Skip to main content
Climate ChangeFood

Food and the environment

By 30 September 2014No Comments

food industryEven though you don’t see it that clearly; the food industry is responsible for a whopping 18% of gases that causes global warming. This is even more than the total amount of cars, plains and trains taken together. So is going vegan better than riding your bike?

Besides the whole ethical debate about meat and our food production (Which is one of high importance as well); the environmental aspect of the meat industry is becoming an serious issue. As we all know, the amount of energy needed to grow meat is many times mored compared to a product like grain. You need around 15kg of grain to ‘grow’ 1 kg of meat. So by eating meat we waste quite a lot of energy along the way. If we would eat grain instead of meat, we could feed the same amount of people with much less food.


An interesting article was published by Moby in the Huffington post : Save the humans.

In this post he mentions some interesting likes, of which I list a few:

  • We are killing around 1776 animals every second of every day.
  • The only reason that meat is still afforable is because of the all the subsidies
  • A shower takes around 40 gallons of water, but it takes between 4.000 and 18.000 gallons of water to create a small hamburger!

And to copy the summary already provided by Moby:

The food industry:

  • Uses tons of grain that could be fed directly to people
  • Uses tons of fresh water that could be used to grow healthy food
  • Creates tons of urine and feces that ruin our lakes, rivers and drinking water
  • Creates about 18 percent of greenhouse gas emissions
  • Contributes to obesity, diabetes, heart disease and cancer
  • Causes epidemic zoonotic diseases
  • Contributes to the creation of antibiotic resistant “super bugs”
  • And is heavily subsidized by our tax dollars.

 

Leave a Reply