How do your food choices impact on the environment?

[New World Explorer]

2 eggs per serving ( 3 times -weekly..talking about 6-7 eggs every week)

Over an entire year your consumption of eggs is contributing 115kg to your annual greenhouse gas emissions.

 

That's the equivalent of driving a regular petrol car 296 miles (476km).

 

the same as heating the average UK home for 18 days.

Your consumption of eggs also uses 14,349 litres of water, equal to 220 showers lasting eight minutes.

https://www.bbc.com/news/health-46865204

Edited January 17, 2019 by Gregexplore

[Tortuga]

Eggs are used to make donuts 

[Brother Arellano]

Oh no! Right now we consume about 15lbs (6.8kg) of red meat per week. My health would really suffer if I could only have red meat once a month. 

[Tortuga]

6 minutes ago, Brother Arellano said:

Oh no! Right now we consume about 15lbs (6.8kg) of red meat per week. My health would really suffer if I could only have red meat once a month. 

15lbs?

That's 60 quarter pounder hamburgers a week!

Edited January 17, 2019 by Tortuga

[Brother Arellano]

1 minute ago, Tortuga said:

15lbs?

That's 60 quarter pounder hamburgers a week!

That’s for a family of three. Mostly lean meats like buffalo. I usually have a steak for lunch and then we mix up proteins for dinner. We don’t eat out often so we cook three meals a day pretty much daily. 

[Bek]

I think that scientists are looking in the wrong place for solutions to climate change. Instead of dealing with industrial pollution (factories, cars etc), they are telling people that they should reduce their consumption of natural things such as eggs, meat and milk that were created by God as part of harmoniously functioning self-sustaining earth systems. 

Edited January 17, 2019 by Bek

[Qapla]

If we stop using the eggs on such a regular basis ... what should we do with all of them? Chickens lay eggs everyday whether we use them or not.

[Hammerhead]

How in the world are you measuring your greenhouse gasses?

Sent from my SM-G960U using Tapatalk

[Qapla]

We use a Gas Chromatograph in our greenhouse       don't most people  

[Thesauron]

If we stop using the eggs on such a regular basis ... what should we do with all of them? Chickens lay eggs everyday whether we use them or not.

We could quit raising so many chicken?

[Brother Arellano]

24 minutes ago, Thesauron said:

We could quit raising so many chicken?

The problem here is that eggs and in fact chickens are such a basic and integral ingredient. Practically every meal you contains egg in some form. There are substitutes. But at an even greater ecological cost. 

[Bek]

4 hours ago, Hammerhead said:

How in the world are you measuring your greenhouse gasses?

Sent from my SM-G960U using Tapatalk
 

There are many websites that let you calculate your carbon footprint.  For example, I like this one: 

 

https://www.nature.org/en-us/get-involved/how-to-help/consider-your-impact/carbon-calculator/

[Thesauron]

The problem here is that eggs and in fact chickens are such a basic and integral ingredient. Practically every meal you contains egg in some form. There are substitutes. But at an even greater ecological cost. 

Yes, so we might need to consider not eating so much of things that require chicken, including eggs. Or, perhaps it is possible to switch to more sustainable sources, such as ecological. Somebody suggested we should eat more insects and larvae.

[Brother Arellano]

19 minutes ago, Thesauron said:

Yes, so we might need to consider not eating so much of things that require chicken, including eggs. Or, perhaps it is possible to switch to more sustainable sources, such as ecological. Somebody suggested we should eat more insects and larvae.

The majority of the greenhouse gas emissions associated with eggs comes from the feed they get. Why not just find a better type of feed. Or eliminate something more substantial. The average American household owns 3 ICE vehicles. Each vehicle creates 4.6 metric tons of greenhouse gasses annually for a total of 13.8 metric tons per household. Similarly the average household consumes 72 dozen eggs annually at 2.2kg or gasses per dozen for a total of 158kg of gasses annually. To keep things in perspective. Eliminating one vehicle per household would more than offset the worldwide production of eggs. 

