All those veggies may be good for you - you selfish bastard - but they're hell on the environment. This bacon sandwich? I'm just taking one for the team.
A study from the seemingly highly-ranked, Carnegie Mellon University ("Go Tartans") concludes that, when it comes to overall greenhouse gas emissions, eating lettuce is three times worse than scarfing bacon.
"Eating lettuce is over three times worse in greenhouse gas emissions than eating bacon,” said Paul Fischbeck, professor of social and decisions sciences and engineering and public policy. “Lots of common vegetables require more resources per calorie than you would think. Eggplant, celery and cucumbers look particularly bad when compared to pork or chicken.”
Fischbeck, Michelle Tom, a Ph.D. student in civil and environmental engineering, andChris Hendrickson, the Hamerschlag University Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering, studied the food supply chain to determine how the obesity epidemic in the U.S. is affecting the environment. Specifically, they examined how growing, processing and transporting food, food sales and service, and household storage and use take a toll on resources in the form of energy use, water use and GHG emissions.
“There’s a complex relationship between diet and the environment,” Tom said. “What is good for us health-wise isn’t always what’s best for the environment. That’s important for public officials to know and for them to be cognizant of these tradeoffs as they develop or continue to develop dietary guidelines in the future.”
And, besides, eating a load of bacon means sooner than you know it you'll be keeling over or as we science types term it, going into terminal emissions mode/
When Canadians eat lettuce grown in California the greenhouse gas emissions must go through the roof. Maybe some neo-liberal economist can make sense of that but I can't.
ReplyDeleteToby, if you're looking for a world that makes sense you might want to look for another planet.
ReplyDeleteA friend's teenage daughter announced that she was now vegetarian but that she was making an exception for bacon. I thought it was funny at first, but it looks like she may be on to something.
ReplyDeleteAnd the CM paper does present something of a conundrum for those of us who enjoy BLT sandwiches.
Of the various arguments that vegans use to try to claim that we should all be vegan, the only one that for me carried much weight was the environmental argument.
ReplyDeleteHowever, even though I found the environmental argument reasonable, I never could actually bring myself to make the switch to a vegan diet.
Now I don't have to?
It seems too good to be true.
@ Mark - you're welcome
ReplyDelete@ Anon 9:51 there always has to be a spoil sport, doesn't there? A BLT is simply a delicious bacon sandwich with superfluous vegetation tossed in to ruin it.
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