sabertooth

Are you car free because you are concerned about the environment? Have you thought about how much meat you eat?

See https://www.nwei.org/ecotips/LessMeat.pdf

ken cummings

No. If I thought of how little meat I eat I would get depressed. I thank my brother for liking to kill game animals. I get 30 to 50 lb of elk, moose, caribou, duck, pig, a year as his freezer keeps overloading.

twochins

i love meat, i don't know how i could have an active lifestyle without it...need the protien for muscles

eating meat doesn't have anything to do with global warming or environment, for me

matagi

About once a month - not because I don't like meat, quite the contrary. However, good quality organic cuts are expensive.

-=(8)=-

None since '78

sentinel

I had a great steak last night.

misteralz

Deer here are vermin - I'll quite happily kill them and eat them.
Read a "Top Tip" in Viz recently about vegetarians, which went a little something like this...
"If, as a meat-eater, you are invited to a vegetarians for dinner, inform them of your special dietary requirements and request a side of lamb or a nice juicy steak. Because if you had them round, they'd more than likely whitter on about nut roasts"

oneredstar

I have not eaten meat since 1993. I keep track of what I eat and make sure that I am on top of all my nutritional needs.

Thanks for the link.

lala

Not much. I don't prepare it myself, except the odd organic bacon/sausage. When I eat out (not often) sometimes, I'll eat a little....mostly responsibly raised meats.

brokenrobot

I had essentially given up red mean a long while back as mad cow started to hit. Lately, though, it occurred to me: do I really want to be the last man standing, obligated to change the diapers on all the carnivores who've lost their minds? Probably not!

GGDub

While I agree with a lot of those points, singling out meat production as the problem is rather silly. All types of agriculture have a negative impact on the environment. Even organic farming is done on land that has been converted from its natural state and causes unbalances in drainage and recharge to aquifers. Groundwater/surface water pollution caused by feedlots is bad but this pollution pales in comparison to pollution caused by mining activities (I'm a hydrogeologist btw). Cyanide, arsenic and other heavy metals are just some of the fun stuff that is released into watersheds. Our bikes are a direct result of mining, so its best to keep that in mind when you point out someone else's bad habits.

FXjohn

Good to see you have a realistic perspective on the danger.

sabertooth

Meat production was not singled out as "the" problem. The claim was that eating less meat would probably be among the top five responses to the question, "What are the most important things I can do to help protect the environment?"

To me, the interesting point is not that agriculture also harms the environment, but that meat production can be so much more harmful than crop production: "To produce one calorie of protein from soy takes two calories of fossil fuel. For beef it takes 54 calories."

The mining issue you point out is probably legitimate (I'm not a hydrogeologist btw). However, it seems logical to me that someone who consumes a car is doing much more damage (by supporting mining) than someone who consumes a bicycle instead. (Here's what the NWEI has to say about cars, btw: https://www.nwei.org/ecotips/CarImpact.pdf)

The section "What You Can Do" looks at multiple ways to address the problem. For example, instead of telling people to stop eating meat completely, it suggests reducing your consumption and/or buying meat from animals raised locally on small farms.

Neither the problem nor the recommendations seem silly to me.

Roody

People do get touchy about this topic! Why?

GGDub

What I find silly, actually ridiculous, is when veggies, who'll fly around the world on vacations, where synthetic materials, and ride things made of metal, preach to people how bad meat production is to the environment (I'm not arguing its not). What I mean is the whole system is unsustainable and we're all part of the problem. You can preach that by riding a bicycle and not eating meat that you're somehow more responsible than someone who eats veal and drives an H2, but in the end you're a consumer as well and having a negative environmental and social impact on the world. I gave up worrying about that a long time ago and now ride my bike and eat less meat because I want to live longer, but am not under any delusions about the size of footprint I'm leaving behind.

cerewa

I'm not sure what you mean when you say a vegetarian bicyclist has a negative "social impact" on the world. I'm pretty sure you don't mean that it's bad for that bicyclist to convince other people to become bicyclists, etc.

GGDub, you say you find it ridiculous that a person vegetarian rides a metal bicycle preaches to a meat-eater about the environmental damage caused by meat-eating, because metal production/mining puts a strain on the environment.

What's significant is not whether there is any strain whatsoever put on the environment, but whether that impact is reasonable.

You haven't given us any reason/evidence to believe that if everyone in the world rode bicycles, that alone would not be enough to ruin the earth's ecosystems or cause global warming. To my knowlege bicycling is absolutely sustainable.

Is the meat-eating Hummer driver doing his/her fair share of the work to keep the planet in usable shape for our great grandchildren? Your answer doesn't address that at all.

Your argument makes no more sense than these arguments:

"I've unjustly stolen a small nut from my bike shop. Since I've already done wrong, I may as well do some more wrong, I think I'll go there in the night, break a window to get in, and run off with their best titanium bike frame."

"I got mad once when I was little and punched my brother hard. Now that I've done that, I may as well borrow his wallet, take all the money out of his bank account in cash, and secretly keep it for myself."

"I ate a vitamin today, and it was good. So I should eat the rest of the bottle of vitamins today, because that will also be good."

