One Blue Marble Blog

It’s funny. I learned more about ethics and social justice in a biology class than any dozen religious sermons that I can remember.

Most people are surprised to learn — as I did during an undergraduate lecture — that we can take dramatic steps towards feeding the world’s poor, and it has little to do with throwing a few dollars in the collection plate, or saying an extra decade of the rosary.

One of the greatest sins of our generation is that every two seconds, malnutrition takes a child’s life. The math means that 40,000 children die every day.

Vegetarianism is one way to restore balance to that tragic metric. And that fact has another corollary: Vegetarianism is also one of the best ways for North Americans to cut their carbon footprint by more than five percent.

My point is not to preach, but to introduce a new section to One Blue Marble: vegetarian cookery and recipes. My partner, Kristina Robinson, is the best natural chef that I have ever met, and I swear that she could make a leathery old shoe taste so good that I’d return for a second helping.

So we’ll be publishing vegetarian recipes here that all filled with rich flavors and exotic spices. The combinations and permutations will be endless.

But I do understand.

If you love meat, then vegetarianism must seem like the proverbial final straw that proves that a low-carbon economy must necessarily be a world sapped of all joy and pleasure — a world in which people wear Birkenstocks to weddings, drink innocuous local beer and insipid herbal teas, and suffer through plain vegetables served over steamed brown rice — leavened occasionally with a little yogurt — morning, noon and night.

It’s a provocative image, to be sure, but a false one. I’ll let you in on one of my quiet little secrets: In a past life, before I grabbed hold of this climate change banner, I was an up-and coming writer who sold stories to national and international food and wine magazines. So hedonistic virtues like flavor, texture, and variety are still vital to my peace of mind. I could no more lead the life of an ascetic than I could be the chief executive at Exxon.

So we will offer recipes and cooking lessons not with the expectation that you’ll become a card-carrying vegetarian tomorrow, but with the hope that you will take a few steps towards living mindfully and sustainably. Start slowly, perhaps by creating one vegetarian meal per week.

Please let us know how it goes!

And if you’d like to know why vegetarianism is good for the planet, please read on!

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Sadly, as this millennium settles in, we’re not making much headway in the fight against hunger. When the Cold War ended, we were promised a peace dividend, and the more optimistic among us hoped the money would be used to promote justice throughout the world. Hasn’t happened. High unemployment and its attendant social problems have made people in developed nations increasingly insular, less willing to look across the oceans when many are suffering next door. After all, charity begins at home.

Truth to tell, it will probably get worse before it gets better. A recent United Nations’ report suggests that food production will have to triple to feed the world’s people in the year 2050.

So what should we do about it? We could let plant geneticists loose, breeding hardy strains of super plants. The world might be better off if tomato vines produced more tomatoes. But few people, even ardent technophiles, believe that we can increase yields by 300 per cent. Besides, serious problems arise from tampering with the gene pool.

It would be wise to slow population growth, by encouraging developing nations to limit procreation. But that road is fraught with peril. Many world religions, Catholicism chief among them, believe any form of birth control is morally reprehensible, and refuse to condone it.

Some developing nations take a provocative view, suggesting that we have no right to rape the world’s resources and then smugly tell them how to live.

No wonder most experts believe that we’ve already lost the population war.

That’s why the best solution may be to change our position on the food chain. You see, animals high on the food chain are incredibly inefficient — it takes more land and natural resources to feed meat eaters. A hundred gazelles can graze on a hectare of land, but those hundred gazelles may only be able to feed one or two lions.

Think of it this way. An acre of land in a warm climate can produce 60,000 pounds of celery each year, or 40,000 pounds of onions. Or it can produce 250 pounds of beef. The simple fact is that as people become affluent, they usually move up the food chain, consuming more resources.

In the United States, 64 per cent of crop land grows feed for livestock, while a mere two per cent produces food and vegetables for human consumption. Almost 80 per cent of the corn grown stateside and 90 per cent of soybeans are eaten by animals that are eaten by us.

Sadly, our wealth and prosperity — our buying power — is making it difficult for developing nations to feed their own. Twenty-five years ago, livestock consumed only six per cent of Mexico’s grain. Today, it’s 50 per cent. In fact, most developing world nations are importing grain to meet their agricultural needs, with a high percentage going to feed livestock, not people. Well-to-do landowners know that they can make good money by selling meat to New and Old World countries, and to the rising middle class in their own backyards.

I first explored these ideas when I read John Robbins’ gentle book May All Be Fed (Morrow). Robbins — for those who don’t know him — was born into an affluent ice-cream family, but couldn’t stomach the inequalities between rich and poor. He renounced his family fortune, and founded Earthsave, an environmental organization devoted to creating a liveable world for all.

The truth is that vegetarianism is a blessed gift that humankind can give the less fortunate. Robbins adds perspective with these words: “If Americans were to reduce their consumption of meat by only 10 per cent, it would free land and resources to grow more than 12 million tons of grain annually for human consumption, more than enough to adequately feed every one of the 40-60 million human beings who will starve to death on the planet this year.”

Ironically, I first heard about this novel approach to feeding the world’s hungry at Dalhousie University in 1979, the year my father died of heart disease. Unfortunately, studies linking diet and illness were simply too late to save the lives of many in my father’s generation.

Today, we know that fat intake is closely tied to health problems like cancer and heart disease, and everyone concerned about health knows that an easy way to cut fat calories is to cut back on meat, and that fruits and vegetables are the best things we can eat to ensure a long and healthy life.

I’m not silly enough to think that cutting back on meat consumption will solve the world’s problems. If, as individuals and as a continent, we start eating more sustainably, we will be making the world a more equitable place.

It won’t be easy. And it won’t happen without a first step. Think globally, but act locally. Start eating less meat. Buy a good vegetarian cookbook.* Cherish every meal as a family, knowing that many are far less fortunate.

Robbins titled his book after a simple mealtime prayer: May all be fed; may all be healed; may all be loved.

Amen to that.

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George Monbiot and Bruce Friedrich have also written about diet and environmentalism recently.

Photo credit: Pedal & Sea Adventures

* We’ll write about good vegetarian cook books going forward!