Reduce your Food Carbon Footprint

Your eating choices affect your health - and they also affect the world around you. It is well known that cows take far more space - and far more energy to raise, move, slaughter, and transport - than the equivalent calories in vegetable form. The further you move towards being a vegan, the greater the savings of your carbon footprint.

It's not just all the machinery and industry involved in slaughtering animals. It's also the animals themselves. Some studies show that 18% of the world's greenhouse gasses are methane created by the cows as they eat. Methane is far more powerful than CO2 when it comes to holding in the heat. So in some ways it could be claimed that all of these cows emitting methane is just as serious an issue as a factory belching out smoke.

One benefit of this change is that it has fairly quick results. That is, the average cow only lives a few years. If a whole group of people stopped eating meet, the number of cows in the meat industry would drop fairly quickly as farmers stopped breeding them as much. In comparison, if a group of people decided to stop flying as much, the planes would probably still keep flying, just with fewer passengers.

Eat Local Foods
It is phenomenal how far many food items are shipped. Fish you eat in a coastal town in New England may have been flown in from Australia. Corn you enjoy in Kansas might have come from Argentina. All of these long distance shipments create large amounts of CO2 from the trucks, ships, planes, and trains that the items get carried along by.

Eat local foods whenever possible. The flavors are generally fresher, and the savings in CO2 output can be enormous!

Use Filtered, Not Bottled Water
Hopefully we all know by now how damaging bottled water is for our environment. Even ignoring all the plastic being made and used to hold the water, the key issue here is that water is heavy and transporting all those cases and cases of heavy bottles around the world creates enormous amounts of pollution. Every single water botttle made emits 1.2 pounds of CO2 from its creation and transportation.

Instead, buy a filter for your home water. You'll have zero transportation cost - the water is right there already. It'll be cheaper, and it'll be - according to every test I can find - a cleaner water product for you to drink!

Let us know if you have any other suggestions for us to add to this page!

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