receives millions from big food industry
> artificial fertilizers uses natural gas, and leaks from those operations is one of the major contributors to global warming
At least 75% of those fertilizers are used for animal farming ( https://ourworldindata.org/land-use )
