Green Living

As we wrap up Meatless in May at ydt, we’re excited to hear your experiences if you participated.   Over 200 individuals joined our cause and together we collectively kept over 87,000 lbs of carbon emissions out of the atmosphere.  Where we go from here will be varied.  Many of us will continue to be “Meatless in June”,  others will consider becoming flexitarians, or are excited for their first meat (hopefully organic and free range) meal after many days of going without.  Regardless of the path you will chose, ydt hopes that you’ve enjoyed being a part of this movement and learned about the big effect that your diet has on our planet.  While we don’t think we’ll ever see a day where everyone is a vegetarian, we do believe that there can be a day where everyone is a “compassionate carnivore” and mindful of what they eat and choose to support.  And of course we’ll be here to help along the way to share what we learn and discover too.

For our last Meatless themed post, Carolyn Scott, The Healthy Voyager is here to share her thoughts on how not only being meatless-but vegan can help make a substantial impact on your healthy and fooprint.

In honor of YDT’s Meatless in May 2009, have you been inspired to green other aspects of your life?  Maybe you have started recycling, using less water in the shower or garden, using energy-efficient light bulbs, bringing your own bags to the market, buying locally-grown foods or riding your bike to get around town. All these acts applied to your daily life can help a great deal, but did you know that nothing will benefit the planet nearly as much as going all the way to a vegan diet? Yeah, it helps you get healthier because vegan diets have no cholesterol and are low fat, and easily digestible,  PLUS being vegan has a huge impact on your carbon footprint!  If you feel you’re not ready to take the plunge just yet but want to continue diminishing your carbon footprint, adopting a vegan diet for a few days a week, or just one meal a day, you could dramatically improve your health while helping out mother earth. You may even be able to keep driving that SUV (hybrid hopefully) – it does less to the earth than the following:

* As mentioned, cutting back on animal product consumption can help combat climate change. Chris Weber, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at Carnegie Mellon University, says that not eating red meat and dairy products is the equivalent of not driving 8,100 miles in a car that gets 25 miles to the gallon. While buying local meat may sound promising, only five percent of food-related emissions come from the actual transportation of the product.

* The Live Earth Global Warming Survival Handbook points out that “refusing meat” is “the single most effective thing you can do to reduce your carbon footprint.” Researchers at the University of Chicago have found that going vegan is more effective in countering climate change than switching from a standard American car to a Toyota Prius. Two other great books about how food affects our bodies and our environment are Food Revolution by John Robbins and Mad Cowboy by Howard Lyman. Both authors lived and worked in the meat and dairy industry, making their information and message incredibly poignant.

Among the benefits to our health in adopting a vegan diet, the environmental benefits are just as extraordinary. The U.N. report stated that the meat industry is “one of the … most significant contributors to the most serious environmental problems, at every scale from local to global.”

* Almost half of the water used in the U.S. is used by the animal agriculture industry. From watering crops grown to feed farmed animals, providing drinking water for billions of animals each year, and cleaning the factory farms, transport trucks, and slaughterhouses, the farmed animal industry places a serious strain on our water supply. According Newsweek, “The water that goes into a 1,000-pound steer would float a destroyer.” It takes more than 4,000 gallons of water per day to produce a meat-based diet, but a vegan only needs 300 gallons of water a day to produce her meals.

* A vegan diet not only helps conserve water, it helps reduce water pollution. The Environmental Protection Agency has found that animal factories pollute our waterways more than all other industrial sources combined. Cows, pigs, chickens, and other animals raised for food produce approximately130 times as much excrement as the entire human population. Crappy, huh?

* Massive amounts of grains and soybeans are grown to feed farmed animals. Close to 1.4 billion people could be fed with the grain and soybeans fed to U.S. cattle alone. The Worldwatch Institute says, “[M]eat consumption is an inefficient use of grain-the grain is used more efficiently when consumed by humans. Continued growth in meat output is dependent on feeding grain to animals, creating competition for grain between affluent meat-eaters and the world’s poor.”

* We could produce more food for more people if we stopped squandering our resources to raise animals. It takes 3 1/4 acres of land to produce food for a meat-eater while food for a vegan can be produced on only 1/6 of an acre of land.

So, hopefully you are thinking of your health as well as the health of our planet. If you would like more information on vegan or vegetarian foods, recipes and nutrition, feel free to visit www.healthyvoyager.com or contact me directly. In addition, there is a page of links and resources where you can find out more about vegan and vegetarianism on the site.

I adopted a vegan lifestyle over 10 years ago now and I did it for health. Health is still my number one reason for being vegan although I am happy that my personal reasons for becoming so have also created a positive impact on our world!

Happy Meatless May everyone and remember, every little change helps a lot.

Tags: carbon footprint of meat, compasionate carnivore, eating meat, meat and global warming, vegan and global warming, vegan diet, vegetarian diet