As I began in my second paragraph above, people do need to eat something. Right now that means sacrifice the environment if we want to keep everyone alive in the short term.
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.
IMHO going vegan is the only practical strategy for reducing the impact of your diet. You have no practical way of knowing most of what's going on in the supply chain for most products, or their true carbon footprint, but overall, the footprint of growing plants and feeding them to animals is way higher than just eating plants yourself. The laws of physics are, to some extent, "on your side" when it comes to boycotting animal products for sustainability reasons.
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.
For some people it will feel like the best way to only have some amount of blood on their hand will be a vegan diet. Obviously not all vegan diets are the same, and foods like avocado which is popular in vegan diets are quiet bad and should be avoided. Basically anything which on the purchased packet says imported from an country that has rain forests should be avoided if one want to avoid having the blood of animals that live in rain forests.
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.
> Basically anything which on the purchased packet says imported from an country that has rain forests should be avoided
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
"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."
"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)."
"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.
Cherry picking data and sources don't really convince anyone. What objective data can say is the averages from large industries. Those are useful, but also limited to those contexts.
I think you also missed that I earlier said that small scale farming and hobbyists are not scalable. There is just not enough land to feed everyone using those farming techniques. A person raising a few chickens do not need to also have a corn farm to feed them. They can just let the chicken eat grass on the yard. Large scale factory farms however do not have enough yards outside the house to feed millions of chicken, so they need to use large scale farming of animal feed. Those two farming techniques are distinctly different.
> Cherry picking data and sources don't really convince anyone
No data and no sources don't either.
> you also missed that I earlier said that small scale farming and hobbyists are not scalable
I may have, and I don't agree. Take those vast grazing areas and crop land for production of the animal feed and there would be plenty of land for both new forests and new small scale farms doing the farming the right way (fruits, vegetables, small fields with plenty of trees in between, ponds and a lot of biodiversity).
> Large scale factory farms
We don't really need those. We have them now, and it may look now like its the only thing that could support our civilization, but that's the big ag propaganda talking - there are many other systems of farming we could switch to.
It may look very different, but the effectivity may/would be many times higher than it's now - it would need new machinery and it's knowledge intensive, but it was proven it can be done (see syntropic agriculture, food forests, agroforestry, permaculture atc.).
Some changes are needed on political & economic level, but agriculture production is a major driver of the Earth system exceeding planetary boundaries, so there's that.
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.