Eco Friendly House And Garden

Cucumbers contain 97% water – So why are we still growing them?

In an age where nearly 7 million people need food to eat – why are we covering vast areas of arable farmland with something that is just water coated in green skin?

Yes, it’s juicy; it’s crisp on a salad and it has long been a favourite for the dieters among us – but this last ‘positive’ fact is actually totally negative in terms of sustainable farming and the environment.

Dieters love it as it has virtually no calories – but this is exactly what makes in a terrible food for the environment.

1) Water:
It is around 97% water – which means that this plant is a thirsty one!  I would imagine that this crop need to be watered much more than many other food crops and cereals – with much of that keeping the plant itself alive rather than filling up the cucumber itself.

Needless to say – water shortages cannot happen on a cucumber farm – so the water must be ‘stolen’ from other resources; such as landscapes, wild animals, plants, remote communities and other farms downstream.

2) Calories:
This food can hardly contain any calories as there is only 3% of the fruit left after all the water has been removed – and most of that will be seeds or skin.

Needless to say – farmland is being wasted on a crop that cannot possible sustain the world!  This cucumber land – and all of its water and other fertilisers – could be growing some seriously calorie-dense crops that can fill a person tummy and give them the energy to stay alive.  A person eating only cucumbers would soon be a non-person!

3) Nutrition:
Added to just the energy deficit – there can only be useful vitamin and minerals in this remaining 3% as well – so eating cucumbers may well be great as a supplementary food to something crammed full of vitamin and minerals – but then why eat it at all?  It probably uses more calories to carry home from the store, wash it, cut it, carry it into the dining room on your plate, chew it, digest it and poop it out than you get from eating it!

Needless to say – there are probably just as many vits and minerals in a 150ml glass of tap water – and you would probably need 100 or more glasses of water from your tap to equal the amount wasted ‘growing’ the 150ml of water in a cucumber!

And I dread to think of the wasted ‘other’ energy needed to farm and transport these fruits.  Collecting seeds, propagating them, preparing the land, planting out, watering, fertilising, harvesting, sorting, transporting to warehouse, packaging, transporting to stores, displaying on shelves, transporting to your home, disposing of your waste.

There are around 10 calories in 100g of cucumber so you would have to eat 500 grams of cucumber (basically 2 whole average-sized cucumbers) just to eat enough calories to then have the equivalent energy to prepare the salad for 20 minutes in the first place (50 calories for a 140 pound person).

If you were planning to do some gentle work on your farm or allotment, you would use around 500 calories per hour – that means around 5000 grams of cucumber – so that is equivalent to more than 20 cucumbers!

Whereas you could have got the same number of calories from just 350 grams of cooked white rice (1 average portion), or only 130 grams of regular muesli (large bowl).

And all these calculations are like-for-like comparisons – and don’t even start to take into account other energy losses.

4) Humans:
With the current world food demands and rising population (with an estimated 200,000 extra mouths to feed today) it does seem rather wasteful to even consider growing this crop – not to mention all the other ‘tasty’ crops that we like to see in our stores that aren’t worth the water, calories or nutrition they take to produce.

Take the myriad of salad greens and lettuces, species of melon, rhubarb, grapes, marrow and celery to name a few, which have ridiculously high water content and painfully low nutritional values.  Shouldn’t we be weaning these out of our diets in today’s unpredictable climate?

Just like cakes and sweets – they are a ‘pleasure’ food that we eat because we can, not because we need to. 

Maybe we should treat these foods along the same lines as the concept of Meat Free Mondays (or as seriously as vegans) as they are just as wasteful to our planet as herds of cattle are.

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!