Meat Production is Responsible for About 18 Per Cent of Global Carbon Emissions

[civil42806]

Why are you making this us vs. them? It's one planet that we all share. We all have to deal with whatever comes to us.

I'm not making it a us versus them.  To  be quite blunt I'm mocking the 376 or so post of faye that the world is coming to an end

[BridgeTroll]

I would be actively involved in raising or hunting my own if I did. My father is a hunter, so I'm not shy around blood and guts.

I commend you for this stance.  Everyone would be better off if they were involved in and had to actually process the food they eat.  Growing food... whether it is plant or animal is hard work.  The world has long since passed the point of an agrarian locally grown or raised society.  Mass production is not only reality... it is necessity.  Can better methods be employed?  You betcha.

It is very easy to a vegetarian here in Florida or California.  Fresh fruits and veggies are available year around.  Not quite so easy in Wisconsin, Maine, and North Dakota.  In the winter fresh produce is trucked in from the southern states and now even South America.  I enjoy fresh grapes and asparagus from Chile year round and have absolutely no intention of giving them up because they are not grown locally.

You mention Mercury in the water and mercury tainted fish.  Limit your consumption of oily type fish.  Predatory fish like tuna and salmon build up mercury by consuming prey fish that have minute amounts of mercury.  "White" fish... Flounder, cod , etc... have low mercury content due to their diet.

A well balanced diet reduces all of these risks.

[kellypope]

I'm in Chicago right now--we go to farmer's markets while they're up (they aren't, now) and get a lot of produce and cheese. When I'll finally have some soil to call my own, I'll plant lot of root veggies, so that as we move into fall and winter, we can take advantage of root time. Also, build a little hoop house so we can get some leafy greens in the dead of winter (my roommates and I love our kale). We buy local fruit preserves and pickles. A woman I know (who is also veggie) has a cider press and grows a lot of beans, and she forages for pears and apples, and makes tons of cider/juice from them. With her beans she makes a lot of chili, of course. She had 8 birds, chicken and quail, that she would have fresh eggs from. She makes her own butter, cheese, and yogurt, using milk from some people she knows with cows. She forages for a lot of food, utilizing a lot wild (not cultivated) plants. So, not that's it's really much harder to be veggie in the Midwest, you just have to know how to make your food last, or how to get nutrient-dense food at any time.

Although, if we start talking about food miles--as you mentioned with Chile, which is 5,000+ miles away (from me, at least)--you get into the same boat as meat production. Which wouldn't be a necessity if people weren't so staunch about their eating habits. It isn't necessary to eat enough meat for two people at every meal, but some people behave like it is. Demand is the problem--that's why it's so appealing for ranchers in the equatorial nations to plow their rain forests (causing a HUGE spike in carbon emissions--look at Borneo, Brazil) for cattle production.

[BridgeTroll]

Thats great Kelly.  Clearly all xx milliion folks in Chicago cannot do that.  Luckily for you... the Vaaaasssst majority of people buy mass produced food at the super market.  Most do not have the time to "forage".  Most do not have the space for a hoop house.  Most cannot raise chickens, quail, rabbits nor make their own butter and cheese.

It is great that you can... I would hope that someday I can do the same.  But is niether realistic nor possible for me or the huge majority of us to live as you and some of your friends are.

Be truthful now Kelly... you stop by the supermarket and pick up veggies that you cannot find via foraging or at the farmers market.

[kellypope]

It's true, I'm not going to deny that a lot my vegetables are coming from who knows where. But I don't agree with you that I can't find them around me. I go for kale, cabbage, cauliflower, potatoes, beans, carrots, zucchini, parsnip. All can and do grow in Cook county. For some reason, the city has decided to put lacinato kale and red cabbage in the planters along State St and Michigan Ave. A lot of things you can forage you won't find at supermarkets or farmer's markets--lamb's quarters, evening primrose, peppergrass, highbush cranberry, burdock, yellow dock, chickweed, cattail.

