Animal Alternatives

Introduction

Plants based food can be amazing in all it's unique variety. Some of us love eating whole foods including vegetables, fruits, mushrooms, herbs, seaweeds, and so on. However it can be hard when you first start exploring plant-based eating, but are used to meat, dairy, eggs, and fish. It's perfectly normal to crave comfort foods, traditional dishes, and we can often end up feeling left out during festive seasons when everyone else eats casseroles or yummy deserts and we're left with some vegetable side dishes in the early days before we and our loved ones work out all the amazing substitutes that are available to recreate these same foods, but in an eco-friendly form.

What's On This Page

This page is mostly a directory to more specific animal alternative pages since some (especially our seafood alternatives page) ended up quite large, but also offers some smaller sections such as the Bees section which offers a few honey and wax alternatives. There will also be some info about non-food alternatives such as links directing you to leather alternatives, and some other products people may not realize come from animals (for example pregnant horse urine used for hormone regulating drugs) which also rely on cruel and unsustainable practices.

How this Page is Organized

Currently the contents of this page are alphabetical, but if you want to understand how to have the most impact when substituting animal products we strongly recommend checking out this page and graph which help demystify which products have the most or least impact CO2-wise. Our World in Data has a whole range of useful pages and graphs helping to demonstrate the impacts of different human activities on the planet including water use, deforestation, illegal vs sustainable fishing maps, and more.

Bees

Bees are extremely important pollinators, but did you know honey bees are only one type and can be invasive in countries where they have been introduced, such as North America? Not only does this mean honey bees are using up food sources of native bees, but they can carry diseases and are routinely transported across country following different harvests. This not only helps disease and dangerous parasites spread further, but the emissions hurt the bees as well as our environment.

Honey Alternatives

Brands

Recipes

Birds

Bird's Nest Soup

Bird's nest soup has nearly driven the species of swallows to extinction who make these unique nests with their spit. Recently people have started living in the downstairs of their homes while allowing the swallows to live in the upstairs portion of their homes. This makes harvesting the nests easier and safer then when the birds were nesting on extremely tall cliffs, but has change the behavior of the birds, so they are apparently diverging from the wild (almost extinct) birds. 

Another issue with this situation, is that the birds' "guano" (shit) piled up on the floors of these homes, seeps through the floors and can drip onto the people living below, along with their food and drinks. As we have (hopefully!) learned from our most recent animal-to-human-transmitted pandemics (Covid and Bird Flu), this could brew disasters results for these people and others.

Alternative: Snow Fungus

Poor-Man's Bird Nest Soup can be made from "white fungus" or "snow fungus" aka. Tremella fuciformis

According to this source "some researchers found that the collagen content in the white fungus is comparable to the bird's nest. Instead of spending thousands of dollars in bird nest, we can buy the fungus at about HKD10 per tael (~38g). Therefore, white fungus is dubbed as ‘poor man’s bird nest’.

White fungus has been prized for its medicinal benefits, namely anti-inflammatory and anti-tumour. In Chinese families, it is commonly used in soups cooked for soothing purposes like nourishing the bodies, healing dry coughs and clearing heat in the lungs. It is also said that eating white fungus could help keep our skin young due to the collagen content in it."

Rock Sugar & White Fungus Soup (Dessert)



Effects of this recipe: This is a very popular recipe in Chinese culture. It can help lung function, beautify and moisten skin. You can have it two times a week, especially in very dry or very hot weather.


White Fungus & Pear Soup (Savory)



Effects of this recipe: Help to stop a dry cough, bowel movement and balance lung function. You can have this two times a week.


White Fungus Porridge


Effects of this recipe: strengthen lung function and help bowel movement. - Blue Melon Recipes (these have been slightly edited/reformatted for use on this site)

Chicken

There are only 8.1 billion humans on Earth at the time this has been written (November, 2023), yet "Worldwide, estimates suggest more than 70 billion chickens are killed each year, not including chickens killed by the egg industry." Chickens can naturally live for 8-15 years, but meat birds are killed at around 40-70 days old (depending on the country, farm type and when the animals start to die from heart attacks, infections, and go lame from broken legs). Laying hens generally live for 20 months, or around 2 years before their bodies can no longer keep up with the demand for eggs, and male chicks in the egg industry are routinely killed the same day they hatch. Usually fully conscious in a meat grinder, via crushing, suffocation in a trash bag, or via gassing.

Chicken became very popular as a meat because of myths that they are healthier as well as their generally lower ecological footprint compared to beef. However this led to their population exploding, making them the second biggest driver of deforestation behind cattle, since the soy that officially takes second place, is primarily turned into chicken feed.

Chicken Eggs

Chickens can naturally live for 8-15 years, but meat birds are killed at around 40-70 days old (depending on the country, farm type and when the animals start to die from heart attacks, infections, and go lame from broken legs). Laying hens generally live for 20 months, or around 2 years before their bodies can no longer keep up with the demand for eggs, and male chicks in the egg industry are routinely killed the same day they hatch. Usually fully conscious in a meat grinder, via crushing, suffocation in a trash bag, or via gassing.

Some people opt to raise back-yard chickens instead of factory farmed, but don't realize that the majority of chicks come from the same factory farms that sell to egg and meat farms. Meaning the majority of males are still slaughtered since they can't lay eggs, meaning there is little market for them. The remaining males usually end up being killed as adults or overwhelming animal sanctuaries.

