Shrink Your Environmental Footprint with a Healthy Diet

Protesting polluting factories, joining green peace or even buying a hybrid car is beyond most of us, even though we appreciate those efforts. Changing your diet, however, is not that daunting and can have a significant impact on your environmental footprint. The food you buy supports farms and farming practices that may be, without your awareness, bad for our collective health and our environment. Become conscious of your diet and where your food comes from.

Vegans are less than 2% of the population, so odds are that you consume meat. Where is your meat coming from? Factory farming of animals is an awful business. It's not surprising we have had deadly outbreaks of E. Coli, Mad Cow and Foot and Mouth disease as a result of the dire conditions in which factory farmed animals are kept. Further, animals kept in these conditions are pumped full of antibiotics, hormones and steroids to keep them upright and gaining weight.

Since 1988, the European Union has not allowed the use of hormones in cattle production due to health concerns for consumers. They don't allow the import of hormone injected cattle either. Why does the US?

Factory farms give their cattle feed that contains grain and corn. Doesn't sound bad? Well, raising animals that do not graze on the range, but instead consume feed, results in the consumption of 37% of the world's grain supply each year. Burn through all that food just to create food? That grain used for cattle feed could nourish untold millions.

Let's look further into the environmental impact, though I feel poorly for not discussing the awful plight of animals slaughtered in factory farms. Factory farming processes create massive concentrations of feces, often kept in "waste lagoons". To complicate things, the feces contains whatever the animal was exposed to, such as hormones and antibiotics. A small percentage of this stockpiled waste inevitably makes into the ground water, rivers and lakes. Any chemical compounds stock piled in the earth will leach into ground water, we've learned this lesson time and again.

Cattle and cows create 15 to 20 percent of global methane gas emissions; yep, that's one of the greenhouse gases. Author John Robbins, "The Food Revolution and Diet for a New America", states that the methane excreted from livestock is 24 times more potent than carbon dioxide, the greenhouse gas in the center of global warming controversy.

I'm not a vegan, but I have cut back on my meat consumption significantly and only buy organically farmed, grass fed beef. It has been good for my health and satisfying to live with greater consciousness and a sense of connectedness to the world.

Mass farming processes for vegetables, fruits and grains also has a significant downside, but not nearly as great as the factory farming of animals. The issues are of less nutrient rich foods, pesticide contamination and destruction of top soil. This poses a big challenge to vegetarians. The food they consume is sustainable and does not support the meat industry, however, if they don't purchase organically farmed foods, they are supporting mass farming and its ill effects.

It's clear that meat consumption and the curbing thereof will provide the greatest reduction in each of our environmental footprints. Try to buy organically farmed produce whenever you can. Get to know your local farmer's markets. Pencil their hours and days into your weekly plan. I'm not an alarmist and this article isn't suppose to scare you, it's about awareness. We are reaching a unsustainable threshold on this planet that we cannot cross. I don't want to be a locust, do you?