But I know that I am capable of doing it differently. I know that where I currently live--13 floors up with very little light, and so temporarily I can't commit to rigging some container veggies--I can't be sustaining myself. I know that when I get the opportunity to move--to a place with soil--I will be building raised beds, and a coop and a run, and planning my medicinal garden, and walking around my neighborhood to see where public fruit and nuts will be. I will be actively composting.

Making your own butter, cheese, and yogurt is so easy it's embarrassing. You can make yogurt in your sleep--literally.

[BridgeTroll]

The upper midwest is an awesome place to farm and garden.  I am originally from Wisconsin.  I also know that from now until March you will not plant or grow anything.  Unless you plan on subsisting on canned or preserved local fruit and veggies you will have to buy these things fresh that have been shipped from afar.  The early settlers in the area (and even into the early 1900's)where you live were ravaged by scurvy and other such maladies associated with lack of fresh fruit and vegetables and they lived off the land.

Modern transportation and farming makes fresh fruit and veggies possible for everyone... all the time.  This is a good thing.  (I love asparagus and can eat it year round now) What and how you eat is a very personal choice and no one should be telling anyone what and how... they should nourish themselves.

[Overstreet]

...........However, you still have the digestive tract of an herbivore. .......................

Contrary to popular belief we do not have two stomachs or gullets.

[kellypope]

"What and how you eat is a very personal choice and no one should be telling anyone what and how..."

In a way I agree, but I also disagree. If you know that someone is eating something that is proven time and again by one study after another that it is going to mutate their DNA and cause them to have some form of cancer--would you let them know? There is a way to be tactful, to speak softly, and not in a way that the person you are talking to is likely to become defensive.

Also, I'm making time to learn about ways to store food. When I return to Jax in the summer, I'm going to try my hand at making fruit leather from the blueberries in the backyard, and blackberries I forage. Drying leaves, having cold storage, cidering, making fruit vinegar, making preserves and pickles are also methods I'm trying to learn more about. Weck is a company that makes reusable canning jars (unlike the Mason seal, which you can only trust once), and Grolsch sponsors galleries here--once you rinse out the abundant unwanted bottles, you can reuse it.

Modern transportation...I wouldn't say that it's entirely a good thing. How far food travels is a huge issue and contributes to the pollution and climate change this thread is about. While it's good to have a sources for nutrients, it's better for the planet to know your alternatives to contemporary ways of "hunting and gathering."

PS--You'll like this. The native peoples of Alaska didn't get scurvy, even though they weren't eating citrus. How? Raw meat still contains vitamin C enough for humans to be able to live without scurvy. Scurvy will start to kick in after about 3 months without some C. But if you cook the meat, you risk losing the C.

[kellypope]

...........However, you still have the digestive tract of an herbivore. .......................

Contrary to popular belief we do not have two stomachs or gullets.

Come now, there's more to it than that!

Our stomach acid, hydrochloric acid, is much weaker than a carnivore's. A carnivore needs the highly acidic stomach acid to break down raw flesh as well as to kill of potentially harmful bacteria.
Also, the length of our intestines is much more like an herbivore's. A carnivore's intestines are very short, so as to pass the digested meat quickly before it has a chance to rot. Longer intestines allow for more time to break down plant fibers and absorb nutrients.
Our facial muscles are not capable of allowing us to break off large chunks of flesh--like an herbivore, we have well-developed masticating muscles.
Our teeth have more similarity to herbivores, our jaw motion and need to chew is more like an herbivore's, even the enzyme composition of our saliva is different from a carnivore's.

[buckethead]

I feel like an omnivore; you feel like an herbivore.

[BridgeTroll]

If you know that someone is eating something that is proven time and again by one study after another that it is going to mutate their DNA

I have to agree with you here.  It has been proven time and again that our diet is better now than it ever has been.  We live significantly longer, healthier, taller, and stronger than our ancestors hundreds of years ago when they lived off the land, grew, hunted and foraged for local foods.

