New Year's Resolution Eat Less Meat!

ADAPT OR DIE! 

Accepting that one of the finest solutions to the environmental crises that the planet currently faces
(see previous post Change the World? Change your diet) is for the human species to adapt to 
a vegetarian diet, and I mean all of us, I can see that this is not going to happen, at least not today.

So here is a watered down approach...

Meat lovers don't despair. In life there is room for a little vice, so my advice is eat roast chicken on Sundays, but buy free range. At worst it costs double, so eat half!

What I have found since making my new year's resolution is that cutting down on meat is not as hard as it seems. I've become a fan of Fresh Earth in Emmerentia because they support those of us trying to eat organic and well, but point is, they make a big juicy burger right out of your American dreams, piled high with delicious extras, served with shoestring fries and golden onion rings. It’s vegetarian, but you would never say!

So I have decided it is possible to save the world:

Do it with Diet!

Five things we can do right now:

1. Many people believe they cannot change their diet, that it will be too difficult. If that’s you, start with one day a week. Try holding a “meatless Monday” and only consume plant products, vegetables, grains, and legumes. Also, drink water or non-dairy beverages, such as almond, rice or soy milk. Your taste buds will thank you for the variety and the nutrition.

2. Every time you go to a grocery store, restaurant, or eat a meal at home, choose wisely and your action can bring immediate, positive consequences to healing yourself and our planet. You can make a difference. Change the world one forkful at a time.

3. Make a meal plan: Meal plans are a great way of creating variety in the choice of food and recipes that you use at home. The great meal plans from the Fresh Earth website do all of the work for you by supplying you with shopping lists, recipes and most importantly a balanced diet for the week.

4. Raise healthy kids. Tasty lunch boxes that are free of fatty, nutritionally-poor, convenience foods like chips and chocolates are a great way to ensure healthy kids and to educate your kids about the right food choices.

Creating tasty, happy lunch boxes is so easy. Involve your child in the process and give them options to choose from.

And most of all (speaking to myself, but you might as well think about it too):
TASTE YOUR FOOD, EAT SLOWLY, IN THE OLD DAYS, FOOD WAS NOT EASY TO COME BY AND WE USED TO SAVOUR OUR FOOD. AFTER A LONG DAYS HUNTING, GATHERING AND COOKING, THE FINAL MOUTHFUL WAS A HARD-EARNED REWARD. GET BACK THAT GOOD FEELING BY SPARKING THE FIRE (STOVE)AND INVESTING TIME AND TALENT IN PREPARING YOUR OWN FOOD.

but enough caps for now.
from me, here's to happy healthy eating in 2010 and a world for our children's children.
awe awe awe

Change the world? Change your diet!

But wait...

I DO have the power to save the world!

As the consumer I am still king, by virtue of having the choice about which products to support and which to ignore. Ordinary shoppers like you and me have the ability to change the world, one grocery list at a time.

What we are seeing is that the way we view our diet, and the choices we make about what we eat, is rapidly becoming one of the most astounding tools we have in our personal arsenal to save the planet, at a time when saving the planet couldn’t be more necessary.

Healthy eating is an incredibly powerful way to reduce one’s carbon footprint and tackle the environmental crisis.

My firey vegan friends tell me, at the slightest opening that they have the solution to the world’s problems – it’s simple, cut out meat. While this can be incredibly annoying, the inconvenient truth is that they are right!

My love for meat is killing us, and our planet, one burger at a time.

I've also recently discovered, via a YouTube clip and other sources that every human being, standing side to side, would fit on a piece of land the size of Manhattan Island!
It’s not our numbers that is the problem, it’s our diet!

Even if the only “vegetarian” I’ll ever become is one that eats vegetarians, (har!) the striking reality is that simply by reducing my dependence on meat as a staple food, (and by only eating free range meat products) I’ll personally be contributing to saving billions of litres of water, reducing pollution and maintaining plant and animal diversity on earth, never mind the fact that I will be showing solidarity with the other sentient beings, captive as we speak, in the Meatrix. (see multi-award winning Meatrix mini movie on Youtube)

Consider these facts that look solely on the impact of a reduced meat diet on saving water:

Firstly, over one billion people worldwide do not have access to clean drinking water. That is an indictment on our treatment of our own species!

I have been informed on good authority (a wild bunny-hugger party dubbed Slaughterfest which began with a heavy talk by one Aragorn Eloff, from whom these saucy stats were recalled) that I could personally help solve this crisis by skipping just one beef burger (250g patty). This act would have a greater impact on saving water than if you were to skip 300 baths, (at approximately 80 litres per bath), so basically not bathing for almost a year!
Did you get that? Option one: order the veggie burger just once for a change
                           Option two: don't bath 'til Christmas 2011.
Same water saving!

This is because it takes approximately 100 000 litres of water to make one kilogram of beef!

It takes only 500 litres of water to make one kilo of potatoes, and 1000 litres for a kilo of rice!
Roasted vegetable risotto (can be quite yummy, actually) would be doing the planet a massive favour.

Macdonalds produces one billion burgers every year (well that was 1963 when they were still letting us know. Now, they have terminated that particular strategy, but the figures of 1993 were just under 6 billion, add 17 years and you get the picture, and that’s just one burger chain!).

So, using the outdated figure, we could hypothesise that if Macdonalds were to agree to close shop for just one year, (skip producing 1 billion burgers) the unfortunate one billion people would have all the water they need!

But that’s unlikely to happen, so the other alternative is that we, as consumers, gang up to give one billion burgers a miss. We could help the one billion people in jeopardy with sufficient drinking water for 17 years!

The figures boggle the mind, but equations like these are all over the net!

As Veg Source puts it, “So what's the beef with beef, when it comes to water?”
“Simply put: it's wasteful and irresponsible to squander our precious resources on a luxury item like meat.”

It is easy to feel numbed by your own inability to solve these massive problems alone, yet in the spirit of “being the change you want to see in the world”, my starting point is to get the truth, and after that, to line up my conscience with the knowledge I've acquired and take the necessary actions.