Go Greener, Australia

Starting next Monday, 29th September, it’s National Vegetarian Week. This is an event put on by the Australian Vegetarian Society to promote the benefits of plant-based diets and encourage Australians to lower their meat intake. NewsPoll shows that 7 out of 10 Australians already eat vegetarian meals sometimes, so this is a good chance to try a few new recipes and find out how eating less meat can help the environment.

Eating less meat is my 7th way you can eat better for the environment. Livestock farming uses lots of water, about 156GL a year, which isn’t good in our current drought. And cows and sheep produce about 12% of our greenhouse gas emissions, mostly in methane. So anything we can do to cut back on these things is a good idea. Other good reasons to eat less meat are the health benefits, and the fact that animal farming can be pretty cruel. You can read more about this at the AVS website if you’re interested.

And, last but not least, going vego for a week will give you a chance to branch out in the kitchen. If you’re like most Aussies, you’re not getting your 2 fruit and 5 veg every day. Why not take the opportunity to try new recipes, or new ingredients that you wouldn’t normally bother with? National Vegetarian Week includes cooking demonstrations in Vic, NSW, Qld, Tas and WA: you can see the list of events here (pdf).

I’ll be going for vegetarian nachos (using organic blue-corn chips I got from a Mexican friend), and baked potatoes using the ones we’ve just harvested from our vegie patch this week. I’m thinking of trying to cook tofu for the first time too - I’ve eaten it plenty of times before, I’ve just not done it myself. Dave will probably surprise me with something yummy, but he never plans ahead when it’s his turn to cook. I’ll post pictures or recipes if we make anything too delicious to keep to ourselves.

If you’ve got any good vego recipes, please let the rest of us know in the comments!

Tags: event, vegetarian

This entry was posted on Friday, September 26th, 2008 at 10:30 am and is filed under food. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.