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Interested
Joined: 10 Feb 2003
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 Posted: Fri May 15, 2009 7:20 pm Post subject: Can vegetarians save the world? |
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Can vegetarians save the world?
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A small town in Belgium has gone meat-free one day a week. A sign of things to come, says one food historian.
For decades, environmental arguments against eating meat have been largely the preserve of vegetarian websites and magazines. Just two years ago it seemed inconceivable that significant numbers of western Europeans would be ready to down their steak knives and graze on vegetation for the sake of the planet. The rapidity with which this situation has changed is astonishing.
The breakthrough came in 2006 when the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) published a study, Livestock's Long Shadow, showing that the livestock industry is responsible for a staggering 18% of all anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions. This is only the beginning of the story. In 2008, Brazil announced that in the 12 months to July it had lost 12,000 sq km (3m acres) of the Amazon rainforest, mainly to cattle ranchers and soy producers supplying European markets with animal feed. There is water scarcity in large parts of the world, yet livestock-rearing can use up to 200 times more water a kilogram (2.2lbs) of meat produced than is used in growing wheat. Given the volatile global food prices, it seems foolhardy to divert 1.2bn tonnes of fodder � including cereals � to fuel global meat consumption, which has increased by more than two and half times since 1970.
Vegetarians have been around for a very long time � Pythagoreans forbade eating animals more than 2,500 years ago � but even as the environmental evidence mounted, they didn't appear to be winning the argument. Today in Britain just 2% of the population is vegetarian.
Thankfully, a more pragmatic alternative to total abstinence now seems to be emerging. In September 2008, Dr Rajendra Pachauri, chair of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a vegetarian himself, called on people to take personal responsibility for the impacts of their consumption.
"Give up meat for one day [a week] initially, and decrease it from there," he said. "In terms of immediacy of action and the feasibility of bringing about reductions in a short period of time, it clearly is the most attractive opportunity." This week the Belgian city of Ghent met his demands by declaring Thursday a meat-free day. Restaurants, canteens and schools will now opt to make vegetarianism the default for one day a week, and promote meat-free meals on other days as well.
This is not the first institutional backing for such a move. In Britain, the NHS now aims to reduce its impact on the environment partly by "increasing the use of sustainably sourced fish and reducing our reliance on eggs, meat and dairy". Last year, Camden council in London announced that it would be issuing a report calling for schools, care homes and canteens on council premises to cut meat from menus and encourage staff to become vegetarian. (In the end the initiative was shot down by Conservative councillors who insisted that people should not be deprived of choice.) While in Germany the federal environment agency in January called on Germans to follow a more Mediterranean diet by reserving meat only for special occasions.
These initiatives may sound novel, but in fact they reinstate what was for centuries an obligatory practice across Europe. The fasting laws of the Catholic church stipulated that on Fridays, fast days, and Lent, no one could eat meat or wine; on some days, dairy products and fish were also banned. Even after the Reformation Elizabeth I upheld the Lenten fast, insisting that while there was no religious basis for fasting, there were sound utilitarian motives: to �protect the country's livestock from over-exploitation and to promote the fishing industry (which had the ancillary benefit of increasing the number of ships available for the navy).
Towards the end of the 18th century, two consecutive bad harvests in Europe created shortages. There was a huge public clamour for the wealthy to cut down on their meat consumption in order to leave more grain for the poor. The idea that meat was a cruel profligacy became current, and led Percy Bysshe Shelley to declare that the carnivorous rich literally monopolised land and food by taking more of it than they needed. "The use of animal flesh," he said, "directly militates with this equality of the rights of man."
In the wake of last year's food crisis and with mounting concern over global warming, we appear to have reached a similar crisis moment. |
You can click on the link above to check out the rest of the article. I've been a vegetarian for many years, for all sorts of reasons including environmental ones, and I'd be delighted to see it catch on. |
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bacasper
Joined: 26 Mar 2007
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| Posted: Fri May 15, 2009 7:31 pm Post subject: |
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| Yes, me, too. Some of my reasons are ethical, ecological, economical, and health. |
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Princess Soraya
Joined: 30 Oct 2008
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| Posted: Wed Jun 03, 2009 10:45 pm Post subject: |
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I'll dance nude in the Coex courtyard when that happens in Korea  |
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OneWayTraffic
Joined: 14 Mar 2005
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| Posted: Sun Jun 07, 2009 6:04 am Post subject: |
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Unless your vegetarian food is grown locally, it really doesn't matter. Most food is grown with the aid of oil/nat gas based pesticides and fertilizers; transported, processed, transported, sold, transported and then cooked and eaten.
Food from your own garden is best overall. |
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Rusty Shackleford
Joined: 08 May 2008
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| Posted: Sun Jun 07, 2009 6:16 am Post subject: |
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| OneWayTraffic wrote: |
Unless your vegetarian food is grown locally, it really doesn't matter. Most food is grown with the aid of oil/nat gas based pesticides and fertilizers; transported, processed, transported, sold, transported and then cooked and eaten.
Food from your own garden is best overall. |
"Food miles" are pure bunkem. A 2 second google search will tell you that. Though, being a vegetarian does have benefits for your carbon footprint. |
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Juregen
Joined: 30 May 2006
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| Posted: Sun Jun 07, 2009 7:45 pm Post subject: |
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Ghent is not a small city in Belgium.
It's one of the top 15 biggest cities in Belgium. Wow, I better not show this to some of my friends. LOL.
Anyway, Belgians are actually heavy meat eaters, it's nice to see there is a small push into reducing meat consumption. |
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VanIslander
Joined: 18 Aug 2003
Location: Geoje, Hadong, Tongyeong,... now in a small coastal island town outside Gyeongsangnamdo!
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| Posted: Sun Jun 07, 2009 8:23 pm Post subject: |
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| Juregen wrote: |
Ghent is not a small city in Belgium.
It's one of the top 15 biggest cities in Belgium. |
under 250,000 people might seem pretty big in a tiny country
but it's accurately described in English as a 'small city' |
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Sergio Stefanuto
Joined: 14 May 2009
Location: UK
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| Posted: Mon Jun 08, 2009 3:32 am Post subject: |
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| OneWayTraffic wrote: |
Unless your vegetarian food is grown locally, it really doesn't matter. Most food is grown with the aid of oil/nat gas based pesticides and fertilizers; transported, processed, transported, sold, transported and then cooked and eaten.
Food from your own garden is best overall. |
Rather like burning coal (for electricity production) to produce 'green products', eh? 
In the absence of any wholesale change in the way we produce electricity, any environmental efforts - particularly those requiring electricity - are like eating pizza to wean onself off burgers.
But it's all very emotionally-satisfying and, perhaps to many, that's the most important thing. |
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Juregen
Joined: 30 May 2006
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| Posted: Mon Jun 08, 2009 7:35 pm Post subject: |
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| VanIslander wrote: |
| Juregen wrote: |
Ghent is not a small city in Belgium.
It's one of the top 15 biggest cities in Belgium. |
under 250,000 people might seem pretty big in a tiny country
but it's accurately described in English as a 'small city' |
The one remaining thing I can say is "small is beautiful"  .
Wikipedia
"The metropolitan area, including the outer commuter zone, covers an area of 1,205 km� and has a total population of 594,582 as of 1 January 2008, which ranks it as the fourth most populous in Belgium." |
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