I am happy for you and your lifestyle choice.  It simply is not a choice many of us could or can make.  Imagine how many blackberries would be available for you to forage if ALL of us were doing so.  I predict blackberry shortages.  People in an urban setting simply cannot forage nor grow or raise their food.

You contradicted yourself regarding eating raw meat btw.  In one paragragh you extol the virtues of eating raw meat to avoid scurvy... then in another paragraph explain why eating raw meat is not good for humans.

[Overstreet]

........Our stomach acid, hydrochloric acid, is much weaker than a carnivore's. ...........

Maybe, but Nexium makes money off of me. A good steak or burger makes it feel better.  Besides tearing chunks of raw meat off a carcuss is over rated any way. I'd rather use tools and cook it. We are really not designed to process leafs and twigs off the tree either.

[jandar]

I grow a few veggies in my back yard, but for the most part, my diet is around 50% protein (mostly red meat).

I might be a few pounds overweight, but I have low cholesterol, great blood pressure. I even eat 3-4 times the daily recommended intake of sodium.

Point being, everyone is different. Many humans can survive on plants alone, some can survive on meat/fish alone. Most survive on a combination of the two.

Its funny, that jaw structure was mentioned, primates with large canines are usually herbivores, the canines are for show and defense.

I actually like what this vegetarian site writes:
http://www.vrg.org/nutshell/omni.htm

Humans are classic examples of omnivores in all relevant anatomical traits. There is no basis in anatomy or physiology for the assumption that humans are pre-adapted to the vegetarian diet. For that reason, the best arguments in support of a meat-free diet remain ecological, ethical, and health concerns.

I suggest reading Adventures in Diet by By Vilhjalmur Stefansson.
http://www.biblelife.org/stefansson1.htm
He chronicles the 11 years he lived as an Eskimo and ate a meat only diet and what it did to his body.
http://www.biblelife.org/stefansson1.htm

[kellypope]

While the nutrition argument is interesting, and worthy of discussion, why don't we get back to the point of carbon emissions? How about over-development (paving and empty lots, real estate development in a failing market without buyers, "clearing the land", etc.) eliminating the amount of land available for wild, edible food to grow?

If you want to keep giving Nexium your money, that's cool with me. That's not my problem. You decide what to do with your money.

We're not designed to process leaves off the tree? Granted, I can't think of any trees whose leaves I'm eating, but certainly chard, lettuce, dandelions, plants in the cabbage family we can eat right off the plant. Some things might be a little too bitter for our tastes, but that's entirely a matter of what you're used to purely in terms of how it tastes. Water tastes bad to someone who only drinks soda.

[BridgeTroll]

While the nutrition argument is interesting, and worthy of discussion, why don't we get back to the point of carbon emissions? How about over-development (paving and empty lots, real estate development in a failing market without buyers, "clearing the land", etc.) eliminating the amount of land available for wild, edible food to grow?

The nutrition argument is more than interesting... it is a big part of the issue.  I... and 95% of the population have absolutely no desire to limit our diet based on where we happen to live.  We all cannot skip through the meadow foraging nuts berries and edible plants.  The sheer mass of humanity would kill the meadow... and we would quickly starve.  If I live in Wisconsin I am not giving up Orange juice because of the carbon emissions.  If I live in Iowa I am not giving up Cod or shrimp because of carbon emissions.

Your foraging, make your own, grow your own lifestyle choice is just that.  A choice.  Let me ask you Kelly... are you single?  Have a family to support and feed?  Going to school?  Working?

The reason I ask is I suppose I could feed myself through hunting, foraging, growing my own if I was alone, living in a cabin on a mountainside in North Georgia.  As a matter of fact... that is my ultimate goal.  Leave the urban, suburban and move to a completely rural and idyllic setting.