At last...
Monday, 2 November 2009 by Dr Maytel
I've been arguing this point at Friday drinks for a while now. And finally a brave American rancher has been boldly published in the NYT.
Be wary kids of any flat world opinion that tells you that there is only one good way to live. It should always be predicated on..."it depends"
So what is the real story of meat’s connection to global warming? Answering the question requires examining the individual greenhouse gases involved: carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxides.
Carbon dioxide makes up the majority of agriculture-related greenhouse emissions. In American farming, most carbon dioxide emissions come from fuel burned to operate vehicles and equipment. World agricultural carbon emissions, on the other hand, result primarily from the clearing of woods for crop growing and livestock grazing. During the 1990s, tropical deforestation in Brazil, India, Indonesia, Sudan and other developing countries caused 15 percent to 35 percent of annual global fossil fuel emissions.
Much Brazilian deforestation is connected to soybean cultivation. As much as 70 percent of areas newly cleared for agriculture in Mato Grosso State in Brazil is being used to grow soybeans. Over half of Brazil’s soy harvest is controlled by a handful of international agribusiness companies, which ship it all over the world for animal feed and food products, causing emissions in the process.
Be wary kids of any flat world opinion that tells you that there is only one good way to live. It should always be predicated on..."it depends"
yep, checks & balances.. I liked that story too.
the moderate organic soy/meat consumption part is pretty easy (at least half our protein comes from other beans & pulses, and eggs)
sticking to organic milk&cheese is not too hard either (with some handsome & squiffy exceptions)
as for seasonality and locality, and making use of everything before it goes bad... hmm... one can but try. it's sisyphean.
yes, its a subject that I am genuinely interested in doing some further academic research on
It's quite ridiculous that i would even be considering more but that is how much it interests me.
I'd be keen to look at a host of different ecologies, peoples and places and really unpick the whole diet and the environment debate from there.
as for never wasting food, I consider myself a first class queen of pimping out left overs in to delicious new creations and/or judging when something needs a spell in the freezer before we can face eating it again. When they are truly unsalvageable I feed them to our worm farm, which produces lovely worm juice for my herbs and tomatos.........
ja maybe i should look into an apartment worm farm... can you have those indoors?
poor erik is already traumatised by the fungus gnats that came from growing kale and chillies on our windowsill organically....
I'm not allowed to buy organic dirt anymore!
maybe you should get a newspaper to pay you to research a series of articles instead? you have the credentials and the writing skills.. and the contacts
the bit where I get stuck is definitely seasonality. If I'm allowed to define 'grown in europe' as local (trucked not flown), I can deal with that...
I do make my token pumpkin jam and pumpkin pie, and pickles by various recipes, and am having apples every morning right now, but doesn't eating seasonally mean eating things until you are bloody well sick of them? I just don't love roasted veges THAT much. I am terrified by the idea of an organic veg delivery box. Am convinced it would mean turnips every night for 3 months.
(I am also quite OK at freezing things like excess beans/pulses or veg scraps for stock, but there's always that block of blue cheese at the back of the fridge which I forget about, or the shrimps in the freezer which are actually 8 months old, or the japanese-chinese cooking sauce which is in a cupboard so ends up past its expiry date. Think I need to do a mandatory weekly excavation of hidden dark places and see what needs salvation.....)