Not a day seems to go by now without some vegan "offering" being mentioned on the news or other media outlet. It used to be that vegerarians had the trump hand in worthiness. Personally I would rather have razors shoved up my rear than become vegan but each to their own. In a few years maybe it will all die down and vegetarians will be able to reclaim their "moral high ground".
If it's a fad it's a useful one for our family.
Although we aren't Vegan one of our children has a diety requirement which means that they can't have milk. I have two words which make our life a LOT easier when it comes to summertime treats Vegan Magnums!
Although I agree that we should be moving towards a lower CO2 heavy diet there's no "magic bullet" to do this.
For instance which is better locally produced milk from cows on low quality land or soya milk which had been shipped half way around the world and may well have been produced on land which was former rainforest?
The answer to the above is probably a complicated one and therefore isn't as straight forward as the vegan option (much as those are very much in favour of veganism would like to think).
For instance, if we stopped producing sheep on our uplands then chances are there's not really any other food production which could be undertaken there. Even if we could then it probably wouldn't produce the yields which would be produced on better quality land and so may not be much better environmentally. It would also likely be at the loss of a lot of our moorland and upland wetlands, which would be far from good.
Likewise the answer isn't Organic, in that Organic can mean more pesticide use (yes there are Organic pesticides, they are just "natural", which as an aside I've seen a natural lake on a volcanic island which has a negative PH value due to the amount of sulfur, I can assure you that's not good for you even though it's natural) as they can be less effective.
As for those who claim to produce products which are chemical free, they need to focus on reducing the amount of Dihydrogen oxide which people often use with their products.
Dyhydrogen Oxide is one of the most used chemicals in the planet and is directly related to the third highest causes of deaths in children in the UK.
Yes we do need to reduce the amount of resources we use to produce the stuff which we consume. Yes we're need to consume less. Yes it would probably be better if there we less meat consumption.
By all means encourage this by things like meat free Monday or Veganuary so that it becomes more mainstream and more socially acceptable, but it is not the solution to everything.
Even if you can't face the challenge of reducing the amount of meat in your diet, how about changing the type of meat which you eat. For instance Beef produces a lot more emissions than Lamb which in turn produces a lot more emissions than chicken and these also generally also equate to the amount of land required for their production (i.e. a kg of beef requires more land to produce than a kg of chicken). By making those switches in the food that we do eat then that would also help. As does doing things like having a smaller amount of meat by adding more vegetables to stew and stir fry to bulk them up without needing to remove the meat altogether.
If 5 people reduced their meat consumption by 20% (1 vegetarian meal a week and a bit less meat in 2 other meals) that would likely have the same benefit as 1 person being a vegetarian. It is probably a lot easier to get 5 people to sign up to do that than it is to get 1 person to do so, chances are it would be easier to get 50 people to do it.
That's the way to make a big difference, by getting everyone to do something rather than a few people doing big changes. As once they have made some small changes they could well be willing to make some more small changes.
If everyone made the commitment to do one of the following (the more the better):
- reduce meat consumption by 20%
- change beef for lamb or better still chicken
- do meat free Monday (or at least once a week have a vegetarian meal)
- by locally produced products
- but less meat but higher quality and use it more efficiently
- try swapping cows milk for oat milk (especially if you mostly have milk in tea/coffee)
However a lot of the hype around some of the alternative (which can be better, but not always) ways of doing things doesn't help.
For those who don't understand what Dyhydrogen oxide or is the waste product of burying Hydrogen and it has 2 hydrogen molecules for every oxygen molecule and had the chemical symbol H subscript 2 and then an O.
Which just goes to show that by giving something's chemical or chemical sounding name rather than calling it a more commonly used name, like water, can scare people into thinking that it's a bad thing. Just for clarification, drowning is the third biggest cause of deaths within children.