#UmpluggedDiet Chapter 1: Quitting red meat consumption
For the project, I’d like to start a journey through a changing of my diet. I observed that, using mainly electric houshold for cooking (such as an electric plate instead of the gas stove), and and multiplying consumption for a long duration of daily use, what we eat greatly affects energy consumption in the home.
Chapter 1: Quitting red meat consumption
This is a changing that I’ve thought about for a long time. To be completely honest, the first reason I wanted to stop taking red meat is health. Red meats are: beef, lamb, pig, veal, deer, goat, boar.
With this assignment I started to search information about energy consumption related to red meat production, and after some calculation, I’ve taken the final decision: “Mom, no more red meat for me, thank you!”
Here’s why:
1) Buying meat from the butcher is not a more sustainable option. On an ethical level, for the treatment of animals, it is certainly a better condition than the industrial production, but in terms of energy consumption, water footprint and co2 emissions, there is not much difference. This is because the emissions caused by the production of meat depend mainly on the breeding of the animals themselves, even before they leave the farm. To the production emissions, we have to add the energy consumption related to transport, distribution, cook and waste that the market requires, that is the same for industrial products and butcher’s meat.
Source: fao.org
2) From a more global point of view, a study of the team of a team of exprts for The Guardian, that compare energy consumption for the production of animal-based and plant-based food, says:
“The use of cows, pigs and other animals for food, as well as livestock feed, is responsible for 57% of all food production emissions (…). Beef alone accounts for a quarter of emissions produced by raising and growing food. The difference in emissions between meat and plant production is stark — to produce 1kg of wheat, 2.5kg of greenhouse gases are emitted. A single kilo of beef, meanwhile, creates 70kg of emissions.”
3) To sum up all the information, I invite you to take a look at this summary table by The World Counts.
Conclusions:
I gave up eating red meat for my health — that is not the topic of the course — and as an ecological choice. I’ll continue eating other kind of animal-based foods because of the habits of my family, and the inconvenience that a drastic choice would bring to a “family management” level. White meat is probably something that I would stop consuming if I lived alone, as those proteins are also replaceable with plant-based foods while, on a more practical and direct level, they require a lot of energy to be cooked — so much more time on the induction plate than when we cook vegetables.
