Conscious Eating 2

It was all over the Times that we should “Give up eating meat to save the planet”. Who knows maybe in twenty years it will be as socially unacceptable to eat meat as it is now to smoke cigarettes.

A few years ago I followed a “blood type” diet for a while. (see www.dadamo.com). I’m an A: a natural vegetarian and prefer to graze on fruit and nuts; meat feels heavy and hard to digest to me. For others, I know it is different. A few years ago I was running a soul retreat in an out of the way beauty spot and we had neglected to tell people we would be having a very simple vegetarian diet. After two days one of the men was desperate and drove a 50 mile round trip on unmade roads to forage for meat, he felt starved without it. So I acknowledge there are some people whose bodies need meat more than others.

But before I go further into meat production and the real cost of eating meat I’m going to report a little of my shopping adventures following my awareness being raised about the parlous state of fish. Right now, I’m staying with my father, the nearest shops are a mile and a half away and neither of us has a car. This makes sourcing local food difficult and the easiest way to shop is a once a week visit to the supermarket via community transport. Recently I visited a couple of small towns in the north of England and I noticed how refreshing it was to find small local food shops in the main street. It’s so unusual these days. Shopping in most towns in the UK or North America you’d think people really do live on air or the occasional vitamin pill. There’s no food in sight. The supermarket is convenient if you have a car.

So I decided to look at the fish and see where and how they had been caught before purchasing. I fancied a kipper. If they had been caught on line I would have bought a couple of kippers because at least line fishing seems to give the fish a chance. But it said: line fishing, seine fishing and trawling. Did trawling mean deep sea trawling, the kind where they destroy the sea bed? I didn’t know so I gave up on the kipper and went to look at the meat for my carnivorous father. I can’t bring myself to cook beef or pork, these big animals seem so close to us it’s almost like cannibalism, so I chose some lamb shanks to make a nice warming lamb stew. After all, I reasoned, sheep don’t generate as much methane as cows do they? Wrong. Here’s some facts, hot and steamy from the Times:

With the highest carbon footprint of all UK foods, lamb creates 17kg of Co2 for every kilo of product as compared to potatoes which creates 450gms of CO2 per 1 kilo. Flatulent farm animals create 14% of global emissions of methane.
The biggest meat eaters in the world – you’re right, the Americans, consume on average 123 kg of meat a year, as compared to Indians who eat an average of 3kg, or Japanese who tend to use meat as a flavor enhancer treat and eat only, 40kg a year average.

67% of the world’s agricultural land is given over to raising livestock. Direct emissions of methane from cows and pigs is a significant source of greenhouse gas. Methane is 23 times more powerful than carbon dioxide as a global warming gas.
Meat production is also responsible for the destruction of forest land for cattle raising and for animal feeds such as soy. It takes 7lbs of grain to produce 1kg of beef.

A typical UK diet including animal products providing 38%of calories requires 0.195 hectares of land and 535,000 litres of water. A vegan diet requires 0.065 hectares and 140,000 litres of water.

So what to do?

Becoming more conscious about the way we eat does require more effort. Fast foods and convenience foods are not called that for nothing. Barbara Kingsolver in a wonderful book called, “Animal, vegetable, miracle”, about how she and her family learned to eat consciously tells how big agri-business turns convenience foods into profit with obesity a by-product:
“...70% of all our Midwestern agricultural land shifted gradually into single crop or soybean farms, each one of them now, on average, the size of Manhattan. Owing to synthetic fertilizers and pesticides, genetic modification, and a conversion of farming from a naturally based to a highly mechanized production system, us farmers now produce 3900 calories per us citizen today. That is twice what we need and 700 calories a day more than we grew in 1980......Most of those calories enter our mouths in forms hardly recognizable as corn and soybeans... if every product containing corn or soybeans were removed from your grocery store, it would look more like a hardware store...”

The more I delve into the machinations of the food industry, the more it starts to make a lot of sense to:

Eat less meat and animal products.
Buy local and in season.
Cut down on air freighted food and packaging.

I’d love to hear about your experiences with conscious eating. Please leave a message on the blog.
Rose