A diet which includes meat is responsible for annual greenhouse gas emissions equivalent to driving a mid-sized car for 3000 miles.A vegetarian diet will generate 50% less emissions (1500 miles).
Going vegan (no animal products at all, no dairy, no fish, no milk) cuts the emissions released by around 87% (to the equivalent of driving just 391 miles).
Organic meat is nice and all, but an organic meat-based diet only reduces your emissions by around 8%.
You can browse some vegetarian recipes here, and some main courses that are vegan here.
From the two lists, the lentil-based recipes jump out: Red Lentil Balls and Spiced Lentils with Cucumber Yogurt.
Also read: 10 Surprising Reasons To Eat Less Meat
9 comments:
"A diet which includes meat is responsible for annual greenhouse gas emissions equivalent to driving a mid-sized car for 3000 miles."
Feel free to call me a pedant but a diet including 1% meat, I suspect, is almost certainly going to produce a different result from one including 99% meat!
Don't you just love the way that scientific research is compromised by Chinese Whispers?
Who eats 99% meat? When 99-percenters go rambling, do sheep flee across the fields? It's fair to assume that the 3000 mile figure is for an average amount of meat in one's diet.
And what is the "average amount" of meat in one's diet?
And does this include Fish? And specifically Jellied Eels?
This is a stupid statistic because it takes no account of several factors. For example, meat that has been intensively produced, packaged and distributed around the country is going to have a completely different footprint than something bought directly from a low intensity.
It is also possible to buy meat that has no greenhouse emissions - such as rabbit or pigeon. (Happy to argue about that last statement if anyone cares to bother).
In contrast, a vegetarian diet which includes a lot of lentils, soya, palmoil etc is going to be generating other emissions and problems.
To me, cutting through all the bullshit, the only rational alternative is to eat as locally as possible, cut out or drastically reduce any imported foodstuff, go back to treating luxuries (eg chocolate, rice, cocoa, cane sugar) as irregularly consumed luxuries. Given we have few sources of home produced protein, I'd suggest that the diet would probably need to contain some locally produced meat of some description, though I'd agree our consumption needs to be drastically reduced.
Oh dear. A low intensity farm. I know what I meant even if nobody else does.
I'd be interested to hear more about zero-emission pigeons and zero-emission rabbits. I was in Belgium over New Year's, and they had more "exotic" meat in their supermarkets, things like these meats.
Is it more realistic to expect England to evolve towards a diet of 80% vegan, 20% local pigeon/rabbit? Probably.
But the point of the blog post was to offer up some tasty vegan and vegetarian recipes. Mmmmm. And to highlight that how the overwhelming urban majority buy their meat (white trays, plastic, supermarkets) is carbon-intensive.
Well, obviously nothing is truly 'zero emissions' but given that rabbits and pigeons are not artificially fed in the same way as farmed animals, it is reasonable to assume that no more carbon is released during the human consumption of these animals than would be if they died more-or-less naturally. Hence unlike farmed animals they have zero net emissions if the environment is in equilibrium.
Ps you don't need to go to Belgium to buy these things, both rabbit and pigeon are available less than 1/2 a mile from where I am sitting, harvested from the fields I can see from my window.
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