Increasing mpg to save earth or try vegetarianism instead
 

Slightly old, but either way. A vegan driving a hummer has less of an environmental impact than a meat eater in a prius.

Vegetarian for 2 years. Who else here is vegetarian/vegan?

http://forums.treehugger.com/viewtopic.php?t=727

From the article.

Can this be right?

From a strictly academic point of view I wondered what would happen to all the by-products we feed to animals if nobody ate them anymore. For example making vegetable oil provides a good source of grain that we don't really have a use for. By-products from ethanol is another good example.

Also, more on topic, I am just escaping my undergraduate institution and delving into a world for the first time where I can make enough food choices on my won to be comfortably vegetarian. I plan to try at least to reduce my meat in take. I will see where it leads me.

Eating lower on the food chain is definately a good thing, but I wouldn't become vegetarian on environmental grounds alone.

I don't think the issue is that we eat meat, but that too many people eat too much meat. The day the environment needs to be saved by the populace becoming vegetarian is the day there are too many mouths to feed. I bet if we manufactured Soylent Green, we could pack in another 10 billion...but what would be the point.

Personally, I think consuming a largely vegetarian diet occasionally mixed with fish and meat is a healthy and environmentally respectable lifestyle change. However, I don't see vegetarianism as being a more ethical treatment of surrounding life. Despite being inanimate, plants are living beings clutching to life like anything else.

An interesting subset of that reasoning is fruitarianism.

- LostCause

You want to be environmentally conscious...learn to swim...and eat rocks...simple

Sorry, couldn't resist. ref link

Vegan, weeeeee!

(also too tired to post coherently)

Me<---Vegetarian wannabe, for health reasons. One step at a time.

Alot of the vegans I know eat food that has been shipped great distances, takes heavy equipment to farm and is heavily prepossessed, how is this environmentally friendly? I can get beef that ate grass on hill sides that shouldn't have equipment on them and not finished on corn, chicken that ate bugs and vegetable scraps and both of those are avalible locally.

Local, organic meat usually has a bigger footprint than factory farmed, shipped halfway across the country meat anyway. :P

The plain fact of the matter is that meat consumption is unsustainable, and as other countries begin to eat more meat, we're going to see a lot more green house gases (since the meat industry creates more of them than transportation) and even bigger increases in the cost of staples crops (since cows eat them too).

I eat about 75% vegetarian, but that is mainly because I am cheap. I think 1/2 the meat I do eat is hot dogs (sick, right?).

i was vegetarian for a while. when i worked for the great cow god burger king that is.... anyhow now 98% of the meat i eat is either chicken or fish, pork is against my religion (and that stuff is terrible for you anyways :yuck: ) and eating beef is rare for me... about the calorie intake thing, i am highly active and well under the sugested caloric intake, (i have a banana for breakfast, rarely have lunch and have a small or medium dinner which is mostly vegetables with a piece of chicken or fish)

I consume more, only due to the fact I have a very high metabolism and run 3 miles every other morning.

meat can only provide about 10% of the energy plants (like grains) can.

Energetically, meat is very expensive (it takes about 10 kg grain to make 1 kg of beef. As corn meal, the grain will supply the energy needs of 23 people, but feed to chickens, only 2)


It also takes more energy to make the energy for the things that make meat. For example:


It takes a certain amount of grain, to make enough bread to feed one person.

It takes 10 times the amount of grain, to feed the cows, to make enough meat to feed one person.

Plants are more efficiently better for the environment, and for the food chains and everything else.

Must really be high. Blessing and a curse. Always skinny but cost lots of money to stay fed.

I also have a very high metabolism. I don't think it costs more money, you just eat more simple carbs that are cheaper than eating meats and stuff. Lots of bread and pop-tarts :thumbup:

Not to say vegetarianism is a bad thing, but most of the food we feed to livestock is not fit for human consumption. In that sense, if we didn't eat some meat, a lot of that feed would essentially be wasted.

