Most environmental scientists agree that producing food from animals has a much greater environmental and climate impact than producing food from plants with equivalent nutritional value. And, yet, all too often, when veganism is presented as an environmental action, it’s accompanied by a caveat: we need systemic change, not individual effort.
As an interdisciplinary UCLA teaching team whose research focuses on the health, climate, and environmental impacts of food systems; the environmental impact of animal agriculture; the structure of activism; and life cycle assessments, we disagree with the claim that
