"Which adds more greenhouse gases to our atmosphere, motorized transporation or livestock?"
Based on the title of this post, you can probably guess that answer to David de Rothschild's question in The Live Earth Global Warming Survival Handbook. Or maybe you've already heard. The answer is livestock, which accounts for an astonishing 18% of global greenhouse gas emissions. Thankfully, there's a simple way to change all that through Essential Skill #31:
Eat your veggies.
Though the meat and dairy industry would love you to believe otherwise -- and spend big money every year making sure you don't change your mind -- you don't need meat or dairy to be healthy. In fact, a vegetarian or vegan diet is healthier, as it's minus much of the fat and cholesterol that leads to heart disease and other complications.
All of this is not to suggest that if you really are a true-green environmentalist, you'll become become vegetarian or vegan overnight. But just like you cut down on your water, electricity and gas use, you can cut down on your support of the livestock industry to help shrink your carbon footprint.
"One pound of meat requires eight times as much energy to produce as one pound of veggie protein such as tofu," write de Rothschild in the Handbook. Add to that the deforestation for pasture land, fertilization of feed crops, methane from animal flatulence and nitrous oxide emitted from manure, and you can see how the greenhouse gases add up quick.
Check out this link to the Mayo Clinic for details on a healthy vegetarian or vegan diet.
If you need any more inspiration to eat your veggies instead of cows, pigs, chickens and other livestock, consider this. Ours is no longer a world of small family farms that respect the animals they're raising. Instead, we're eating animals from the cruel factory-farming system, which treats animals like unfeeling commodities meant only to be bought, killed, packaged and sold. If you want to know the truth that the meat meat and dairy industries do not want you to know, go to The Humane Society of the United States.
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There's no beef or pork in this household. Though one of us is vegan, the other eats only chicken, eggs, dairy and sometimes fish. It's a diet high in veggies and grains, though not nearly as boring as that may sound. We LOVE, LOVE, LOVE many of the soy meat substitutes and experimenting with creative veggie dishes we would normally never try. Eating a meat-based diet really does limit your menu simply because you're not forced to explore countless other recipes from all around the world.
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