Not to mention: that Quorn stuff and veggie burgs and the like - that's processed food. Which always takes more resources to produce than whole foods.

I'm a meat eater (not a lot of meat, and trending very much toward "conscience carnivore" these days, with almost all sources of animal products being local and mostly organic), but I am a whole-foods, cook-for-yourself devotee. The waste involved in processed foods includes water, energy, packaging materials, food itself...not so nice.

I'm sorry so many in the mass media are choosing to have the vegetarian vs. meat-eater conversation instead of the processed-food vs. whole-food, and local vs. industrial, conversation.

I'm not even a vegetarian, it's just that organized lying annoys me.

I spent a huge amount of willpower altering my diet enough to get from 42'' waist trousers back to 32'', just don't have the energy left for another big change to my eating habits.

I've been mostly vegetarian for most of my life but recently started eating meat a little mainly to check that I am cooking it OK.

I have no idea what Quorn is.

I cook everything from scratch - although admittedly I choose to feed my boys Australian beef over Japanese or American. They have beef maybe once a week. We eat lots of tofu but then we live in an Asian country where that's normal.

Quorn is the leading brand of mycoprotein food product in the UK and Ireland!

Basically a high-protein fungus used to make meat-like products. They taste OK, and I like the sci-fi-ness of it, but there was a big fuss when they started selling it in the US.

I keep flirting with going all vegetarian. Meanwhile I eat less and less meat. Though I doubt I'll ever give up fish and seafood.

I'm curious to hear how tofu is so environmentally unfriendly. It's processed, but it's not really that processed, is it? I've known people who make their own. There is at least one tofu factory in the neighborhood and it doesn't seem like a very high-impact operation.

Good question enn.

Looking a bit deeper, one factor seems to be UK-centric. Soybeans don't grow well in Britain, so to make tofu a lot of stuff has to be moved long distances.

Also they say:

Some substitute crops required are currently only grown overseas (e.g. soy, chick pea, lentils). The land required for all these crops to replace beef and lamb is about 1,352 kha, compared with about 135 kha to supply concentrates for ruminant meat now. So, the substitution of beef and sheep meat with Quorn, tofu and pulses clearly demands more overseas land. Part of this is because two major crops selected for substitution are low yielding (lentils and chick peas at <= 1 t/ha). Were higher yielding pulses used, this demand would clearly be reduced.

They mostly refer to other papers for the energy requirements though, there are references in the PDF file on page 21.

In my experience (and pretty much lots of it, by now), most people start off going veg by switching to highly-processed "fake meat" foods. It's kind of "comforting" to them, of course. BUT if they stick with veggie-ism, eventually they start eating more veggies and fruits and whole grains as they lose their ingrained, habitual taste for meat foods and slowly learn that processed carbs and too much hydrolyzed, isolated soy protein isn't good. For some, the irony of being veggie and living on "fake meat" sets in as well.

A large percentage of the veggies I've known have eventually gone vegan, as they learn that the milk and dairy industry are perhaps crueler than the meat industry (for example, milk cows are kept constantly pregnant so they lactate, then are severely distressed and depressed when their babies are taken away, then their babies mostly end up as veal), and also many veggies go vegan as they learn the incredible link between casein (milk protein, present in incredibly concentrated dosages in cheese) and cancer. Most vegans end up mostly off the processed fake meats, although a small percentage are die-hard junk foodies, and some like the occasional pepperoni or "not dog" or such treat that reminds them of childhood.

The vegans who stick with it and get off the processed junk just naturally start getting a physical, mental and emotional high off the good food (and all the phytonutrients, which can only be found in plants), and a large percentage of these vegans go somewhat or mostly raw. Even partial raw foodies usually stay off the Morningstar Farms and Boca and such products.

Vegan athletes (some of whom are freakin' impressive MONSTERS) almost always end up at least 80% raw. They view processed vegan junk food as a waste of time: it takes energy to digest it, and there's little or no payback to justify this.

I'm not preachin'. Just sayin'. Yeah, this "being vegetarian is bad for the environment" meme is a load of shite. But you're bound to have ignorant backlash, what with all the mainstream media attention on the "going veg saves more emissions than switching from a Hummer to a Prius" issue. The Atlantic jumped on it just yesterday.