Eco Friendly House And Garden

It’s Monday and you haven’t started cooking dinner yet – so make it the start of your ‘Meat Free Mondays’ campaign!

If you are not already a vegetarian, vegan or a meat-free Monday participant – then maybe you could try it for a few weeks and see if it really makes that much difference to your lives.

There are many celebrities who have given up meat altogether including Brad Pitt and Clint Eastwood, but it can be a difficult life to continue of your diet revolves around processed foods and take-aways.

So, if you can manage to eat at home on the rather sensible day of Monday, you could easily make it a meat-free one.  For example sausage and mash with gravy; pie, chips and peas and even a roast dinner could be made using meat-free ingredients – and I have had them all and they were yummy!

And if you are eating meat on up to 6 other days of the week, I’m sure you won’t really think anything of it – however, you could be making a huge difference to people, wildlife and habitats across the globe!

Benefits In A Nutshell:
There are many good things that can come out of cutting out meat from your diet – even if it’s only for 1 day. As don’t forget that it won’t be just you – so multiply the meat your don’t eat by 1000′s of other people in your neighbourhood, and we are stopping hundreds of cattle from traipsing through the Amazon……

Meat Uses More Land To Grow – By using a field to ‘grow’ cows or sheep, we need to use another piece of land to ‘grow’ the food to feed the cows and sheep.  So meat uses more land to grow than the tasty vegetables we love.

Meat Uses More Energy To Grow – More energy goes into growing a cow than into a cauliflower – so if we ate the cauliflower instead we could save all that waiting around for the cow to be ready for slaughter.

Meat Uses New Land To Grow- More meat in our diet means more land is always needed for farming them – and in South America, we have heard that the rainforests are being cleared to feed more cattle – or more correctly, rainforests are being cleared to make us hamburgers and cheap steaks.

Meat Gives Of Methane – Cows fart!  A lot…….

Meat Cannot Be Composted – Uneaten meat cannot be composted in your garden like leftover vegetables and fruit – and may well attract vermin anyway, so the disposal of meat can become a problem for businesses – and the environment.

Vegetables Are Good For You – By taking the focus off the meat part of your dinner you may well find that you eat more vegetables in your meal instead – all good news for your health.

Your Choices:
Just as with new products and new fashions – if people don’t buy it, people won’t make it. 

So if everyone could just take 1 day a week of meat, you will see a great reduction in the meat in stores, and therefore the amount of land being used to farm them.

I’m not saying that this will be an instant reaction from the farming industry, but it will certainly make a difference over the next few years.  And from current environmental thinking we may well need to start doing this anyway.

So, why not take a stroll up the vegetarian aisle next time you are in a store and try some of the alternatives – you might quite surprise yourself with what is available, and how much you like it.

And to be honest – dinner guests will eat whatever you cook them as long as it’s tasty – and if you don’t tell the kids or the partner when you serve up a fantastic vegetarian meal - they probably won’t even know the difference and so you can easily convert dozens of people you know without any fuss!

Is Eating Meat Eco Friendly?  Should We Convert To Being Vegetarian Or Even Vegan?

There has long been the argument against eating meat – although it covered many aspects it now has another twist.  Rather than just worrying about the health of the animals, the cruelty of killing them, the risk of diseases from them and the whole ‘is it healthy’ debate – the new angle is about how eco friendly eating meat is.

For the Vegans, it’s just another string to their bow about the all-good angle of veganism, but are they losing a few points as the argument unfolds.  I have just covered a few points from both sides of the fence – so to speak – although I must admit that I lean to one side – but obviously you must decide for yourself.

Cows Verses Corn.
Should we feed our animals with grain that could be feeding humans in the first place?  Basically, there are plenty of people who believe that the grain we grow should be eaten by humans rather than processed into food for livestock. 

