I realize that most people will read this and go "haha, see that triggered vegan", but please take a moment to honestly consider how horribly bad this article is.

The article (besides being about vegetarians and vegans who turned butcher, for some self-contradictory reasons) is about the benefits of grass-fed, expensive meat versus soy- and corn- fed meat. The main benefit is that it's healthier for the animal, and therefore "nicer" for the animal, and also more environmentally friendly.

However, it is not at all more environmentally friendly. The impact on the environment is actually a lot higher, because now you need to dedicate large portions of land to grass-fed animals. And yes, there are plenty of areas that don't seem to grow any proper food but do grow grass, which makes it sound like it's a perfectly valid plan. But even if you cut down every forest on earth and use every arible piece of land for grass-fed animals, you would still not have enough space on earth to support our current demand for meat in such a way.

They hint towards this a little bit, and suggest that people can counterbalance this by only eating a little piece of meat. But then that is the "real" solution here: to severely reduce your meat consumption. The whole part about grass-fed vs corn-fed is not at all relevant to the story after this point, it's all about reducing consumption. After all, if you only ate a little bit of meat, it would STILL be more sustainable to eat corn/soy-fed meat instead of grass-fed meat.

Of course, that's exactly what vegetarians and vegans are doing: they're reducing the amount of meat they eat.. but instead of stopping at, say, 10% of what the average person eats normally, they stop at 0%. And they are often demonized because of that last 10%, whereas stopping at 10% apparently makes you some kind of noble hero.

Also, there are some pretty insane lines in this article:

> [...] a vegan for five years <attended a> “Kill Your Own Thanksgiving Dinner” event at a local farm.
> “It was really morbid. I was the only one who signed up,” she said.

If you're a vegan, and you care about animals, why were you signing up for a "kill your own turkey" event? That sounds like one of the least vegan thing you could do.

> After spending her high school and college years subsisting on a vegetarian diet of flavored yogurt, Gardenburgers, pizza pockets and mac and cheese with frozen vegetables mixed in, she began eating meat again in Europe, where she worked on farms for a few years.
>“As soon as I started eating meat, my health improved,” she said.

So she stopped eating junkfood and her health improved. This is framed as if it's somehow bad to be vegetarian/vegan for your health, but I hope any skeptical reader will see her problem was a horrible junkfood diet, not that she was vegetarians. How many meat-eaters can be healthy on only eating pizzapockets, yoghurt and hamburgers?

> “I have a business based on the fact that I’m sad about the way animals are being treated,” he said.

No, you have a business making a profit from the death of animals.

> “Since I became a butcher I’ve been called some horrible things on the internet, and it doesn’t seem right,” [...] “There’s a larger problem here: the problem with concentrated feedlots, and with animals being commodities. That’s what we should be attacking, not each other. ”

That's like saying "Hey, I treat my slaves really well! We should be fighting the bad slave-holders, not the good ones."
No, (ethical) vegans are against using animals as products, and that's what they're commenting on. Not whether or not your meat is healthy.