What did you learn about dietary choices from using the footprint calculator? Now imagine that you could translate what you learned into an effective societal policy on food- what would it be? And how would this policy effect the need to alleviate world hunger?
925 million people on earth do not have enough to eat according to the FAO [Food and Agricultural Organization]. That's almost 1 in 7 inhabitants of our planet!
Food & Hunger >
Don't give up meat
You don't need to go vegan to reduce your carbon footprint. Go to a local butcher or meat locker to get your meat. The meat doesn't go thought a plant so you would be reducing your footprint
I agree with you zane4246
Yup
BOOM
Fantastic idea, this also helps support your local community which is always a good thing.
Great idea because people who are vegan have to get their food trucked in, or made for them. If we get our meat from locals or even better raise it ourselves it should reduce our carbon footprint.
While I agree that it is better to eat local, the largest part of the food footprint is in production *by far*. Transport of the food is a relatively small portion of the food footprint. Cows and pigs release methane which is a 20x more potent greenhouse gas than CO2, and they need a lot of crop or grassland to be available to feed them.
It is way more efficient to grow vegetables to eat ourselves than it is to grow food to feed to cows and pigs.
And finally, dawson, why do you think that meat can be found locally but vegetables can't? At my local farmers market I can get almost every vegetable you could imagine grown within 100km of my town.
One last thing: veganism/vegetarianism is not "either/or". You can still eat meat sometimes but reduce your carbon footprint a lot if you simply eat it less often.
So I would say: yes give up meat, not necessarily all the time, but a few times a week, and you can make a real difference.
I agree with you Jason Hodin. You don't have to go completely vegan. It would help a lot to just reduce the amount of meat you consume everyday. Buying anything you can get local is ideal to help reduce your carbon footprint.
I agree and disagree with this comment for a couple different reason. The idea to go to local butcher shops is indeed a fairly good one economically because it can boost local business but it really wouldn't lower your carbon footprint by much. For instance it takes about 1800 gallons of water for every pound of meat! It takes about 150 gallons of water for every pound of corn produced and the average cow can eat up to 1000 pounds of corn every few months. As you can see these numbers are pretty high. As Jason Hodin also pointed out the methane produced by these animals is quite harmful to our environment and is on of the major problems with the meat industry. So I would say that generally, giving up meat is probably the best bet for reducing your carbon footprint.