This may sound familiar, but let’s recap: vegetarian, whole unprocessed food is the healthiest for all people, and our planet! It is nutritious, practical, and yes, it is the most sustainable option.
People in the western society, and increasingly in other cultures around the world, are eating twice as much meat as we did a few decades ago.
In an awareness-raising campaign a few years ago the founder of Treehugger, Graham Hill, hurled a few statistics at the audience:
- Environmentally, meat, amazingly, causes more emissions than all the transportation combined.
– Beef production uses a 100 times the water that all vegetables grown.
Unfortunately, in North America chicken and beef are now the staple of SAD diets. In fact, they are pushing fruit and vegetables to the top of the food pyramid. Consequently, in order to produce enough meat to fulfill that proportion of demand, and factoring in the growth of population along with an increase in per capita consumption, agribusiness is shifting to predominantly feed the animals that feed the people.
If we were fed naturally and locally, the land used for animal farming and food manufacturing would be freed up for cultivating nutritious and mineral-rich fresh produce.
