Increasing mpg to save earth or try vegetarianism instead

[mhmitszach]

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

[Lazarus]

From the article.

Meanwhile, Americans also consume an average of 3,774 calories of food each day.

Can this be right?

[Gone4]

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.

[LostCause]

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

[tasdrouille]

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

Sorry, couldn't resist. ref link

[SVOboy]

Vegan, weeeeee!

(also too tired to post coherently)

[Arminius]

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

[Ryland]

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.

[SVOboy]

Originally Posted by Ryland

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).

[igo]

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?).