Cutting off from the American lifestyle
One vegan’s journey in a country full of meat-eaters
How does going vegan actually help you and the environment? I’m an 8th grader at Oyster-Adams Bilingual School and in science we are starting a new project. It’s called the Do One Thing (DOT) project. We have to do one thing for 28 days that helps the environment. I chose to go vegan. Going vegan is a common choice for this project but I believe it’s a big lifestyle change for an omnivore like me.
Shifting straight from eating all animal products to none can be difficult, especially where I live. The U.S. is a country FULL of meat and I am choosing to not eat any meat or dairy for 28 days. I know everyone says it’s hard to stay committed. A problem with the American lifestyle is that we have a tendency to consume and over-consume. But all I have to do is stick to it.
What inspired me to do this was the series of documentaries about the causes and effects of environmental problems that we watched in class. This has been said many times but these issues are real problems and we shouldn’t have to have so many people trying to tell us the same message. We watched Before the Flood, Plastic Paradise, and Cowspiracy. The film that impacted my knowledge of this issue the most was Cowspiracy. It talked about how the main cause of greenhouse gases concentrating in the atmosphere wasn’t fossil fuels but was actually animal agriculture. In the video it said that 51% of all greenhouse gas emissions are actually from animal agriculture. Now when I say animal agriculture that means all aspects of it.
Cows actually let out a lot of methane when they eat. Cows are constantly being overfed so they can provide more for the many Americans who buy beef. So the more they eat the more methane they emit. Methane is one of the many greenhouse gases that are messing up our atmosphere. We don’t want too much of it in the air. We need to acknowledge the effects of the “livestock revolution” (Stanford News).
Every second one acre of forest land is cut down for animal agriculture and half of U.S. land is used for cattle grazing. There is this massive process all leading up to tons of methane going into the atmosphere, effecting temperatures all over the world, melting our biggest source of fresh water (the ice caps) just to name one effect. This is all so you can get that burger for dinner. Not to mention one burger requires 660 gallons of water to produce (also mentioned in Cowspiracy).
In my family, our house, and our way of life (not including food) is probably okay from a sustainability perspective. We carpool, we don’t waste food, and we usually use public transportation. But discovering everything I saw in Cowspiracy absolutely changes things. My dad’s from the south and my mom’s Russian, so there are a lot of cultural differences involving food but the common theme is that both cultures love meat. We eat something with meat for dinner a couple times a week, it can range from 1 to 3, but when we do we eat large volumes. My mom has always wanted to try to be vegan so I took that opportunity so we would be able to help each other stay on track. It would also give me a chance to try out new recipes. I really want to learn how to cook so discovering a lot of great vegan recipes would be cool.
The dairy and meat industry is never going to be sustainable because it comes with too many problems. So I want to see what being vegan will do. Hopefully a lot of other people feel the same way so that the demand for these problematic products can go down. It may be a big step for your diet, or a huge impact on the American economy. But I believe that there’s always another way because humans always come up with solutions.
