What You Eat and Its Effect On The Environment

[Andrew Michaels]

Whether you eat meat, a grain-based vegetarian diet, or a raw one, you might find this interesting.

I've heard for years that raw diets are better for the environment, but saw little solid research to back it up.

I decided to research the subject and have been reading up for several months now.

I just finished an article, though I'm still looking for some additional info. The article is here:

Save The Environment: How What You Eat Changes The World.

I've been searching high and low to verify some of the orchard efficiency data I've seen, and it seems likely that fruit trees are at least somewhat more efficient than a grain fields. Depending on what fruits we're talking about, fruit trees are sometimes very efficient at producing calories with minimum amounts of water compared to grains and meat.

There's still some question over cooking food, shipping fruits from other parts of the world, and pesticides.


Information I still need:
1)Data on the energy use and C02 emissions from cooking food.
2)Data on chemical use for non-organic orchards vs grain fields
3) I'd like some more solid numbers for my fruit calories/water use section.

Any other information you think might be useful.

(I prefer hard data from research, but I'll consider anything solid).

Thanks, and let me know what you think.

[Fullcrum]

If you study permaculture and are familiar with the swale system for desert and low-water areas, you'll know that fruit trees are even more efficient in those environments: especially the drought resistant ones like dates, figs, and other tropical fruit trees.

Do some research on that. You'll like what you come up with.

[Andrew Michaels]

I know, but there seems to be little in the way of hard data to show that, though there are examples of desert lands being reclaimed through trees.


The below link is greening the desert, a fantastic movie.
YouTube - Greening the Desert

[medaille]

I think it is pretty clear that eliminating meat from our diet is the most environmentally beneficial thing we could do. It's pretty blatant.

As far as vegetarian vs vegan vs raw vs fruitarian, etc. etc. the difference in my uneducated mind would be much smaller and less significant.

[Fullcrum]

There are few statistics to support permaculture.

Except maybe yield per acre. Or maybe calories per acre, as permaculturists tend to mix crops. Or maybe facts like the soil is further enriched every year. Or you don't need pesticides if you plant repelling plants like garlic, onions, and mustards next to more delicate plants. I dunno, there's not much to flesh out with this whole permaculture deal .

Bottom line: Make your hard data food procured, water required for farming, use of chemicals, cost to farm, calories per acre, and $ made from that produce factoring in the premium price of organic produce.

[BalancedExistence]

While I agree with what you have to say Andrew and am aware of the environmental issues I find is bizarre that everyone associates meat with grain. I know it is the reality commercially speaking where the two are synonymous but naturally speaking there is no cow that clears land, cultivates corn, harvests it, processes it and then eats it. Cows eat grass. It’s what their digestive apparatus is designed to do. We live in a mixed up world where the animals people eat are eating food they have not evolved to eat. So people eat sick animals, get sick and then blame it on meat as opposed to the unnatural farming method.

Which is why I’m unsurprised that there are intelligent people like you showing others the dangers of eating meat. Generally speaking there are problems with meat and processed meat products. However my reaction to the same problems you see is different to yours. I eat animals that have eaten and lived the way they naturally should. Thus I don’t eat meat that has been fed grains. I just wonder how much consideration you've given to this avenue of thinking?

Nor do I eat processed wheat products such as bread and pasta for reasons I outline in a recent article on my blog regarding weight loss. I’m not sure if you are aware but unsprouted grains contain phytic acid. Way back in 1964 a study found boys in Iran and Egypt had severely underdeveloped testicles. Tests showed that they had extreme zinc deficiency despite the plentiful consumption of zinc in their diet. The study discovered that while the bread the boys ate contained a great deal of zinc it was bound by phytates and so useless. Phytic acid, which is in unsprouted grain (meaning all modern grain products) is a vitamin and mineral blocker.

It's a strange world we live in.


Stephen

[Elrond]

Originally Posted by medaille

I think it is pretty clear that eliminating meat from our diet is the most environmentally beneficial thing we could do. It's pretty blatant.

Not in all cases.

The place where I live has a population density of 6/km2 (15.5/sq mile) and not much industry. That leaves a lot of room for agriculture. Growing grains and such is not really viable and if it were most of it would not be suitable for human consumption, which is the case in the rest of my country. Like I said there is a lot of room for animals to roam and to my limited knowledge they live primarily on grass. Who would eat the grass otherwise? Not humans. Who can eat the grains mainly cultivated? For the most part not humans.

The agriculture is on the other hand heavily subsidized. The alternative is to buy most food from elsewhere (which we already do anyway). We would have to give up our love of dieray(spelling?)-products. I wonder what the enviromental impact would be if everyone here went vegan/vegeterian/etc (dismissing the good/bad health effects)? I don't know.

[funchy]

Originally Posted by BalancedExistence

While I agree with what you have to say Andrew and am aware of the environmental issues I find is bizarre that everyone associates meat with grain. I know it is the reality commercially speaking where the two are synonymous but naturally speaking there is no cow that clears land, cultivates corn, harvests it, processes it and then eats it. Cows eat grass. It’s what their digestive apparatus is designed to do. We live in a mixed up world where the animals people eat are eating food they have not evolved to eat. So people eat sick animals, get sick and then blame it on meat as opposed to the unnatural farming method.

But nobody is willing to go back to grass-fed-only beef. American beef is sent off to be "finished" at feedlots, where the cows stand around in groups eating out of troughs of grain. It "fattens them up".

Some of our beef comes from the extras out of the dairy production. Dairy cows get not only grass but legumes (soybean and alfalfa hay) plus lots of grain. Today's dairy cows are bred for huge production amounts and then in many cases given drugs to keep yield high; as a result they MUST get a large amount of nutrition they'd never get wandering a range.

Chickens are ALWAYS grain fed, unless you're buying one of the very few "free range" chickens which may or may not be getting some grain. They never get the seeds, insects, and other natural sources in their normal diet.

The reality is to abandon the current methods for a grass-fed or free-range only method would push up food prices, demand more room for the animals themselves, and demand more labor at the farm. Consumers won't stand for it. As it is the livestock industries are heavily subsidized via things like the Farm Bill here in the US. It's illogical -- for example a lower-nutrition crop such as corn is heavily subsidized because livestock farmers depend on corn. Tomatoes or cherries are not. The bigger picture is that it creates a food market where the poorest people can't afford a fresh-food health diet so they're living on cheetos and burgers. And then we wonder why the lowest income brackets struggle with obesity at a higher rate.

You also need to consider the ecological footprint of even grass-fed beef vs getting those calories from plants. Other than human waste, livestock waste is how we get E Coli, salmonella, and other pathogens in our food, our drinking water, and the lakes our kids swim in. Livestock waste is linked to fish kills, pfisteria (fish disease), and the ocean dead zones. Methane produced by one cow is a funny cow fart; methane produced by millions of cows is an environmental problem. It is an issue if you think how many tens (hundreds?) of millions of livestock animals we raise in the US alone.

Maybe people can't stop eating meat entirely, but going meatless just a few meals a week makes a difference.

[madgeylou]

here's some recent research that shows what you eat has a lot more impact that how far it travels. all the water consumed and the methane produced in the production of red meat make it by far the worst choice you can make. methane is 25 times more potent as a greenhouse gas than CO2!

article:
WorldChanging: Cows Aren't Part of a Climate-Healthy Diet, Study Says

study itself:
Food-Miles and the Relative Climate Impacts of Food Choices in the United States