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 >
Eating more vegetarian meals can make a real difference
According to http://css.umich.edu/factsheets/carbon- … factsheet, 83% of carbon emissions come from the food we eat. The majority of the carbon dioxide released from that is from meat production. Beef is what takes the most energy to produce. There are about 6.61 pounds of carbon dioxide per serving. That is more than double the amount of carbon dioxide for pork within a serving. Even replacing beef with another meat for a year or so, can reduce about 882 pounds of CO2.
According to https://www.theguardian.com/environment … than-cars, it takes 28 times more land than pork or chicken to produce beef. It also requires eleven times more water. Comparing beef to other foods, such as some plants like the potato, beef releases eleven times more greenhouse gases.
Even eating a few more meals without meat can reduce the amount of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. "scientists and found that meat-rich diets - defined as more than 100g per day - resulted in 7.2kg of carbon dioxide emissions. In contrast, both vegetari an and fish-eating diets caused about 3.8kg of CO2 per day, while vegan diets produced only 2.9kg"(https://www.theguardian.com/environment … -than-cars). This is data that was collected by scientists at the University of Oxford. There is a significant difference in carbon emissions. I am not saying that you should become a vegetarian, but I do believe that a good way to reduce our carbon footprint to reduce the number of meals we eat with meat and have more vegetarian meals.
I agree with this. Instead of eating beef, you could replace it with beans. Beans are a good source of protein. If everyone stopped eating beef, which contains the most carbon out of all the foods, we would be preventing about 75.3 million metric tons of carbon from being released into he atmosphere, which is told in research journal titled "Climate Change". 75.3 million metric tons of carbon is like taking 16 million cars off the road annually. Simple things like converting garden soil to mulch can save the atmosphere about 752,000 metric tons of CO2, which is stated in "How Your Food Choices Can Help Fight Climate Change" by Julia Westbrook http://www.eatingwell.com/article/29079 … te-change/.