Is It Naptime Yet

We’re not a big beef eating family. In fact I buy no beef products to make at home, only when we go out do I eat beef, and that’s only if we eat fast food, but we are eating more chicken than I would like, and need to cut back on certain things, like pre-made meals. ( I just love Trader Joe’s  Chicken Pot Pies and Mandarin Orange Chicken, though it’s not like I can eat it right now.)

Anyways, Mark Bittman, a New York Times Columnist and author has been talking about the effects of meat and the meat industry, more specifically in an article called Rethinking the Meat Guzzler and his book Food Matters.

To put the energy-using demand of meat production into easy-to-understand terms, Gidon Eshel, a geophysicist at the Bard Center, and Pamela A. Martin, an assistant professor of geophysics at the University of Chicago, calculated that if Americans were to reduce meat consumption by just 20 percent it would be as if we all switched from a standard sedan – a Camry, say – to the ultra-efficient Prius. Similarly, a study last year by the National Institute of Livestock and Grassland Science in Japan estimated that 2.2 pounds of beef is responsible for the equivalent amount of carbon dioxide emitted by the average European car every 155 miles, and burns enough energy to light a 100-watt bulb for nearly 20 days.

This isn’t the only reason to not eat as much beef, and farmed animals, but I’m not going to list them. Go read the article and find out for yourself why  we should eat less meat and in essence help our environment and our own health.