There are many figures showing that the energy and protein derived from eating the grain is greater than the energy and protein that you finally get out of the animal – however it has also been shown that the proteins from meat are more easily digested and cause less damage to the teeth than grains and pulses.  You would also need to eat more vegetable matter per unit of protein or energy than meat.

Animals farmed for food have to have large areas of land to roam while alive, therefore reducing even further the amount of land available to grow crops on. Others would argue that many livestock – like sheep and goats – roam in fields that cannot be farmed for anything else so would be ‘wasted’ otherwise. 

In addition many animals are fed on plant materials that are not suitable for human consumption – think of your guinea pig in the garden eating the outer cabbage leaves and the ends of your carrots!  Therefore, are all livestock competing with humans for food?

In contrast – eco-friendly organic animal farming uses more land than factory farming, so can the cute organic lamb we are all crying out for actually be reducing the amount of food available for humans?

Cattle & Carbon:
Every kg of beef sent to the stores has apparently emitted 14kg of carbon dioxide during it’s lifetime.  Even cheese releases around 10kg of carbon per kg!  And even milk has churned out around 1kg of carbon per liter produced!  So gulping down a glass of the white stuff is damagingthe atmosphere! 

These figures are very high, and obviously the intensive farming of lifestock uses a lot of oil in machinery and feeds. The United Nations Food & Agriculture Organisation has recently been quoted as saying that ‘animal farming is eco-hostile’.

There are around 1.3 billion cows on the earth at the moment and the total number of all farmed animals is expected to double to 40 billion by 2050.  And we all know that rainforests are being destroyed to make way for some of these animals – therefore causing even more carbon to remain in the atmostphere.

Meat = Methane:
It has been calculated that cows and animal farming are responsible for 18% of human climate change – particularly with their methane emissions.  Methane is such a dangerous greenhouse gas in the short term that we should really be reducing the amount of this gas in the atmostphere as it turns into Nitrous Oxide.
 
To put this in perspective, if carbon dioxide = 1, then methane = 23.  Quite a difference!  But what if I told your that using that same scale, nitrous oxide would be 296!!!

Although 18% is quoted – in a weird manipulation of the figures – it’s not that bad?  Most of the nitogen produced by a cow is held within it’s manure which is usually pumped straight back into the soil to fertilise the next crop – reducing the need for chemical intervention.  However, it can also be used for fuel – which can be seen to be reducing the pressures of deforestation to get wood for cooking and heating etc, but the flipside is that burning it actually releases all that stored gas into the sky!

Local Fresh Meat Vs Less Food Miles:
Many vegans eat staple foods like nuts and grains for protein that need to be imported from across the globe.  This increases the total food miles of a particular product. 

Surely the carbon used in the worldwide transportation of their meat-free foods is adding up somewhere.  Don’t forget – the figures given for the energy used to grow a particular crop may not take into account all the fuel, staffing, building and maintenance costs of running a ship or airplane to transport it to your plate.

Packaging for long-distance foods also includes refridgeration techniques, excess protective packaging and ultimately environmental damage.  Why not just eat some home-grown meat un-packaged from a local farm shop you walked to instead and save all that waste?

Vegans say that just refusing to eat meat for one day a week is more environmentally friendly than switching to a completely local diet.  They really think it’s that bad.  Worse than their own food miles.

Opposition would say that reducing our dependance on meat would certainly make a big difference to the global impact of animal farming, but that a totally vegan diet is not as efficient as one containing a small amount of meat and dairy.  And getting rid of all farm animals would have a huge knock-on effect for wildlife, humans and plantlife – and would frankly not be feasible.

Is it just a cow?
And don’t forget, farm animals are not just about meat.  They give us wool, leather, milk, cheese, manure, transport, traction, security and pet food. 

We would have to find substitutes for all of these products – and many if not all of those substitutes will probably involve more oil and plastic – or ironically plant products.  And aren’t they all as bad as the livestock we are trying to eradicate?

Nothing is ever just black and white……

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