Ethical Eating Saves Money?
A reader has passed on this Sydney Morning Herald article about a new book on vegetarianism and the good environmental reasons that go with this lifestyle choice.
Angela Crocombe’s book Ethical Eating aims to teach us ‘how to make food choices that won’t cost the earth’.
Angela believes this is the first book to take a comprehensive look at ethical eating from an Australian point of view. It investigates where and how our food is produced, packaged and sold, attempts to untangle the complex debates about farming methods, food miles and product certification, and carries a list of Australian suppliers of organic produce.
About The Book
After seven months of research there are many footnotes referring to scientific studies, academic and government reports, meat industry fact sheets, plus Angela’s interviews with industry representatives and newspaper articles to support a matter-of-fact approach that doesn’t ‘preach to the reader’.
The book has a simple message: individuals can have a local and global impact by scrutinising what is on their plates… a New Scientist study finds that becoming a vegan would save more greenhouse gas emissions a year than switching to a hybrid car.
“It’s all about increasing your awareness, making people think a little more about what you put in your mouth and the journey it has been on to get there, rather than mindlessly stuffing our faces with whatever we find,” says Angela.
Food Miles Awareness Good For Your Health
A study of food miles by the Melbourne environmental organisation CERES found a typical weekly basket of fruit and vegetables travelled 8730 kilometres from the point of production to consumption. The journey taken by the bananas, tomatoes and other produce generated greenhouse gas emissions equivalent to driving 1173 cars for a year!
Food Miles Good For Your Wallet?
Angela finds that although organic produce is costly, this cost is offset by savings from spending less on meat and processed food.
ARE we changing our lifestyle habits?
4 Comments
Thank you for your invitation to comment.
I became a vegetarian over 50 years ago, I am now a healthy 82 years of age. The reason then was purely for health. Since then I have come to realise many other good reasons besides health to adopt a vegetarian diet, not the least a deep respect and sense of kinship with the animal kingdom.
Angela Crocombe’s book “Ethical Eating” highlights another angle supporting a vegetarian diet, especially in this time of increasing awareness of environmental issues.
Perhaps in a world of increasing hunger and starvation the following quotation from a book I started to write some years ago may motivate some people to consider modifying their lifestyle to a diet that reduces meat consumption for reasons other than health.
“THE REAL CAUSE OF HUNGER”
Whatever reasons are given by historians as to the many causes for war, whether involving religious fanaticism, class differences, national or racial rivalry etc. the basic underlying cause is based on land ownership and use. A diet based on animal consumption requires as much as twenty times more land to feed and nourish the same number of people on a vegetarian diet. This situation is further compounded by the modern practices of feeding grains to livestock rather than allowing them to graze naturally on pastures.
Using grains such as corn, oats and soybeans to feed humans would be a far more efficient use of food than feeding the same grains to livestock, which will be slaughtered for human consumption. To clarify and stress the point of the enormity of wastage in the production of nutritious food a revealing quotation from page 352 of John Robbin’s book “Diet For A New America” dramatically stresses the issue–
“Many of us believe that hunger exists because there’s not enough food to go around. But as Frances Moore Lappe and the anti-hunger organisation Food First have shown, the real cause of hunger is a scarcity of justice, not a scarcity of food.
Enough grain is squandered every day in raising American livestock for meat to provide every human being on earth with two loaves of bread. Hunger is really a social disease caused by the unjust, inefficient and wasteful control of food….”
And from page 353 of the same book the following calculation ……
“The world’s cattle alone, not to mention pigs and chickens, consume a quantity of food equal to the caloric needs of 8.7 billion people – nearly double the entire human population of the planet.”
The above information is worth further research!
Tony La Spina
Thank you for a very thought provoking comment Tony – the problem is huge and complex. It does need more research and more commentary. Do you think there is a glimmer of understanding out there?
Yes Gail there is more than a mere glimmer of understanding out there mainly due to avenues of communication such as this blog.
The commercial interests in the main are competing with nature and life and need consumers to rely, on a continuing basis, on their products be they processed foods, drugs, fossil fuels such as oil, coal etc.
However there are out there forward looking commercial interests with a new vision that are making available technology on renewable energy, releasing info that will help people to achieve and mantain good health without legal or illegal drugs.
Above all this, the many millions of the poorest people are increasingly gaining the means to help themselves and be free of the heavy burden of mere survival. These prescious souls will be free to join the growing number of aware and concerned people and help Mother Nature recover.
Thousands of people, such as author Angela Crocombe are making availabe info that will lead to a world that only dreamers would dare to dream.
Tony.
It does seem that bloggers and independent views expressed on the net are having an influence – pretty hard to gauge though!