[i]Carmen Mart
DCL
As if you didn't have your waist line to worry about, scientists are now dubbing hamburgers the new "Hummers of food."
By switching out your burger or steak with a salad , you can save as much climate change causing carbon dioxide from entering the atmosphere as you would leaving the car parked at home a couple days a week.
Nathan Pelletier, a scientist at the Dalhousie University in Canada reports that,
Though beef only accounts for 30 percent of meat consumption in the developed world it's responsible for 78 percent of the emissions. That's because a single kilogram of beef produces 16 kilograms carbon dioxide equivalent emissions: four times higher than pork and more than ten times as much as a kilogram of poultry. If people were to simply switch from beef to chicken, emissions would be cut by 70 percent.
So what about locally produced meat? Is it any better?
According to Chris Weber, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at Carnegie Mellon University in Pennsylvania, it's not, considering only a mere five percent of emissions related to food derive from travel.
He's quoted saying, "You can have a much bigger impact by shifting just one day a week from meat and dairy to anything else than going local every day of the year."
Though Weber makes a good point about the importance of reducing our meat consumption, we shouldn't forget about going local. There is certainly room for both. Making changes in our daily food decisions is one of the simplest things we can do to make an eco-friendly difference—in many ways, even easier than making often expensive home and transportation upgrades.
So before you bite into that burger, think about making a weekly—if not daily—switch to more sustainable and meat-free food options.
:: Yahoo! Green
