- Position‹2 of 2
- Cons of vegetarianism
- Argument1 of 3›
Vegetarianism can have a large carbon footprint
A vegetarian diet can harm the environment due to eating fruits/vegetables that are imported because they aren't locally in season.
The argument
Popular fruits such as blueberries and strawberries are often imported in by air when they're out of season locally. Meanwhile, millions of hectares of forest have been cleared in the past years to make land for the production of palm oil, soy, and cacao. Other foods like nuts, rice, olives, and oats require thousands upon thousands of liters of fresh water for a single kilogram. A purely vegetarian diet can be seriously detrimental to the environment. The carbon footprint of a vegetarian, depending on what he/she eats, could be as large as that of the average meat eater.
Premises
Counter-arguments
The argument selects worst cases and presents them as the norm. Air-freighted out-of-season berries, water-intensive almonds and deforestation-linked palm oil are real issues, but they are not what a typical vegetarian diet consists of, and life-cycle analyses consistently find that plant-based diets have substantially lower greenhouse-gas footprints than meat-inclusive ones — beef in particular is far more emissions-intensive per kilogram than almost any plant food, because livestock add the inefficiencies of feed production, land use and methane on top of the very transport and water costs the argument attributes to crops. 'Can be as large as the average meat eater's' is a claim about a deliberately badly-chosen vegetarian diet, not the average one; it shows that some vegetarian choices are high-impact, not that vegetarianism as such carries a large footprint. The genuine point — that not all plant foods are low-impact and that sourcing matters — is a case for eating seasonally and locally, not evidence against vegetarianism's environmental advantage.
Rejecting the premises
[Rejecting P3] That a vegetarian's footprint 'can be as large as' a meat eater's describes a deliberately high-impact diet, not the average, so it does not show vegetarianism generally has a large footprint. [Rejecting P1] Air-freighted berries and water-intensive nuts are selected worst cases, not typical of vegetarian eating, and life-cycle studies find plant-based diets are lower-emission on average, with beef far higher.