by Jason on November 6, 2009
A thousand pardons for the lack of posts (and newsletters) over the past little while! Partly I’ve been crazy busy, but I’ve also been thinking about the format of the site and I want to make some changes.
You already know that factory farming is ridiculously wrong, that meat consumption has been linked to a ton of diseases, and that some people do horrible things to animals from time to time. Being reminded of that on a recurring basis might help maintain your commitment to a plant-based diet, but it’ll also bum you out, and let’s face it, as an individual you’re not going to be able to change most of this stuff. As a group, that’s a different story, and I’m working that part out still, but on the whole, the kinds of posts I’ve tended to write have come across as whining. Brilliantly witty whining, yes, but this isn’t a competition to see who can find the most things that are wrong with the universe. The major media outlets do a fine job at that already.
I’m still working out how this will affect the site, but I want to focus on the awesome, so I can help you be awesome. Now, you may have noticed that news outlets focus on the negative as well, so this might prove to be a bit of a challenge, but I guess we’ll have to make our own news if it comes to that.
Stay tuned, more posts coming soon…
by Jason on October 28, 2009
Environmental footprint stats aren’t messed up enough yet, but they’re getting there. In the latest round, a mid sized dog is being compared to an SUV. According to researchers, the dog will go through 164 kilograms of meat and 95 kilograms of cereals in a year, which is the carbonastical equivalent of driving a big-ass car for 10,000 kilometres.
Now, it should be mentioned that I’ve seen dogs thrive on a plant-based diet, but on the whole I’m not a fan of these metrics. Sure, it’s great to be proud of the reduced environmental impact of your diet, but now some nut just has to point at your dog and somehow that becomes an excuse for their meat-eating ways. In some ways it’s an extension of the “animal rights activists need to focus on ‘real issues’ like child labour” (or whatever Big Issue doesn’t require an immediate lifestyle change) nonsense, but how many of you have ever thought that you diet gives you “credit” to “spend” on other indulgences, like, OK, a dog?
Put another way, while environmental footprint calculations can be useful to put impact in terms relative to things we’re familiar with, they shouldn’t be seen as budget line-items in your life. What do you think about these calculations? Do they actually help, or do they give everyone something that they can use as a credit/excuse against something really nasty, like eating meat?
