Become a Sustainavore!

Eat for your health, the planet, and your values.

Become a Sustainavore!

Eat for your health, the planet, and your values.

Sustainable Dish Episode 94: Critiquing Moral Vegetarianism

On this episode of the Sustainable Dish podcast I talk to Andrew Smith about his book A Critique of the Moral Defense of Vegetarianism.

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3 thoughts on “Sustainable Dish Episode 94: Critiquing Moral Vegetarianism”

  1. Interesting podcast. I enjoyed most of it, and was pleased that Andrew had clearly done his research on plant cognition etc, which was nice to hear.
    The points he makes about population however are (unfortunately) not correct, and I was surprised to hear them coming from someone who (on the other topics at least) displayed an ability to think more broadly outside the obvious.
    In short, the reason why you can’t say ‘there’s too many of us to live sustainably on this planet” and be correct, is because you are conflating not being able to have ‘this’ world with not having any world – making the mistake in thinking that the way we live now as being the only possible way. (This is interesting because he largely avoided the same logic in thinking about vegetarianism, but falls right into it in regards to population).

    This world cannot continue, that is already certain. The real question is can our planet viably and productively host ~7bn people on it over the long term? What we know is that if so, it can’t be like this.. but we also have all the knowledge and technology required to live sustainably – but if were to somehow create that world it may well support a population this size, but it would look nothing like the world we have now. So, no we can’t save this world (nor should we), but we can and should build a better one that produces food fibre and fuel regeneratively, and uses only small amounts of energy generated renewably and designs its socio/economic/political systems to operate only within ecological limits.

  2. Something that was left out as an option for fats, is fats from hazelnuts and other tree nuts. They’re a pretty good option, and able to really help with restoring and regenerating the environment. I am fully for an omnivorous diet, I just thought I should mention it. Mark Shepard talks a lot about hazelnuts in his book Restoration Agriculture. Cheers!

    1. Tree nuts are great, but nuts are VERY calorically dense for not amazing nutrition. Their oil is largely polyunsaturated so heating it is problematic, and nuts generally have a lot of omega 6 fatty acids, the pro-inflammatory type. I don’t recommend nuts in large amounts.

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