[cbau]

As someone arguing against vegetarians in the past, I get the point, but I actually made the switch recently, not because of ethics, but simply because of cost and laziness.

It's a silly story: I recently wrote a program to create my diet from the week based on local grocery store nutrition labels and prices for a couple hundred items, subject to constraints for calories, macronutrients (supporting my goals in the gym) and micronutrients (hit all RDIs for vitamins and minerals plus some speculative stuff). Meat is never included in the generated output because it's too expensive relative to what it offers from a nutrient perspective. All of my daily needs can be met for cheap and with minimal prep on a diet consisting basically of rice, beans, eggs, soy milk, oat milk, pea protein, Brussel sprouts, carrots, and apple juice, which works out to <$15/day for ~3000 calories; <$10/day if I remove some personalized constraints which adds lentils and substitutes cow milk in place of plant milks. Prior to my program, I was spending $20+/day buying groceries mindlessly or on takeout.

I've basically become a vegetarian out of sheer frugality and laziness (I don't like cooking and I don't like solving a puzzle to hit my macros each day). I imagine many people could be convinced to be weekday vegetarians from this angle, but it did take me several months to work through nutrition science books/videos to arrive at this point. (Shout out RP Strength.)

The other issue with my diet is that it is not optimized for taste or variety. I don't mind this (condiments go a long way and I'm pretty focused on my fitness goals), but I think I'm an outlier in this respect.

Anyway, all this to say I see an economic angle for hope, except that all messaging to the public on nutrition science is awful and confusing which leads to consumption decisions not based in any logical framework, and I doubt that behavior will change anytime soon unless we go through another economic shock.

[akudha]

I remember reading somewhere that over 80% of the grains grown in the U.S is for animal consumption, not human. Those animals are then slaughtered for human consumption. I don't know how true that number is, but even if it is half that, it is still highly inefficient and wasteful. That article also calculated the amount of resources (water especially) to produce one pound of meat vs a pound of fruits/vegetables.

None of this is rocket science, it is fairly straightforward to understand. Reducing meat consumption makes sense economically, ethically, environmentally etc. But, people like their hamburgers and their sea food and their KFC...

[cbau]

Right, makes sense. I guess going into fitness I expected meat would be important for getting protein and might be worth a premium, but it's both expensive and requires time to cook where most vegetarian products can be eaten without any prep. The only appliance I need is a rice cooker, which has had an extremely high ROI. The only animal product I can't seem to remove is eggs because of choline.