locavore -- one eating locally produced food -- is a great idea.
but this article claims that the free-range animal husbandry is worse than factory-farming them!
the obvious but difficult answer: vegetarianism.
so many complexities.
From: Shahryar
Meat in a low-carbon world
Feel-good food just got tricky. It was easy when "good" meant anything which could have stepped off a John Constable canvas: free range chicken, foraging pigs and grazing cattle. But then climate change came along. No one noticed at first, still concentrating their fire on the obvious targets like 4x4s, long flights and coal power stations; but our meaty diet is laden with greenhouse gases, and trying to reduce them throws up some unpalatable choices.
It has prompted the Vegetarian Society to take out adverts in the paper declaring that our carnivorous tastes are a "silent but deadly" assault on our climate. First a few farmyard facts. Cows and sheep are ruminants which means their digestion produces much methane, a gas with about 20 times the global warming power per puff than carbon dioxide. It comes out in breath, burps and farts. Their manure is also heavy with nitrates which pollute both water and air. Pigs produce less gas, but plenty of manure. Chickens eat and waste little. There is also a vast difference in the efficiency with which they turn vegetable fodder into meat protein; and the less land you need to feed each animal, the more you have left for anything else - like climate-friendly forests. Cows and sheep need 8kg of grain for every 1kg of meat they produce, pigs about 4kg. The most efficient poultry units need a mere 1.6kg of feed to produce 1kg of chicken. The UN's food and agriculture organisation has added all this up and decreed that livestock warms the planet more than transport. So in fear that the "anti-carbon tyrant" might wipe their business from the planet, the meat industry has been looking for low greenhouse gas (GHG) solutions, and the problem is that many of them are found indoors. Housing animals gives humans control. The diet can be precisely manipulated to maximise growth and minimise polluting gases. ... deleted http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/1/hi/sci/tech/7389678.stm Published: 2008/05/08 11:03:04 GMT © BBC MMVIII |
2 comments:
If it is possible to minimise gases in animals by regulating their diet, why don't the companies that kill them to make meat etc. do the same for human beings as well?
Possible that a vege diet can help us in this direction as well.
I have a fading memory of reading a Kornbluth and Pohl sci-fi novel from the '50s in which animal flesh is produced by cell culture on an industrial scale and so there is no need for livestock farming nor for wholesale slaughter of sentient animals.
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