This is such a hopefully encouraging piece. Thank you for doing this great work!

Thanks for this great piece about the Foodprint resolution. It's so important that the various constituencies that care about food, justice, sustainability, animals and the climate work together. Jasmin's article lays out all the arguments for why, and points the way to needed changes in policy - and individual and institutional practice. We need to read more articles like this and then take action.

My family is vegan but I'm just a quiet, lead by example, kind of vegan. Not really and activist but I wish I had more of a voice, like Jasmin here. Keep cranking out articles like this- they're very informative.

Thanks to afrench and Jane for exploring the issue further. I do believe that eating lower on the food chain for the greatest proportion of our food is much better. I do believe the current population of the world is not sustainable in the long term if we are going truly integrate human and behavior and the natural world in order to survive. Long-term projections indicate that human pop will peak at the end of this century. I hope that alone will lead to lower impacts from our food system. But we can do more. As I wrote earlier, the current dominant meat production paradigm is inhumane and unsustainable, but there are alternative, sustainable systems emerging, I encourage Jane to look into Polyface Farm in VA. That farm owned and operated by Joel Salatin has set off a whole new approach taking root across the land. Salatin has learned how to mimic natural biological cycles/systems to raise many species together thereby minimizing external energy inputs. Sun and symbiosis create the energy upon which the meat is produced: chicken, pork and beef. Moral judgments are a human construct and we need them to minimize violence and intolerance, but we must remain open to the fact that they are subjective and can change with new information. One way to find good information that will allow new interpretations of what is morally acceptable is to look at the natural world to see what lessons it teaches about what is truly sustainable. Like you Jane, I too believe that morality and sustainability are linked. I am positive that the crises of the next century will make that totally clear.

Andrew, are you for real? Do you even have a clue as to what is involved with animal production, or are you posting quotes like that as a means to make yourself feel better about partaking in the most cruel and commodified industry imaginable? Vast tracts of land are needed to grow crops to feed the billions of animals we raise for food each year. According to scientists at the Smithsonian Institute, the equivalent of seven football fields of land is bulldozed every minute, much of it to create more room for farmed animals. Of all the agricultural land in the U.S., nearly 80 percent is used in some way to raise animals—that's roughly half of the total land mass of the U.S.10 More than 260 million acres of U.S. forest have been cleared to create cropland to grow grain to feed farmed animals. You keep talking about "sustainable meat" but there seem to be two very distinct flaws there: One is that what you call "sustainable" is also unrealistic and elitist. There's not enough land to produce animals in that way. In order to produce animals sustainably, we'd have to drastically cut down the animals we produce anyway. Plus, it's way too expensive for factory farms to make that conversion. It makes a lot more sense as far as I'm concerned to just cut out the animal section entirely, or, as someone else said, drastically reduce it. Another thing to keep in mind is the cruelty element. Even if it is what you call "sustainable," it does not escape the cruelty that is inherrent (you cannot make milk without creating veal calves; you cannot make eggs without gassing the boy chicks alive and eventually killing the hens once they are "spent"). I consider myself an environmentalist, but I have to say, I just don't understand environmentalists who turn off animal cruelty issues as if it were a light switch. There needs to be balance between the two. Andrew, your quote gave me a much-needed morning chuckle, so thank you for that.

I actually found the article that Jane posted was really interesting, especially in terms of what you are saying. http://www.mountainx.com/opinion/2009/070109greenwashed. I particularly liked this part:

"But let’s get back to local farms, specifically those that raise animals. Compared with factory farms, family farms do employ some environmentally beneficial practices. Yet in some ways they’re actually less eco-friendly.

Animals allowed to move around expend more calories and thus consume more resources than those crammed into tiny crates and cages. Chickens not pumped full of antibiotics and genetically manipulated to reach optimal slaughter weight at 6-1/2 weeks take longer to raise — and consume more food in the process. Cows raised on pasture produce more methane (a greenhouse gas 25 times more potent than carbon dioxide) than those crammed into feedlots.

Supporting a meat-based diet requires five times as much land as a plant-based diet, and smaller farms use even more land per animal. Additional demand for these products means deforestation, which leads to increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. The amount of land needed to produce all the meat Americans now consume by so-called “sustainable” methods would be astronomical — and it simply isn’t available. So if the answer lies in a shift from factory to family farms, much less meat will be produced.

But what about those who can’t afford or don’t have access to “elite meat”? Must they become vegetarians so that those better-off can continue their habits guilt-free? And how can something that uses so much land and other resources ever really merit the “sustainable” label?

There are definitely good reasons to support local farms. It’s great to do business with our neighbors, keep more money and jobs in our community, minimize “food miles,” eat fresher and tastier food, preserve local farmland and avoid supporting corporate agribusiness. And local farms are generally far less cruel than their industrial counterparts when it comes to raising animals."

Anyway, the interesting thing I'm noticing is that although we disagree about certain things, we all seem to agree that people should eat less animal products and more plant-based foods, or even all plant-based foods.

But one point that my wife (who is standing over my shoulder right now) pointed out to me is that an element that many people are forgetting is the cruelty-factory. Julie, I will look into that link you added, but I want to mention that though you cited processed plant-based foods like tofurkey, there are also local, organic, non-processed plant-based foods that require a lot less toll on this planet than anything else... I just feel like people come up with a lot of excuses for why they can continue to eating meat but, as my wife keeps saying, meat is cruel. You can't make chicken without killing male chicks, for example... and chickens are treated like the bottom of the barrell, because they are. It's beyond JUST the environment, here. It's also about what is humane. Ask the right questions -- of both your farmers and yourself -- that's what I'm saying.