Hello Readers, happy Friday! You may or may not have noticed, but our Green Tip O’ the Week for this week was about going meatless one day out of each week, which is a great way to help slow our complete and utter destruction of the planet. Okay, so that is a pretty dramatic statement, but the truth hurts, huh?!
Anyways, I have to admit that I have been a lifelong consumer of meats and cheeses (along with plenty of veggies!). At the same time, I freaking love the heck out of animals of all kinds, especially dogs, sharks, dolphins, llamas and the occasional spider.
I have a hard time reconciling my love for meat with my love for animals, but meat is so delicious! On the other hand, it isn’t terribly good for you, or the environment. In South American rainforests alone, grazing land for meat-destined animals ends up clear-cutting a football field’s worth of rain forest land each minute of each day (Smithsonian Institution, “Smithsonian Researchers Show Amazonian Deforestation Accelerating,” Science Daily Online, 15 Jan. 2002).
I could spend the next 10 blogs describing the awful environmental impact of the meat industry, but I think people already know about that, or at least you folks reading this know about it. So instead, I will end this week’s blog with a call to action; join me in going meatless at least one day a week. I’ve decided Mondays are a good day because I love alliteration, and “Meatless Monday” just rolls right off the tongue. But to be honest, I ate meat on the same Monday I declared a personal “Meatless Monday”, but that’s because I had to meet some friends for a birthday at Portland City Grill and their happy hour menu favors the meat-oriented folks. So I ended up making this Tuesday my meatless day—my point is to be flexible with it to fit your schedule.
Just one day makes a huge difference and according to Environmental Defense, if every American skipped one meal of chicken per week and substituted vegetarian foods instead, the carbon dioxide savings would be the same as taking more than half a million cars off U.S. roads. – Mark
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/27/weekinreview/27bittman.html?pagewanted=all
http://www.thedailygreen.com/going-green/community-tips/meat-industry-eat-lower-food-chain_
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