Ruth Carruthers: Meat and veg
Without careful choices, turning vegetarian or vegan may not be as good for the environment as it seems.
More like this...
What do Nicolas Müller, Hannah Teter, Matt Rodriguez and Ed Templeton all have in common? Answer: they all don’t eat meat. However, Templeton and his wife Deanna take things a step further as vegans, meaning they don’t consume animal products of any kind, not even honey.
Like the first three, I’m also a vegetarian, but have been toying with the idea of turning vegan after watching the eye-opening films Earthlings and Food Inc. I was raised vegetarian – although my parents always gave me the option to eat meat or not – but the main reason I stay vegetarian is because I have strong feelings about animal rights and industrialised fishing practices, not because I think eating meat is entirely wrong in itself.
Taking a stand against factory farming is one of the main reasons people turn vegetarian or vegan. However, more recently people have decided to go sans meat because it is now believed that a plant-based diet is also better for the environment. It states on the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) website that “growing feed for animals instead of food for people also means a constant appetite for land, leading to the destruction of rainforests while livestock farming itself is a major contributor to greenhouse gas emissions, soil erosion, water pollution and a host of other environmental problems.” All of which is backed up in the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization's 2006 report, Livestock’s Long Shadow.
But how does this relate in real life? Well, last week I was on a quest to make my vegan friends some tasty flapjacks. The ingredients called for a dairy-free margarine to replace the butter that I would normally put in the recipe. But when out shopping for it, I noticed that all of these vegan alternatives contained palm or vegetable oils – note the plural which means it contains a blend of different vegetable oils, one of which might be palm oil.
As I explained in a column I wrote for HUCK last year, palm oil plantations in Indonesia are driving mass deforestation in such places as Sumatra, contributing to climate change and driving species such as orangutans and tigers to extinction. So whilst vegans might be trying to reduce cruelty to animals on western farms, they are unintentionally harming wildlife in South-East Asia. In that case, would it not be better to eat responsibly-sourced British butter?
It’s a similar dilemma for those wanting to substitute dairy products for those made with soya. As this video from Friends of the Earth explains, soya bean production in South America is destroying large parts of rainforest and driving indigenous people off their land. A large amount of this soya also forms the basis of the livestock feed used here in the UK. The soya milk I drink states on the carton that their soya beans are not from deforested rainforest, which indicates to me means that a lot of soya is. I know for a fact that the RSPB avoids using soya in their chocolate for that very reason.
A plate of vegan green bean and potato curry that I recently ate at the Dub’n’Grub reggae night in Glasgow also presented a dilemma. I realised that there was no way the green beans and mangetout on my plate were grown in the UK – as they are not in season – and so were most probably flown in from somewhere like Kenya. And surely long-distance air transportation of food has as much of an environmental impact as locally-sourced meat?
But after some research, it looked like eating Kenyan green beans may not be as bad for the environment as I first thought. As African agriculture expert, Professor Gareth Edwards-Jones of Bangor University in Wales states in an article for The Guardian, Kenyan farmers actually fertilise their crops using cows manure and harvest by hand. This is much more environmentally-friendly compared to intensively-farmed British beans using petrochemical-based fertilisers and diesel-fuelled tractors. Also, Fairtrade green bean farming is a vital source of income for many families in Kenya. As is the Fairtrade agreements for tropical fruits, coffee and chocolate in other parts of the world.
Ultimately, all such examples show that it’s difficult to know which way to turn. Whilst there are many arguments against eating meat, it seems that being vegetarian and vegan isn’t perfect either. The most sensible choice for me seems to be sticking to my veggie roots, concentrating more on eating seasonal food and making sure the dairy products I buy are cruelty-free. And as for my meat-eating friends, I think it’s a matter of finding out where that animal has come from and making ethical choices accodingly. They can always try having a Meat Free Monday too!
Being vegetarian isn’t about being perfect. The environmental movement is synonymous with sacrifice, but more and more I realise that it’s not necessarily all about giving something up altogether, but more about reducing our dependence on things we don’t need and caring more about the creatures we consume.
Subscribe to HUCK for six issues
Only £21 (UK) / £44 (EU) / £59 (Rest of the World).
Meat and veg (text) by Ruth Carruthers is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.Comments (3)
Please note: Your comment may be held in moderation for approval by an administrator to prevent spamming. This usually doesn't take long, please be patient.
However I have to disagree regarding the palm oil, soy products etc.
Vegans don't "have" to substitute dairy with such products. It is very easy to eat delicious food without processed substitutes. It's all about eating mostly wholefood and as little as possible processed foods.
There are plenty of recipes online for vegan cookies and cakes that don't require margarine or soy milk :)
Also, the animal products industry are way more damaging to the environment than the whole transport industry put together. There have been many studies on that and they all come to the same conclusion.
So a vegan who doens't eat local will still have less impact on the environment than an omnivore who sources all his food locally.
And lastly, I have to agree with Owen, cruelty free dairy is simply not possible. In order to produce milk, a cow has to be impregnated and the veal has to be sold for meat, organic or not, grass fed or not :(