This is what I thought - I just wanted to make sure I hadn’t failed to consider something obvious. Am meeting up with some old friends who are science geeks next month and wanted to throw out the line “for all we know, the center of the galaxy exploded 25,999.9 years ago and we could all die tomorrow” and I didn’t want anyone coming back with “well actually…we would have detected that by now thanks to technology xyz that was in ivented in 20XX”.

I think it would have been fair to have a rule saying “no surgical modifications”… because doing things like facelift, nose-job, breast/buttox implants, cheek lifts, wrinkle removal, etc, are obviously unfair advantages (in a beauty contest) for those who have the money pay for it; and having a generic blanket rule like that would have accomplished the same thing they were trying to accomplish without being so blatantly transphobic… so a rule like what they have only proves that they are both despicable AND dumb. The entire notion of beauty pageants is outdated and stupid if you ask me.

This crucially important caveat they snuck in there:

“Prof Scarborough said: “Cherry-picking data on high-impact, plant-based food or low-impact meat can obscure the clear relationship between animal-based foods and the environment.”

…which is an interesting way of saying that lines get blurry depending on the type of meat diet people had and/or the quantity vs the type of plant-based diet people had.

Takeaway from the article shouldn’t be meat=bad and vegan=good - the takeaway should be that meat can be an environmentally responsible part of a reasonable diet if done right and that it’s also possible for vegan diets to be more environmentally irresponsible.