Goose

"Not only does farming geese cause animal suffering, but its environmental impact is cause for alarm, as faeces and antibiotics end up polluting the surrounding land. According to the US Environmental Protection Agency, foie gras operations have breached countless environmental laws. According to Animal Equality, Hudson Valley Foie Gras, the largest foie gras farm in the US, has violated multiple Clean Water Act obligations over the last decade and has faced numerous inspections with thousands of dollars in fines. And by relying on feeding animals that would breathe out CO2, the carbon footprint of geese farming is high, contributing to our current climate crisis.

Farming geese also help to spread pandemics. The most recent avian flu outbreak in the US took place in 2022, and in 2021, France’s avian flu outbreak largely occurred on foie gras farms." - The Cruel Reality of Farming Geese

Recipes

Pheasant

Many people assume that hunting game birds means they are relying on what nature provides, however nature can't keep up with the demand and countries like to claim that "hunting supports conservation" to encourage people to keep up the "tradition", as a result millions of birds are raised in factory farms to help supply countrysides around the world with "wild" game birds, or worse import exotic game bird species who can have unfortunate impacts, pushing our own natives closer to starvation.

According to a new report of the UK's hunting industry:

The UK's hunting industry is the worst in Europe, but countries like the USA also import exotic birds just to be shot, and experience the same types of ecological consequences.

Alternatives

Cattle

Cattle are the main global driver of deforestation, causing 5 times more deforestation than any other sector. Their population is much lower than some smaller species, but they cause some of the worst air and water pollution, erode soil, damage waterways, and are helping to drive a large number of species to extinction.

Beef

Beef farming is particularly problematic as it has driven between 80-90% of deforestation in the Amazon. When introduced to islands such as Hawaii, they have helped strip native vegitation to the point of extinction, and with less roots to hold the soil in place, landslides are becoming a greater risk. As the vegitation has been stripped 

Horses

Horse meat and dairy is consumed in various places around the world, but is illegal in others. For example it's illegal to butcher horses for meat in the USA, yet millions of horses are slaughtered for meat eat year, including horses exported from the USA.

Horse Meat

"U.S. horsemeat is dangerous to humans because of the unregulated administration of numerous toxic substances to horses before slaughter. In the U.S., horses are raised and treated as companion animals, not as food-producing animals. Unlike animals raised for food, the vast majority of horses sent to slaughter will have ingested, or been treated or injected with, multiple chemical substances that are known to be dangerous to humans, untested on humans or specifically prohibited for use in animals raised for human consumption. Horses are gathered from random sources at various stages in their life, and there is no system in the U.S. to track medications and veterinary treatments given to horses to ensure that their meat is safe for human consumption. Due to concerns about the health threats of drug-laced horsemeat, the European Union (EU), a primary importer of North American horsemeat, suspended horsemeat imports from Mexico—where 87 % of horses slaughtered for export to the EU are of U.S. origin. EU authorities made the decision after a series of scathing audits that exposed a plethora of problems, including the lack of traceability of American horses and horrific suffering on U.S. soil and in Mexico."  -  US Humane Society

Recipes

Horse Milk

Just like cows and goats, female horses must be impregnated over and over to keep them producing milk. The problem is their babies must be removed for them to produce enough to be economically valid, and horses haven't been bred with over-sized udders like the other "dairy animals". There is already a problem with people breeding more horses than there are loving homes to accept, meaning that breeding these extra foals will lead to more horses taking up valuable space and other resources from shelters, being euthanized, or worse, ending up slaughtered for meat.

People have been turning to horse milk because they can't digest cows milk, but horse milk is going to have a similar ecological footprint to cow milk due to the animal's size and diet. Diet being the largest source of livestock-created emissions. One major benefit of switching to plant-based milks is that we no longer have to worry about dairy allergies or lactose intolerance, but all plant milks we've encountered have much smaller ecological footprints than dairy from animals, in terms of land-use (including deforestation), water use and water pollution, as well as emissions.

Pregnant Mare Urine (PMU)

"Premarin is a very common drug prescribed to millions of women worldwide as a hormone replacement therapy. The name stands for PREgant MAres uRINe, as the drug is produced from the hormones present in the mare's urine. The horses used to produce this drug are referred to as "PMU" horses, for short. 

Premarin is created by collecting the urine of pregnant mares. The mares are kept in small standing stalls in order to limit their movement, so not to displace the urinary bladder bags used to collect every drop of urine. The mares are kept in this manner for a lengthy portion of their pregnancy, normally about six months. Once the mares are full term and ready to deliver, they are turned out to have their foals. The mares are able to nurse their foals until weaning age, about 4 months, at which time they are separated and the mare is bred back to repeat the whole process again. This cycle of breeding has created an overabundance of unwanted foals, most of which are sold to the slaughter industry.

PMU farms used to exist all across the USA and were also prevalent in Canada. Conditions at PMU farms vary, and some farms work very diligently to place their unwanted foals. Many others are not as responsible.  Due to increasing pressure of animal welfare regulation, and public outcry over the horrible fates often suffered by the foals, current PMU production has moved overseas." - Gentle Giants Draft Horse Rescue: PMU Industry

Grants & Funding

International