[Qapla]

12 minutes ago, Brother Arellano said:

The average American household owns 3 ICE vehicles

Somehow, I never have been able to get my vehicle started by putting ice in the tank  

 

Additionally, living in Florida, we don't really need any vehicles that can operate on ice either

[Qapla]

Spoiler

ICE vehicle - Internal Combustion Engine

 

[BLEmom]

I’m really surprised none of you brothers mentioned the emissions that come from eating beans as a cause for concern.  Are you not using the gas chronometer to measure those emissions?

 

Im kidding here brothers.  😉

Edited January 25, 2019 by BLEmom

[Tortuga]

5 minutes ago, BLEmom said:

I’m really surprised none of you brothers mentioned the emissions that come from eating beans as a cause for concern.  Are you not using the gas chronometer to measure those emissions?

https://animals.howstuffworks.com/mammals/methane-cow.htm

[New World Explorer]

On 1/21/2019 at 7:17 AM, Qapla said:

Somehow, I never have been able to get my vehicle started by putting ice in the tank

You have to add chocolate to it... cars go only on choco-ice LOL

[retroHelen]

The thing is that the whole of human-made agriculture is wrong and we will learn a whole new way of providing ourselves with food in God's New World. 

 

God would never encourage monocultures of crops, they are not sustainable in the long-run and mess up biodiversity; deplete soils; concentrate pests and diseases and wipe out wildlife. The garden of Eden was not acres of monocultured fields to sustain Adam & Eve and all the life around them and Jehovah did try to teach them how to keep it subdued and harmonious, but they turned their back on that wonderful education.

 

Native Indians in America kept up a good tradition, in that they moved around and planted food by a '3 sister system' of ground edible plants under mid-range height edibles shaded under tall edibles. This 'companion planting' suppressed weeds and each plant helped the other like what happens in nature. Then after harvest, they moved the plot elsewhere, so the soil didn't get exhausted of nutrients.

 

Jehovah put up with what the Israelites did on the land, but insisted on every 7 years and 50 years of letting the land go wild/fallow/uncultivated, so that it could rebalance itself and recover it's biodiversity of wildlife, soil microbes and fungi.

 

It shocks me that until a few years ago UK was pretty good with livestock, but then economics got in the way, so rearing cattle intensively got going a few years ago and they became more interested in breeding quickly for size and milk yield rather than quality of life for the animal or quality of meat or dairy.

 

This lead to animals being fed waste from confectionery and bakery factories and growing obese cattle with body fat of poor quality, lacking omega 3s and other healthy essential fatty acids for themselves or feeding humans. Basically breeding cattle to be like sick diabetic humans. Meat & dairy from them is unhealthy, spreading their inflammatory illnesses caused by poor diet to humans - even methane off-gassing is worse for badly fed cattle on grain and rubbish rather than old ways with grass/silage/winter root vegetables.If you were fed food more difficult to digest than normal, you would off-gas more wouldn't you!! That's aside from some countries feeding their cattle antibiotics and hormones to get them to grow quicker - or literally swell up with fat because they are sick and inflamed with the chemicals.Then we eat the fatty animal who. like all mammals, stores the excess toxins & hormones it can't excrete in it's fat, so we eat or drink (in dairy) from them and accumulate for ourselves hormone or toxin driven cancers! Thankfully, there are still some small scale farmers sticking to grass-fed long living herds whose meat & dairy is so different from supermarket dyed watery fatty meat and dairy - worth paying a little more to get.

 

Free ranging chickens and pigs live in woods/jungles/'the bush' in nature and whatever they 'give off' helps trees and plants, so should be a carbon footprint that's so small because it would be completely  recycled.

 

Sheep are always free ranging and difficult to rear intensively and so greatly help keep the countryside clear of weeds and thorny brambly stuff that they eat, that managed properly they can do more good to create wildlife meadows for nectar insects that help birds and small rodents,as well as serving a useful purpose to us with their various types of wool. So who cares about their carbon footprint it's recycled carbon by creating diverse carbon absorbers in the long-run too.

