Going veggie

I am ashamed to admit that in my household we eat quite a lot of meat. We have something containing meat or fish almost every day of the week. When I'm at university, I try to limit the amount of meat that I eat to maybe once a week. This is because producing meat is extremely energy intensive compared to vegetables or other food products. This is from The Rough Guide to Ethical Shopping (by Duncan Clark, ISBN: 1-84353-265-4), pgs 117-122:

"...most animal products are very inefficient to produce. Take beef, for instance. Producing a single kilo of intensively farmed beef typically takes around 10 kilos of grain for feed. Beef is among the worst culprits, but similar problems apply to most meats.

The rising demand for animal feed has a number of implications, one of which is a growing demand for farmland to grow feed crops such as soya. This is already resulting in the clearing of rainforests in the Amazon.

Even if rainforests weren't at risk, the intensive production of animal products would create a range of serious environmental burdens. For one thing, the production of feed crops and the farming of animals uses up an astonishing amount of water. It can take 100,000 litres of water to make a single kilo of beef.

And then there's global warming. Farm animals are thought to account for around 10% of the world's greenhouse-gas emissions. Partly this is due to the fact that meat production uses a lot of oil - to power farm machines, make fertlizer for feed crops, transport feed and animals, and so on. All told, meat requires around 10-30 times the total energy input per kilogram than corn or soya. But it is also because cows and other livestock annually burp and fart out an astonishing 80 million tons of methane, which is a particularly problematic greenhouse gas."

After reading this I can't think of any justifiable reason for me to be eating meat every single day of the week. Of course humans are omnivores and do need a bit of protein in their diets, but I've found that eating meat or fish only once a week or so is enough to keep my muscles bulky enough to do the 3 1/2 mile cycle into town and back for my vegetables from the market.

For those who just can't reduce the amount of meat that they consume (e.g. athletes), buying locally produced meat is a good way to reduce the environmental impact. You can have more control over whether its intensively produced or not and the distance that the meat has had to travel to get to you. Farmers markets and farm shops are one of the best ways to do this. If you buy meat in a supermarket, then you could try to stick to British meat and avoid products such as New Zealand lamb.

If you, horror of horrors, regularly go to McDonald's, consider this. They're currently making an effort to appear green, saying that they'll re-use their chip fat oil as biofuel for their fleet of cars and lorries etc, but they are responsible for the deforestation of huge swathes of South American rainforest, just so they can ranch cattle for a neverending supply of hamburgers. I've boycotted them since I was 14.