Day 19: Going veg
A meat free Christmas is perhaps the fastest way towards reducing your carbon footprint this month
di Staff
VitaEurope wants to keep you company until Christmas and remind you of all the beautiful things you can do to make the last bit of 2011 useful, fun, sustainable and unforgettable.
We have prepared a special advent calendar for you. Everyday we’ll suggest a simple action you can take which will improve your life as well as the world around you. What are you waiting for?
Consider a meat-free Christmas
Roast turkey, beef in pastry, Christmas Eve cod, pork casserole, orange duck, wild boar stew. These traditional European Christmas dishes all share two crucial ingredients: festiveness and dead animals.
Is it wrong to kill animals for food? Perhaps. Perhaps not. What is certain is that meat sales soar at Christmas.
Last year the British Turkey Federation (BTF) reported an 18 per cent rise in sales and an estimated 77 million pound income stream during the four week Christmas period and the animal welfare NGO Viva reports that 10 million turkeys are slaughtered every December in the UK alone.
Why is a meat free Christmas better? For starters because it saves a whole lot of animals a whole lot of suffering. And then there is the environment to think about. According to a 2006 UN report, the livestock industry generates more greenhouse gas emissions than all the cars, trucks, trains, ships, and planes in the world combined.
It is one of the largest sources of carbon dioxide and the single largest source of both methane and nitrous oxide emissions. Nitrous oxide is considerably more potent as a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide and the global meat, egg, and dairy industries account for a staggering 65 percent of nitrous oxide emissions.
If full on vegetarianism sounds extreme, consider a vegetarian menu for at least one day a week during the holidays, and why not add it in to your new year’s resolutions for 2012? By being a one-day-a-week vegetarian you reduce your meat intake by about 70 kilos per year, which means one tonne of C02!
Convinced but not sure what’s on the menu for a meat free Christmas? Here are a few tips:
