Vegetarian Challenge

This week I’ve been posting about how eating less meat is good for the environment. Next week I’ll be putting my money where my mouth is, and going meat-free for 7 days. Dave is joining in too, and I’m going to take photos of what we eat and write about what we’re learning.

We’ve already cut back on the amount of meat we eat, but the idea is to push ourselves to do more than we normally would. In the past, I’ve used challenges like this to help me break old habits and start new ones (like giving up biting my nails, or eating healthier foods). I learn new skills and ways of staying motivated, and I’m more willing to do difficult things because I know it’s temporary. Afterwards I’ll be able to use the new skills to improve my everyday routine.

All our meals will be lacto-ovo-vegetarian, which means we’ll still be eating dairy foods and cheese. So we’re not quite herbivores yet, but we’re on our way! We’re going to eat out sometimes, to see how that works out. Hopefully by the end of the week we’ll have learned some new recipes, tried a new restaurant, and reduced our impact on the environment. Instead of posting two or three articles over the week, I’ll be posting a photo and a short description every day instead. I hope you enjoy it, and that the photos make you hungry

6 ways to eat less meat

Yesterday I posted about how eating less meat is good for the environment. Today I’m going to show you some tactics you can use to gradually cut back on the frequency or quantity of meat you eat. I’ve put them roughly in order from easy to more difficult, so you can start with the slack options

Tasty treats

The next time you decide to go out for dinner, try a vegetarian restaurant, or one that caters to vegetarians. It’s a good opportunity to taste foods you wouldn’t usually eat, like tofu or lentils. And you’ll be able to see what kinds of things can be done when you don’t have to include meat in every dish. I love the nachos and breakfasts at Source Foods on Beaufort St in Perth, but would like to try more places. If you’ve got a good vego restaurant near you, let us know in the comments

Get educated

I was pretty grossed out by the details of how animals are farmed – it really makes you think about what you’re eating and can help motivate you to stick to your changes. Check out the information on factory farming at PETA’s GoVeg site (videos as well), or the SaveBabe website, and for a lighter take on such a serious subject, watch Moofeus free the pigs in The Meatrix (remember that although cows in Australia are usually kept in pasture, chickens and pigs are factory farmed here, and the slaughtering process is pretty bad for all of them).

Buy less meat

When you’re working out how much meat to buy, keep in mind that people only need one serve a day,which is 65-100g. That’s about the size of a deck of cards. If you don’t buy large portions of meat to start with, you’ll find it easier to cut back, especially if you’re the sort of person who has to eat everything on your plate. And since the price of meat keeps going up, this can save you a bit of money.

Buy only sustainable meat

When you’re at the shops, restrict what sorts of meat you buy. You could stop buying red meat; or restrict yourself to free-range or organic meats instead. That way, when you get home you’ve got little choice but to reduce the amount of meat you’re eating. Unfortunately, if your butcher or supermarket stock lots of sustainable meat, this won’t do much to help you – you’ll still be able to eat quite a lot of meat, and will have to try harder…

Learn to cook meat-free meals

This is where you might have to learn some new skills, although you probably already have a few favourite meals that don’t have meat in them: bruschetta and Dave’s leek and mushroom pasta are my faves. You can try replacing meat with things like tofu or seitan as well.

Taste.com.au allows you to search for vegetarian recipes. If you need a bit of inspiration, try some of the fantastic vego and vegan blogs out there: the photos at VeganYumYum make me hungry in an instant! I’ve also bought a vegetarian cookbook, Fresh Food Fast by Peter Berley, and try out new recipes from it often. If you’ve got any good recommendations for books or websites with recipe ideas, please let me know, especially if they’re Australian (converting ounces to grams does my head in!)

Set yourself a challenge

Decide on a challenge, and try it out for a while. Some examples might be: making Tuesdays meat-free; meat-free lunches; giving up beef; or trying one new vego recipe a week. Do it for a month and see how you go – it could become a permanent change.

Dave and I have been doing all of these except for the last one, but we’re tackling that next. Tomorrow I’ll tell you about the challenge we’ve set for next week…

ANZ and Gunns

If you’re an ANZ bank customer, and you oppose the Gunn’s pulp mill in Tasmania, check this out:

GetUp.org.au is asking ANZ customers to speak to their bank managers about the pulp mill. ANZ is considering funding the pulp mill, and could be swayed against it if they think that it will affect the way the public sees them. GetUp is asking people to tell ANZ that they’ll take their business elsewhere if they fund the mill – they have a list of facts to help you work out what to say. You can sign up here on the ANZ campaign page.

The Tasmanian government has signed over large amounts of state forest to Gunns for the next 20 years. Given how urgent the problem of climate change is getting, it’s madness to deliberately chop down ancient forests which would otherwise be absorbing carbon dioxide for us. The trees will only be used to make wood pulp which will then be turned into paper in Japan, while we get our forests taken away and a dirty mill in their place, and Gunns gets the profit.

At this point, the campaign is focused on ANZ customers only, so I’m not able to participate, although I’ve joined in previously. But I thought some of you might be interested.

The 7th way to choose eco-friendly food

Last year I wrote about the 6 ways you can choose eco-friendly food. Mostly they were choices that you could make while doing your shopping, like paying attention to the source of your food, it’s packaging and how processed it is. These are simple habits that you can learn. There’s another important thing you can do, but it’s a bit harder than the first six. The 7th way to reduce the eco-impact of your food is this: eat less meat.

Why does eating less meat help the environment?

