For my final civic issues blog, I plan to educate all of you on the wonders of vegetarian living. Now, let me be perfectly clear: I’m not a vegetarian, and I’m not going to tell you to be one either. However, the environment strongly benefits from a vegetarian diet, so what I will suggest is that you consider taking steps each day to reduce your consumption of meat (or increase your consumption of vegetables, fruits and grains).
The trend is actually spreading, and “Meatless Mondays” are becoming a common occurrence. But why?
First of all, as a nation, Americans consume WAY more animal-based products than just about any other country in the world. In fact, individuals in North America currently consume ten times more animal protein than necessary for a complete nutritional diet. If everyone ate the way Americans do, we would need about five planets just to keep up. The reason for this comes in the steps required for food to be produced. A meat-based diet requires up to ten times the land area to feed someone relative to a plant-based diet. This is because rather than growing something and eating it, a meat-based diet requires farmers to grow something (grain, for example), feed it to something else (maybe a chicken) which lives on a whole other area of land, and then take that something (still the chicken) and feed it to someone else (us). The extra step requires a huge portion of land mass not necessary to produce plants. This contributes to increased expansion and utilization of natural resources. In fact, a significant portion of the 13 million hectares of tropical forest lost each year goes to land for animals or for producing animal feed.
Another problem stems from how some animals are caught for food. Let’s take shrimp, for example. In order to catch shrimp, or really any other type of marine animal for that matter, huge nets are cast into the ocean. These nets pull up the target species, but they also bring up many others. In fact, up to ten pounds of fish are destroyed in catching each pound of shrimp. Nets for catching shrimp and other fish are also responsible for injuring thousands of turtles and dolphins each year.
Eating a completely meat-based diet, especially one of a typical American size, has several detrimental effects on the earth. Even if one is not concerned with animal welfare, there are clearly many reasons to reduce the consumption of animal-based products. Even by switching the types of animal-based products you eat, you can help the environment. The Monterey Bay Aquarium posts best seafood buying practices on their Seafood Watch web site. The Environmental Defense’s list of the best food to choose and the types to avoid is also available.
Just by altering your diet a little bit – not eating meat one day a week or switching from shrimp to scallops – you can help to increase sustainability of our Earth and its resources.
http://www.conservation.org/act/simplesteps/green_home/Pages/eat_lower.aspx