Sustainable Ideas...

Have you had meat yet today? If you have, you might want to rethink tomorrow’s menu. According to South Africa's The Star newspaper, meat eaters’ diets are responsible for double the amount of emissions than vegetarian diets. Eat meat, said the Institute for Ecological Economy Research, and you’re responsible for producing the same amount of greenhouse gas as a mid-sized car 4,758 kilometers; a vegetarian would only have driven that car 2,427 kilometers.

Meat is so costly in terms of greenhouse gases because of the production methods, the methane produced at huge feed lots, transportation and habitat destruction. But, even as we learn just how costly our daily burgers are, the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization thinks that meat consumption will double by 2050.

In response to this, according to Citizen Sugar, the non-profit World Farming wants governments to start campaigning to reduce meat eating by 60 percent by 2020. And, as Dr. Rajendra Pachauri, chair of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change suggests, making the easy change of going meat-free one day a week would make a huge difference. The meat industry thinks that they’re being unfairly targeted, but what do you think? Could you go meat free for a day?

Image of a 1947 American Meat Council ad from Plan59.