They say the same thing about the stuff used to produce ethanol, and we're steal seeing food price inflation because edible crops are being produced in lesser quantities in order to make room for ethanol-producing land.

I'd like to argue that a large part of the food inflation is due to the dollar going down the toilet in relation to all tangible goods.

To further elaborate. If the dollar is worth less, the seasonal pickers that migrate need to be paid more. If the dollar is worth less and oil costs more, it costs a lot more to run the farm equipment. Both of these are heavily affecting the local farms of New England where we do not make any ethanol.

^^ i agree^^
either way you have to feed livestock, and have a place for them, unless you would sugest genocide..... but then thats a whole issue on its own. atleast with the meat industry we get something back, and honestly, who wants to go eat grass anyways?? i can think of better tasting things than that.

I was born a vegetarian. Then later on in my life I started eating chicken and recently (within the last couple of months) turkey. So I'm whatever a chicken/turkey eating vegetarian is called.

In the US perhaps, that doesn't address the issue in the rest of the world.

Chickurkeytarian. :D

Maybe I'm being too much of a devil's advocate but world events such as the cyclone that hit Burma forcing them to become a rice importer instead of an exporter cause enough of their own problems that I don't feel comfortable putting too much blame on ethanol. Africa has their own reasons for having food problems starting with some bad droughts and ending with horrible leaders or anarchy in some regions. The complexity of the global issues is why I focused on the US food prices - beyond the fact those are the ones I can easily quantify with numbers mentally.

Even outside of trying to look at case studies, it's a fact that meat production consumes more resources in terms of land, water for irrigation, petroleum for harvests and transportation, and everything associated with the actual animals themselves. Let's not even get into pollution from fertilizers and excrement, :p

Well we technically can't because we can't digest cellulose. That's what cows can eat. I don't even know why we try feeding cattle with grains, use the grass. I'm pretty sure it's also good for their milk.

Those facts about the trophic levels, came from my biology book and class. We've been studying ecosystems and ecology in general. Lately, it's been the human impact on the environment. We went deep into trophic levels. Learning about that makes me want to go full out vegetarian. a few of my friends are vegetarians, one a born vegetarian. So it's nothing new.

Vegan here !

Love it.

O rly?

We should have a club

I'm half a*sed vegan?!

Haven't drank milk in about 6 months. Haven't had eggs really since being veg. I just eat cheese and stuff with milk and egg ingredients.

Maybe one day....

On that note its good know that places like india are investing large financial resources into recycling cow manuer into power. So much so that they actually have plants that power entire cities just on manuer alone.

Changing the cycle is impossible, because by eliminating the cow you eliminate milk, which is another conspiracy in and of itself, but the answer lies in trying to convert by products into viable energy sources to eliminate harmful exhaust into our atmosphere. Those are the answers that will save the world when mixed with a healthy dose of education.

One problem I would have is not eating dairy products like cheese and milk! I drink milk by the gallons and eat cheese by the truck-full! :D

I'm eating vegan ice cream with chocolate chips right now, :p

hows it taste?

Good, I eat it all the time, :p

where you get it at?

The local co-op, it's not hard to find these days, but some places is a bit trickier than others. I think even the acme has it now, :p

What's the cost and what is it made of?

I think it was like 4 bucks and soy based, but rice dream has rice-based vegan ice cream too, so it's not all soy. Here's the kinda junk I eat sometimes: http://www.collegevegan.com/2008/02/...ht-study-food/

Thanks. I have ther rice-based stuff when I'm in Thailand. Not bad!

( Cool site you have going on at collegevegan.com :thumbup: )

I don't know, but would they have it at wally world? cause I've never heard of any acme places around here... Pretty small area to work with really. gotta drive 20 miles to the nearest wal-mart and 40 to the nearest mall. which is pretty small. 1 gas station in my town if that's any indication (got it this year ;) )