Can you resolve to reduce your fossil-fuel consumption by eating fewer animal products?
By
2014. A
new year. The time to make resolutions. It’s when we all join gyms, sign up for
dating sites, and start new diets — only to quit them a few weeks later.
If
you’re into resolutions, I’ve got one for you to consider: In 2014, try a
low-carb diet. Not a low–carb(ohydrate) diet, but a low-carbon one. As in
carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse
gas causing the
climate crisis.
If you
think it sounds a bit strange, hear me out.
And I’ll
be honest. I’d love to reduce the amount of fossil fuels I use. But I have very
little ability to make my city improve its public transportation, walkability,
and bike paths. Some people can afford major investments like solar panels or
even better insulation for their homes, but I can’t. And neither can many other
Americans.
But an
awful lot of greenhouse gas emissions come from agriculture. Including the
impacts of deforestation due to agriculture, getting our food from farm to
table accounts for more than 27
percent of global
emissions.
The good
news: Changing your diet is affordable — even delicious. We all eat three times
a day, after all. And a low-carbon diet is actually healthier and often cheaper
than what most Americans eat already.
How do
you do it? The short answer is “eat less meat.” But please keep reading before
you dismiss this as a vegetarian rant.
It takes 40 calories of energy to produce just
one calorie of beef, with a similarly lousy ratio for eggs, and an even worse
one for lamb. It takes 14 calories to produce one calorie of either milk or
pork, and four calories to produce one calorie of chicken.
That’s
because we grow enough grain to
feed 800 million people, and we feed it all to livestock. Those
animals do produce meat, milk and eggs, but they also burn a lot those calories
off as they grow.
The
amount of calories fed to livestock is far greater than the calories humans
obtain from their meat, milk, and eggs. It’s far more efficient for humans to
eat plant foods ourselves.
There
are also other paths to a lower carbon diet.
Choosing locally grown foods, buying organic, gardening, and avoiding processed
foods all help. But the simplest, most reliable, and most impactful way to
shrink your footprint is by eating lower on the food chain.
This
isn’t news. Scientific
American wrote about
it in 2011, and the United Nations Food and Agriculture reported on it in 2006. Anna Lappe
published a book on climate and diet called Diet for a Hot
Planet in 2010.
If you
aren’t ready to go veg, don’t worry. Baby steps are better than nothing. That’s
the idea behind the Meatless Monday campaign. Just avoid meat
one day a week. Eat some vegetarian chili or lasagna. Dip veggies in hummus for
a snack. Have a bean burrito or munch on fresh fruit.
Personally,
I think reducing your animal product intake is easiest if you crowd out meat,
milk, and eggs with plant-based food that you enjoy. If you’re busy stuffing
your face with crisp apples or roasted butternut squash, you’ll be too full to
feel deprived.
Best of
all, you’ll help your health as well as the planet. As it turns out,
vegetarians and near-vegetarians are 24 percent less likely to die
of heart disease than
meat eaters. That means a resolution to reduce your meat consumption will help
ensure that you’ll be around to enjoy many more New Years to come.
OtherWords columnist Jill Richardson is
the author of Recipe for America: Why Our Food System Is Broken and
What We Can Do to Fix It. OtherWords.org