We Could be Heroes
Our current environmental situation
faces a number of crisis ranging from global climate change to
natural resource scarcity. Mark Bittman, an opinion writer for the
New York Times and Time Magazine's food columnist lays out in a short
piece entitled appropriately enough “We Could be Heroes” how
livestock production and the increasing role of meat in the global
diet has negatively impacted a number of pressing environmental
issues. Bittman cites the United Nations Food and Agricultural
Organization’s report titled Livestock's
Long Shadow which attributes
that roughly 18% of green house gas emissions are directly related to
livestock production. This figure was later proposed as being
potentially to low and that it could be perhaps as high a figure as
51%. Likewise Water is growing to become an ever scarcer resource
and with grain-fed beef requiring up to 2500 gallons of water per
pound any choice we as individuals take to eat less meat helps alleviate the ever growing burden on our resources. Bittman puts it
best when he says “We have to think about producing and eating meat
in those terms [one of scarcity]. Anything else would be unethical.”
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