 

Carbon is only bad when humans make it bad by deforestation, pollution and mismanagement - separating carbon/methane producing from carbon/methane absorbing or unbalancing the ratio of them.

[BenJepthah]

On 1/17/2019 at 10:59 AM, Qapla said:

If we stop using the eggs on such a regular basis ... what should we do with all of them? Chickens lay eggs everyday whether we use them or not.

That’s a really good point. If humans stopped all consumption of animal based products this would not necessarily have any impact at all on the real impact on carbon emissions. Chickens would still reproduce , eggs still be eaten by something , cows would either be eaten by predators or die of old age and be eaten by scavengers. And on top of these realities, people would still have to eat something and that something will probably require petroleum based farm equipment and transportation and storage. Unless that something is other people at which point we could quickly resuce the human impact of food production . 

[BenJepthah]

On 1/20/2019 at 2:33 PM, Thesauron said:

Yes, so we might need to consider not eating so much of things that require chicken, including eggs. Or, perhaps it is possible to switch to more sustainable sources, such as ecological. Somebody suggested we should eat more insects and larvae.

But wait!! Aren’t insects now in the midst of a mass extinction!! 

[Thesauron]

That’s a really good point. If humans stopped all consumption of animal based products this would not necessarily have any impact at all on the real impact on carbon emissions. Chickens would still reproduce , eggs still be eaten by something , cows would either be eaten by predators or die of old age and be eaten by scavengers. And on top of these realities, people would still have to eat something and that something will probably require petroleum based farm equipment and transportation and storage. Unless that something is other people at which point we could quickly resuce the human impact of food production . 

Of course animals would still go in reproducing, but in a natural way. There would be no need for industrial breeding.

But wait!! Aren’t insects now in the midst of a mass extinction!! 

Yes, 40 percent of wild insects are in decline. But if we are going to use them for food, we’d not be talking about wild varieties.

[BenJepthah]

On 3/20/2019 at 1:24 AM, Thesauron said:

Of course animals would still go in reproducing, but in a natural way. There would be no need for industrial breeding.
Yes, 40 percent of wild insects are in decline. But if we are going to use them for food, we’d not be talking about wild varieties.

Would industrial breeding , raising and harvesting say 1000 lbs of meal worms  be any more efficient from a Carbon imprint standpoint than raising 1000 lbs of chicken? Both need feed ( meal ). Both give off greenhouse gasses and waste products? Only one can be “ free ranged” ( so to speak ). Both must be transported to market. 

    Now recently I have seen a more efficient way to produce and market citrus. A man in Nebraska is greenhousing citrus using geothermal technology and passive solar design in a very efficient way that allows him to produce organic ( relatively pest free) citrus for the local market at a higher profit margin ( less shipping cost) and lower carbon emission ( less distance to ship). Than the customary method. Conceivably this could make a big difference.

[Thesauron]

Would industrial breeding , raising and harvesting say 1000 lbs of meal worms  be any more efficient from a Carbon imprint standpoint than raising 1000 lbs of chicken? Both need feed ( meal ). Both give off greenhouse gasses and waste products? Only one can be “ free ranged” ( so to speak ). Both must be transported to market. 
    Now recently I have seen a more efficient way to produce and market citrus. A man in Nebraska is greenhousing citrus using geothermal technology and passive solar design in a very efficient way that allows him to produce organic ( relatively pest free) citrus for the local market at a higher profit margin ( less shipping cost) and lower carbon emission ( less distance to ship). Than the customary method. Conceivably this could make a big difference.

Raising 1000 kilos of insects does not require as much as raising 1000 kilos of chicken or beef. To create 1 kg beef requires about 80 to 170 kg of greenhouse gas, while mealworm ends up at about 20 kg.

There’s a nice little presentation at Deutche Welle’s website.

https://www.dw.com/en/insect-pet-food-to-offset-carbon-pawprint/a-45770960