[Yhjusticenet] Info for Vegetarian

[Athabasca United Church]

I was asked at the last Presbytery meeting to forward the Church In the
World's rationale for requesting that two out of the three meals at the
Presbytery Meeting be considered meatless. The materials supplied will
provide some information as to why we see this as important and the
connection to the use of water as a basic source of life. 
  _____  


DID YOU KNOW ......? 

♣ The world’s cattle alone consume a quantity of food that could meet the
dietary needs of 8.7 billion people - more than the number of people on
Earth today. If every person became a vegetarian or vegan, there would be
enough food to feed the entire world. PETA’s Animal Times, Fall 2005

 

♣ 78 calories of fossil fuel are used to produce one calorie of beef
protein; 2 calories of fossil fuel are used to produce one calorie of
soybean protein.

 

♣ 70% of the decrease of woodland in Canada is due to animal agriculture.
EarthSave Canada website www.earthday.com as printed in the Northern
Vegetarian Society Newsletter 

 

♣ More than 15,000 litres of water are needed to produce a single day’s
worth of food for the typical meat eater. In comparison, an ovo-lacto
vegetarian requires only 4,500 litres of water and a vegan needs a mere
1,135 litres. Simply put, a carnivorous diet is unsustainable.

from Vegetarian Times Complete Cookbook as printed in Canada EarthSaver,
Sept/Oct 2005

 

Hard to swallow

 

            New research indicates that gas-guzzling cars are a much less
important factor in climate change than the huge amounts of food devoured
by carnivorous 'burger man'. Of all the seasonal homilies about "green"
Christmases and "sustainable" new year pledges - an oxymoron if ever I've
heard one - only one stuck in my mind: each of us could make a bigger
contribution to reducing emissions of greenhouse gases by becoming a vegan
than by converting to an eco-friendly car.

 

             Researchers at the University of Chicago have calculated the
relative carbon intensity of a standard vegan diet in comparison to a US-
style carnivorous diet, all the way through from production to processing
to distribution to cooking and consumption. An average burger man (that is,
not the outsized variety) emits the equivalent of 1.5 tonnes more CO2 every
year than the standard vegan. By comparison, were you to trade in your
conventional gas-guzzler for a state of the art Prius hybrid, your CO2
savings would amount to little more than one tonne per year.

 

            This may come as a bit of a shock to climate change
campaigners. "Stop eating meat" is unlikely to be the favourite slogan of
the new Stop Climate Chaos coalition. Even "eat less meat" might not go
down too well, even though Compassion in World Farming has produced an
utterly compelling explanation - in their report, Global Benefits of Eating
Less Meat - of why this really is the way forward.

 

            The basic rule of thumb is that it takes 2 kg of feed to
produce every kilogram of chicken, 4 kg for pork, and at least 7 kg for
beef. The more meat we eat, the more grain, soya and other feedstuffs we
need. So when we hear that the total global meat demand is expected to grow
from 209 m tonnes in 1997 to around 327 m tonnes in 2020, what we have to
hold in our mind is all the extra hectares of land required, all the extra
water consumed, the extra energy burned, and the extra chemicals applied to
grow the requisite amount of feed to produce 327 m tonnes of meat. Only a
tiny proportion of those recently alerted to the threat of climate change
would make any connection whatsoever between this and the food they eat.
These are two entirely different zones of environmental reality - and
getting one's head around climate change is proving to be enough of a
challenge anyway.

 

Reprinted in part from article by Jonathon Porritt, the Guardian, January
4th; 

see complete article at: http://society.guardian.co.uk/print/0,3858,5366 -
035- 105909,00.html 

 

 

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://mail.yellowheadpresbytery.org/pipermail/yhjusticenet_yellowheadpresbytery.org/attachments/20060411/08e63c0c/attachment.htm