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…