Saving the World...

Feed Lot in California


Brown Guy sent me an article in the Times about meat and meat production that you should all read. Essentially it detailed the effect meat production is having on the world. It compared the crisis to the effect oil is having on the world. Both are unnecessary evils that are around purely because people are fat, lazy, selfish and greedy. I have tried to convince all of you to eat less meat for a while, though I'm sure it only made you eat more to spite me. But perhaps if not for my moral reasoning, maybe for the environment. Years ago I went to a PETA conference and one of the things they explained to us to help us convert to being a vegetarian was the effect livestock has on the environment. For example, it takes on average 4 or 5 servings of grain that are fed to livestock (it varies depending on the animal) to equal the amount of nutrition we would get by simply eating the grain ourselves. Now if you take the energy it takes to produce that grain (the amount of feul, processing etc.) and multiply that by the amount fed to all of the livestock in America alone, the energy wasted is jaw dropping. Aside from the obvious pollution factors that come from any plant, animal warehouses also have the ability to harvest antiobiotic resistant bacteria.

As most of you know I have already cut down my meat consumption in an effort to be a vegetarian some time in the future but did you know that by cutting it down just 20% is the equivalent of switching from a Camry to a Prius. It's only a couple of meals a week without meat, it isn't that hard...

Here's a good quote from the article: "If price spikes don't change eating habits, perhaps the combination of deforestation, pollution, climate change, starvation, heart disease and animal cruelty will gradually encourage the simple daily act of eating more plants and fewer animals."















After moving to New York and seeing the excess waste and pollution that you really don't see in Michigan, I became much more of a doer than a sayer. It's very simple to say that you are going to have less of an impact on the world but a very different and often harder thing to actually do it. One reason it was so easy in New York was because people are so conscious about it. I could go to Whole Foods and buy organically grown food and often free range chicken (with my canvas bags in tote and reused plastic bags for produce), I could recycle everything (our kitchen garbage was smaller than a normal bathroom garbage) and I could walk everywhere. It is a very easy place to get by being very low impact. That is one of the reasons returning to life in Michigan is much harder. The closest Whole Foods is over an hour away, there is no convenient place to recycle and the city doesn't do it. And you can't get anywhere without a car. It's a much harder thing to accomplish when there are no means to do it. Which is why I have had to try and put in a much more focused effort on doing what I can until June when I move back to NYC.

Here are some things I am trying to do to help the environment that maybe you can too: Re-use everything (bags, containers, jars). Don't leave unless you have to. Without any friends it's very easy for me to only leave my apartment to go to class and not drive anywhere else. Always try and buy things that are not just organically grown but low impact. As the word "organic" is becoming much more popular, the line of what it means it getting blurred. Sometimes it just means they don't use pesticides (which is still good) but other times is doesn't really have any effect on the food. Buying organic chicken is a good thing, but mostly for our bodies as opposed to the environment. A lot of times a box or label will say organic and then tell you how and those are usually the ones that have less of an impact. If you don't have a canvas grocery bag get paper or reuse your plastic ones.

Anyways just some thoughts on how to make this planet better for our kids/ferrets. Go big...

-M, p, z & shredder

oh ps - Tyson now does not use antibiotics or hormones in their chicken which is good for our health but they do have huge chicken farms and very inhumane methods of killing them so if you can buy another brand I'd say go for it, though usually if you are shopping at a store that isn't a Whole Foods type place you are shit outta luck.