What Is The Best Diet To Respect The Environment?
Many people wonder what is the best diet to respect the environment. While some argue that the vegan diet saves many animal species, others think this diet can be even more harmful.
Who’s right? Let’s find out together what is the best diet to respect the environment .
Why is eating meat or vegetables different for the environment?
Although a vegan diet is not necessarily the best choice to respect the environment, we should still think about how much meat we eat. To generate muscle, our body needs nutrients, which is food.
This process is quite ineffective, so the calories we need to take in to generate muscle with a similar caloric value are much higher. This also happens with cows and other animals.
Therefore, the answer is clear: producing a kilo of meat is much more expensive for nature than producing a kilo of vegetables. It is difficult to study, but depending on the animal, producing one kilo of meat protein requires between 4 and 16 kilos of grains.
Producing meat: a not very sustainable practice
If we only ate grains, the impact on nature would be less, right? Large soybean monocultures are one of the reasons Amazonian fauna is endangered.
Furthermore, these animals and crops need water: more or less 10 times more quantities are needed to produce meat.
Cattle also produce pollution, especially when we talk about intensive farming. When these mega-farms are built, nature is destroyed for both its manufacture and animal feed.
However, intensive farming coexists with the environment and generates less impact, even if it would be impossible to meet the current demand for meat with it.
Animals that live in this way are left in the wild in the pastures where they coexist with wildlife, and where grass and trees are part of the ecosystem.
Is the vegan diet the best to respect the environment?
For all these reasons, many suggest that the vegan diet is the best to respect the environment.
However, the production of vegetables also has an environmental cost that may even exceed that of meat.
Imagine that you want to eat some strawberries and you have a small garden in your house, where they grow enough to be able to eat a good plate as a dessert.
Now imagine that, instead, you go to a supermarket where you buy strawberries that come from South America, which are wrapped in plastic and have traveled thousands of kilometers by plane and truck until you get to the supermarket refrigerated counter.
Vegetables also have an environmental impact
Another possibility is that the strawberry does not come from that far away: imagine you are eating strawberries grown in Italy, but in regions where there is little water, so you have to move the water and generate drought in the region.
In addition, these plantations are gigantic, so no birds or other wild animals live in them, and the bees have disappeared.
The production of fashionable exotic fruits, such as avocado, a classic of the vegan diet that is putting the amount of water in the world at risk, is often not very sustainable.
Another example is palm oil, which is causing the destruction of forests in Borneo and threatening the survival of the orangutan.
It is important to note that many of these products that travel thousands of kilometers and are wrapped in plastic comply with the plant product regulation. So organic food doesn’t have to be better for the environment. On many occasions it is simply consumed for fashion and producers do not care about protecting nature.
What is the best diet to respect the environment? One with less meat
The answer to the question of which diet is best to respect the environment is the following: a diet that reduces the consumption of meat compared to the average diet in places like Europe or the United States.
Italy, for example, consumes more than 50 kilos of meat per year per person, which is equivalent to 150 grams per day.
So, when you ask what is the best diet to respect the environment, the answer could be a diet in which the consumption of meat is occasional and preferably coming from extensive farms in our area.
If possible, you should buy it in local markets or directly from the manufacturer, to avoid unnecessary travel and plastic wrapping.
Furthermore, this type of intensive farming coexists with predators such as the wolf : if we eat the local products of these farmers, we help them to survive and protect the livestock, and perhaps to reduce the pressure of the wolf.
What is the best diet to respect the environment? One based on local vegetables
However, the consumption of vegetables does not guarantee that our diet respects the environment : try to consume seasonal and physically close products: strawberries in December are not ideal.
Also try to reduce the consumption of exotic fruits that come from thousands of miles away.
In short, consume what you want, but always try to find out what impact this consumption generates on the environment. The decision is yours.
Neither the vegan nor the omnivorous diet is necessarily better for respecting the environment.
Try to follow a diet that respects the natural cycles that occur nearby and that is mainly based on fruits and vegetables.
Only in this way can the environment be helped.
