My girlfriend Cate is an on-again, off-again vegetarian whose New Year’s Resolution (successful so far) is to stay “on” permanently. When you’re one-half of such a relationship, you end up being a part-time vegetarian, too. While I don’t agree that eating animals is immoral (although admittedly I have qualms about the conditions under which we raise and slaughter food animals), I have been swayed by statistics about the environmental impact of my omnivorous habits. Last April, Kathy Freston wrote a good article for The Huffington Post about the environmental impact of eating meat. In summary, if every American had one meat-free day per week, the effects on the environment would be pretty significant: 100 billion gallons of water would be saved, 1.5 billion pounds of grain would be free to feed people instead of animals that feed people, and greenhouse emissions equivalent to 1.2 million tons of CO₂ would be cut. That’s nothing to sneeze at.

This article was recently submitted to the Reddit’s environmental subreddit. One sly bastard responded:

How would we save all this feed for the cattle and animal excrement again? Having the US go veg for one day wouldn't get rid of all the cows we have, we just wouldn't eat them for a day. This is fucking stupid.

Mmm, yes. Fucking stupid, indeed. I can just imagine the smug bastard reading the article and thinking, “This writer completely forgot that even if no American ate meat for a day, we’d still have to feed these fucking cows! What an idiot!” Congratulating himself on how much smarter he is than everyone else on the Internet, he no doubt nearly dislocated his shoulder trying to pat himself on the back as he furiously responded with what was, in his best estimation, a truly witty comment.

Except he completely missed the point.

And this is a common problem with nerds on the Internet: they’re so consumed with thinking they’re smarter than everyone else, that they end up narrow-minded and ignorant and, frankly, stupider than everyone else. Because if this Redditor had taken a couple minutes to think about the article, he would’ve realized a couple things.

One, the article is using an abstract concept—a meat-free day—to illustrate the concrete point that industrial agriculture has a huge environmental impact, and is especially wasteful when we use arable land and edible crops to feed animals which we then eat. The article also challenges the claim that we don’t have enough farmland to feed everyone in the world by pointing out that the grain used to feed food animals for a single day could do a lot to feed hungry humans. Obviously the writer doesn’t expect every single American to forgo meat for a day, and certainly not on the same day. But the point of an analogy is to draw a connection between a readily understood concept (not eating meat for a day) and a more complicated idea (the environmental impact of industrial agriculture).

Two, the point of the article isn’t to encourage people to stop eating meat for just one single day; the idea is that if every American made this a part of their lifestyle, then over the long term, meat consumption in the US would be cut by about 14%. While 14% on one day isn’t that much, 14% over the course of a year or decade or several decades would be very significant.

You may or may not agree with the message. There’s some weight to the claim that humans have evolved to be omnivorous, and cutting out meat may be bad for long-term health. There’s also truth to the claims that world hunger is a distribution problem, not a problem of quantity. But that’s not the point. The point is that nerds who take everything too literally are stupid. Nerds on the Internet often exhibit what I like to call “ironic intelligence”: in reality they’re probably pretty smart people, but since they spend all their time trying to assert their intelligence instead of actually thinking about issues, they just end up being blithering idiots.