"I'm good at bicycle racing and it's fun and all, but I'm too old/too poor/too weak to ever win an olympic gold, so I shouldn't bother racing."

UCSDbikeAnarchy

now entering my 6th mostly meet free year. I think i get plenty of protein from eatins lots of tofu, beans nuts, milk cheese. I would be a little bit more owrried about my protien intact if i was vegan. people have a tendancy to offer me fish when i say i don't eat meat, especially here in the netherlands. I would never dmeand that someone go out of their way to make me something meat free, so In the case of fish, I'll eat a bit, everything else I'll pick around or jsut not eat.

I'm meat free for enviromental reason just the same as I'm car free for for enviromental reasons. Hopefully, it offsets a bit of the impact I've had runnign around europe for the last year.

Of course everything we does have an enviromental impact, but every little thing we do helps. Of course the bigest single thing you can do to save the enviorment is to not have kids. Now THERE is a touchy subject. see www.vhemt.org

lala

I agree about the children.

But perhaps this will need to go to the dreaded Politics n Religion forum....

pedex

checking my grocery bills from last couple of months, im averaging about 20lbs per month of meat....mostly chicken, fish, and hamburger

may sound like alot, but also consider I ride for a living, my daily calorie needs run around 4500 cals per day lately, not uncommon for me to eat 3/4 to 1lb at once in a big meal after work

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sidenote, anybody thinking chicken is lower in fat than beef products, think again in the US and UK anyway, the fat content of factory raised chicken is as high or higher than beef products----their high growth diet they give them makes for fat and out of shape chickens(imagine that)

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Damage to the environment, well of course. If we humans lived on this planet in an indefinitely sustainable fashion the world population would likely never get much higher than 2 billion or so.......we have 6.5 billion give or take at the moment.

sabertooth

But that doesn't mean there is anything wrong with the message about meat. It just means the messenger may be a hypocrit.


So what's the solution? Mass suicide? Sterilization? (Sorry. Cheap shot. I couldn't resist.)


The size of footprint we leave behind is what it is. The question is, "Am I being delusional by thinking that the size of my footprint makes a difference?" BTW, do you vote for president? Do you think your vote makes a difference?

Recently, I ran across a checklist of specific steps you can take to live a more sustainable life. The checklist was broken down into sections - 10 things you could do that were considered "First steps", 10 things that "Required effort" and 10 that were "Hard-core". Here's the hard-core list:

1. Walk, bike, carpool, or ride the bus to work.
2. Sell a car.
3. Get a home energy audit and follow through.
4. Make your yard a chemical-free zone.
5. Shift to a vegetarian diet.
6. Eliminate disposable products from you kitchen.
7. Replace much of your lawn with a garden or native plants.
8. Move to a smaller home or rent out extra living space.
9. Severly limit airplane travel.
10. Regularly volunteer time/resources to protect the earth.

JT52

Vegetarian for almost two years. Nearly dairy free as well.

I-Like-To-Bike

Because the rants from pompous or self righteous proselytizers (no matter what the dogma) are as much fun as a mime in the park.

AverageCommuter

Absolutely true. It is impossible to live without impacting the environment. No species can. But just like all species, when you exhaust the ability of your environment to provide for you, you will experience a massive die-off.

It happens around here with deer. They no longer have any natural predators, so their population increases until they outstrip their food supply. To prevent the suffering and starvation, which is definitely not pretty, there are sanctioned deer hunts.

We humans, however, have managed through technology to push our environment, which unfortunately encompasses the entire planet, much farther than should ever have been possible. When the rebound comes, and it will eventually, it will be cataclysmic. So we can either start working now to attempt to mitigate the damage or we can bury our heads in the sand and just hope that the incredible suffering that will preceed our extinction will not start until after we die of old age.

So is one person giving up a car for a bike, or giving up meat, going to have a major impact? No. However one person making these and/or other changes, and proving to others who might be contemplating it, that you can still be just as happy and healthy, if not moreso, might.

1. Done
2. Done
3. Looking into it
4. Done
5. Nearly so, maybe once every 2 weeks
6. Done
7. In the process
8. Already smaller than average, if we move, we'll go even smaller w/passive and active solar.
9. Only once in 39 years
10 darn, got me on that one

attercoppe

I typically only eat meat for one meal a day, that's at the small-town restaurant where I cook (lunch is free when I work). We get our beef from a local concern who raises and processes the cattle themselves (it's one of the few "good" things the Bush-voting, Wal-Mart-shopping, SUV-driving owner does). Our chicken is from Tyson, which may be healthier chicken than some, but of course is a major producer, and likely has all manner of earth-unfriendly practices.

The whole unsustainable meat industry thing is something that I feel pretty far removed from, as in I don't really feel like I can make an appreciable difference in it - and I think a lot of other people feel the same way. It's like anything else on that scale (someone mentioned presidential elections) - one person doesn't make a big difference, but many many single people eventually cause change. I don't know if the factory farming conditions and effects have been well covered up, or if it's just not a subject that interests enough people, but there doesn't generally seem to be a lot of sentiment against MegaCorp meat.

smithers

i'm meat-free