meat triggers ahead.
Pro plant-based content coming atcha.
Along with changing pretty much all environmentally unfriendly habits over the course of 2020, one of the biggest things that kept nagging at me was my meat consumption. Not because I didn’t enjoy the occasional cheeseburger - but more because *I knew* about the negative environmental impacts associated.
February 23, 2021, I decided to put my delightfully seasoned roasted veggies where my mouth is and take a personal stand with my food consumption. Yes, I did a guided meditation, saw what I can best describe to you as a “clip art steak” and knew that meant it was time I finally stop blaming my lack of vegetarianism on my husband’s multi-meat tendencies.
GHG stands for greenhouse gasses. CO2 (carbon) is the most common of them, so we often lump all the other gasses in under CO2e aka the carbon equivalent. The statistics are undeniable: Methane is 20x more powerful at trapping heat in the atmosphere than carbon dioxide. Nitrous Oxide is 300x more powerful than carbon dioxide at trapping heat. The biggest emitters of Methane in the U.S. are cows, chickens, turkeys and pigs. Cows are far and away one of the biggest emitters in the world. The meat, egg and dairy industry alone produces 65% of the world’s Nitrous Oxide.
reduce the meats by 1/4?
According to a 2019 study from the journal Scientific Reports, if every American reduced consumption of beef, pork, and chicken by a quarter, we’d save approximately 82 million metric tons of greenhouse gas emissions per year: a reduction of more than 1 percent.
If everyone in the U.S. went vegetarian, cutting meat out and replacing it with plant proteins of the same nutritional value, that would save 330 million metric tons of greenhouse gas emissions per year - the equivalent of taking over 71 million cars off of the road forever.
DISCLAIMER: we said this would be triggering!
Seriously though, starting small makes an impact. Even if you can’t bear to ditch the beef entirely, if you eat it sparingly, that will help. For example, if every American dropped just one serving of chicken from their weekly diet, that would save the CO2 emission equivalent of taking 500,000 cars off the road.
