Earth Day Goal: Drop The Steak

By Camilo Echeverri Bernal on April 23, 2015

People celebrate this wonderful day once a year. Dubbed Earth Day in most places, it is the concensus that awareness should be raised about the importance of recycling and not wasting water, amongst things like driving more environmentally-friendly cars. However, an aspect of the issue sometimes goes unspoken, and that is diet. If people want to do something for the environment, they should just drop the steak.

So-called environmentalists often ignore the impact of their diet upon the environment. Whilst talking about saving water and taking shorter showers, they forget that the production of animal products contributes to more than one-quarter of humanity’s water footprint. It roughly takes 2,000 gallons of water to produce one pound of beef.  That’s a seven minute shower every day over a six month period.

“In a country like the United States, a fifth of all your grain production is dependent upon irrigation. For every pound of beef produced in the industrial system, it takes two thousand gallons of water. That is a lot of water and there is plenty of evidence that the Earth cannot keep up with the demand,” said Prince Charles.

Aside from the almost two thousand gallons of water to raise one pound of beef, it takes 6 pounds of feed, 36.2 pounds of roughage or grasses and 18.6 gallons of additional water.

Other resource that is used up as part of the industry’s needs is the rain-forest. According to the Nature Conservancy, every second of every day one football field of rain-forest  is being destroyed. Much of the cut-down rain-forest is used to raise and feed livestock  which is exported to the U.S and ends up on fast-food hamburgers.

It is even rumoured that the current drought in California could be abated if people cut down on their beef consumption. That really says something about people’s priorities, it would seem.

 

image via http://www.capitallyfrugaldc.com/2015/04/22/2015-earth-day-freebies/

Can you call yourself an environmentalist and still eat meat and other animal products? No.

 

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