Agriculture causes nearly 1/5th (18%) of the greenhouse gas emissions in Australia, mostly from keeping livestock. Keeping cows, pigs, sheep and chickens for us to eat means we have to: clear land for them to live on (fewer trees to absorb GHGs), clear land to grow food for them (fewer trees again), transport their food (more GHGs), and provide water for them and the crops we feed them (when we’re experiencing the worst droughts in a long time).

Then there’s the whole business of turning them from living animals into meat, packaging that meat, and transporting it to our shops: not pretty, and racks up even more greenhouse gas emissions.

Farmers, shops and consumers can all work on making the industry more efficient. But of the emissions coming from livestock, only one-third of them are from things we can control, like transport and processing. The remaining two-thirds comes from the methane these animals are farting producing (12% out of the total 18%). So being efficient is great, but not enough.

By reducing the consumer demand for meat, we can reduce the amount of land-clearing for pasturing and feed-crops, reduce the pressure on our water supplies, and reduce greenhouse-gas emissions. There really are a lot of environmental benefits in return for the effort you put in.

What are our options?

Becoming a vegetarian is an obvious choice, which as well as respecting animal welfare, is good for your health as well. But it doesn’t have to be all or nothing: even eating less meat instead of giving it up completely will help your health and the environment.

Most Australians eat too much meat anyway – the average Aussie eats 200g of meat each day (and I know of plenty who eat more than that!). But the national health guidelines recommend that we eat only 1 serve of protein foods each day. That works out to 100g or a serve about the size of a deck of cards; and it doesn’t even have to be meat, it can be eggs or legumes or other alternatives. So we’re often eating more than twice the amount of meat we actually need.

The Cosmos article linked above notes that even a 10% reduction in the consumer demand for meat will help the environment. If we make sure we’re eating just the amount recommended to make sure we get enough protein in our diets, that would be a 50% reduction!

But eating less meat means changing the way we plan our meals, and the way we think about our food. It’s not a hardship, but it does mean you have to get organised and make an effort. Tomorrow I’m going to post some tips for reducing how often you eat meat, and the amounts you serve yourself. On Friday I’ll tell you about the challenge Dave and I are doing to help us set some new habits…

Reaction Time in the Quarterly Essay

Today we’ve got a guest post from Wendy Palmer, who you might recognise from her comments on earlier posts here. Wendy is a fiction writer with an interest in environmental issues. She’s written a review for us of the Ian Lowe essay I mentioned yesterday.

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Reaction time: climate change and the nuclear option. Ian Lowe. Quarterly Essay 27; Melbourne, Black, Inc.Over the last year or so, the ‘nuclear power option’ has been touted as a viable solution for cutting carbon emissions and countering climate change. The publicity has been such that even some trenchant anti-nuclear people are considering nuclear power as the lesser of two evils. But can nuclear energy really solve our growing climate change and energy supply issues?In his wide-ranging essay, Lowe goes through five reasons why nuclear energy is not the solution:

• Economically, nuclear power would cost more than alternative energy producers (as well as more than conventional coal): one estimate is $75-105 per megawatt hour; only solar has the potential to cost as much at $70-$120 per megawatt hour, while wind and gas are much cheaper
• Nuclear power is too slow a response to cut carbon emissions: realistically it could take up to ten or fifteen years to build one nuclear power station in Australia, then another five years to make up for the construction and fuelling energy costs; this means it would be fifteen to twenty years for it to even start making a contribution to cutting carbon pollution. Compare that to fifteen to twenty months for introducing large-scale renewable energy production
• Nuclear power is not carbon-free: it takes a lot of fossil fuels to mine and process the ores, enrich the fuel and build the stations. Obviously the same argument applies to building renewable energy grids, but arguably they are less intensive in this regard
• Just like oil, uranium ores are a limited resource: the high-grade ores are limited and could only supply present demand for fifty years (ten years, if we increase demand to replace all coal-powered station). Then we have to use the lower-grade ores, which would require so much extra energy for extraction and processing that they could release more carbon dioxide than burning gas
• Nuclear power is dangerous: both in terms of the risk of accidents and the risk of terrorism or proliferation. The management of the radioactive waste is another major issue here, both morally (we export the ore; should we take back the waste?) and technically. These are the concerns which make many people anti-nuclear; it’s the other four issues that should make us re-consider whether it is, indeed, the lesser evil.

The whole essay makes for fascinating reading. Lowe covers some of the politics of nuclear energy and evaluates (and eviscerates) the Howard government taskforce report, Uranium Mining, Processing and Nuclear Energy – Opportunities for Australia?, showing how much of its ‘positive’ endorsement for the nuclear power option is pure spin.

Lowe also spends time dispelling some of more entrenched myths about renewables: that they can’t handle baseload, that they’re expensive and will cost jobs, that they can’t be scaled up etc. In fact, the record of alternatives is pretty good both economically-speaking (job creation, for starters) and performance-wise, especially given the comparative lack of research funding.

Compared to the practicalities of nuclear power stations – where will we build them if for maximum effectiveness they should be near the demand (ie near population centres) and on the coast (for cooling water)? What will we do with the waste? How are developing nations going to handle these issues? – renewables look easy.

Lowe’s underpinning argument is simple: those touting nuclear energy as the solution are looking for a technical fix that would allow the western world to maintain its current, incredibly wasteful, lifestyle. On the other hand, alternative energies can be brought on board much faster than nuclear power and can handle our energy needs if we also become more energy-efficient – which doesn’t take a huge sacrifice on our part.