I’ve been reading articles on climate change and our food system and have found that the costs of transporting food across the country and around the world is totally unsustainable. I was also somewhat surprised to learn that the cost to our environment to sustain the meat industry has actually surpassed the damage done by transportation of vegetables. Around 30% of the greenhouse gas emissions come from the meat industry. If that isn’t enough to make you become a vegetarian, we can feed 8 times the amount of people on a vegetarian diet than on a meat based diet. The land use for raising animals is obscene; as well as the methane emissions from the animals themselves.
I didn’t actually mean for this blog to become a rant on veganism; but I am actually pretty shocked these days at the number of “former” vegetarians there are in the ranks of my friends. The 90’s had an upsweep of vegetarianism that started to transform the meat industry; and then I started hearing more and more of my friends start eating one or two meals with meat a year, then each month, and now I once again find myself in the minority. It’s crucial that people hold corporations accountable for the amount of waste and misuse of our resources; but being a vegetarian; growing our own food or supporting local agriculture/farmers markets/co-ops and not relying on large businesses for our food actually can make a huge difference.
I am tired of hearing about all the new “green business” – what we all really need to do is to really have a locally grown and foraged attitude towards what we all eat.
I think that practicing non-violence and attempting to create a non-hierarchical system means practicing peace and equality in all aspects of our lives. Growing animals for the purpose of eating them, and condoning the horrendous treatment of animals in slaughterhouses allows us to believe that animals are unequal to us. It creates a window to allow us to unconsciously allow for inequality to exist in how we view the world. It’s all oppositional to the way I’d like to live, so I guess this is why it’s been 18 years now that I have been a vegetarian.
Enough of a rant: here are the mushrooms!
Hen of the Woods:
and here are the Oysters:
