Going Green in Winter: Food, Part. 1, Eating less meat.

One of the greatest impacts that humans make on our environment is through food production and consumption. The massive uses of water, fertilizers, pesticides, agriculture machinery, the loss of biodiversity through monoculture, the fossil fuels used in shipping food across the globe in our recently developed global food market, the amount of waste that is produced by consumers selectivity about food appearance and buying more than they need, the disposable packaging that food comes in that ends up getting down-cycled or ends up in the landfill, the list goes on and on. It is said that cattle farming along produces more green house gasses than all of the world's transportation (cars, ships, trains, planes, etc.) combined. So, when we think of things that we can do in our daily lives to make less of a negative impact on the environment, perhaps the most logical and effective place to start is our diet. I will give here a brief overview of a couple of actions (or non-actions) that one can take, and will list further external sources for further information and implementation.

One of the biggest things that one can do in regards to their diet to help the environment is to eat less meat. I know this is a confrontational topic, and to most, giving up meat or even reducing their consumption of it is almost heretic. However, I am not here to deliver a moral argument against eating meat, nor am I going to espouse it's benefits to one's health. My personal opinions on the matters will be left aside and I'll simply be talking instead about the environmental benefits.

The very nature of the transference of energy from life form to life form tells us that animals need to consume more than they produce. Using cattle as an example, they produce about 16 times less caloric energy when eaten than they consume when eating food themselves. So, we grow  food in abundance, then feed it to cattle and get far less food from them than we would have had if we would have eaten the plant material that we grew in the first place. So, the energy that goes into planting, growing, harvesting and shipping the cattle's feed alone is a very large and unnecessary impact on the environment.  Another aspect to cattle farming that is damaging to the environment is the amount of water used in raising them. The amount of water that it takes to raise cattle is astronomical. To put it in perspective, it takes 24 gallons of water to grow a pound of potatoes. A pound of beef on the other hand takes 5,214 gallons. So, that's 99.6% more water going into creating an equal amount of beef over potatoes. In times with water shortages and droughts, where we have to be extremely careful to safeguard our resources, it is incredibly wasteful to use 99.6% more water on creating the same amount of food. Another aspect beyond water and energy is land space. It takes a lot of land to raise cattle, because they eat so much more than they produce. It takes 16 pounds of grain to produce one pound of beef, for example, and it takes a lot of acreage to grow that much grain when you consider that on average beef cattle weigh 1600 pounds. That's 25,600 pounds of grain going in to one cow. That could feed a hell of a lot more than one person. Also, taking the utility of land debate between food crops and cattle aside, there are areas of the world that are committing ecological genocide to create pasture land for cattle. The Amazon Rainforest is a prime example of this. Between 1990-2000, 80% of the deforestation that occurred in South America, a huge portion of this being the Amazon, was driving by the needs of large scale agriculture, primarily cattle ranching. So not only does it make much more sense to be able to produce far more food on much smaller space, but because the demand for pasture land would go down, the drive towards deforesting places like the Amazon would decrease.

These are statistics for beef production obviously. It is the most extreme example, but the arguments are the same for pork and poultry, just to a slightly smaller scale. It still takes much more food to produce a pound of pork or chicken, it takes much more water than it would to grow the equivalent amount of grains, fruits and vegetables. Fish results in different issues that I'll touch upon in a later post, but that are equally terrible on the environment.

So, if you want to do something to do that would reduce your negative impact on the environment, refusing to eat meat, or even simply eating less meat, will make a dramatic change. It's as easy as choosing something else at the grocery store, or ordering something else on the menu. It's as easy as just making a choice. Plus, tomatoes are pretty tasty too.

So, that is one thing that one can do to "go green", even in the dead of winter. Next we will talk about eating local and food preservation.