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Reducing Greenhouse Gas Pollution: Why Go Vegetarian & Locally Organic

The Live Earth - ECP Carbon and Lifestyle Calculator is really cool, but it's missing one important question:

What do you eat?

 * It takes about 10 fossil fuel calories to produce each food calorie in the average American diet. So if your daily food intake is 2,000 calories, then it took 20,000 calories to grow that food and get it to you. Growing, processing and delivering the food consumed by a family of four each year requires the equivalent of almost 34,000 kilowatt-hours (kWh) of energy, or more than 930 gallons of gasoline (for comparison, the average U.S. household annually consumes about 10,800 kWh of electricity and 1,070 gallons of gasoline). 
* 15% of U.S. energy goes to supplying Americans with food. (If all humanity ate the way Americans eat, we would exhaust all known fossil fuel reserves in just seven years.) 
* According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, agriculture contributes over 20% of human-caused greenhouse gas emissions, including more than 20% CO2, 55% of methane and 65% of nitrous oxide.

 Are you an omnivore, vegetarian or vegan?

 * According to a recent University of Chicago study, the greenhouse gas burden of the average American diet is 1.5 tonnes greater than a fully plant-based, or vegan, diet. 
* That's a 50% larger difference than switching from a Camry (30 mpg, average) to a Prius (57 mpg). 
* And it's nearly 20% of the average North American's personal greenhouse gas footprint. 
* 18% of human-made global warming emissions are from livestock production. 
* On average, eight times as much fossil fuel is required to produce animal protein than the plant equivalent. 
* On average, it takes 28 calories of fossil fuel input to generate one calorie of food value from an animal. It takes 68 calories of fossil fuel to produce one calorie of pork, and 35 calories of fuel to make one calorie of beef. 
* Animals grown in feedlots or factory pens consume far more energy to raise than free-range, grass-fed critters, which require only a third of the energy. 
* Eating a vegetable or grain gives the diner all the caloric energy in those foods, but feeding these foods to a pig reduces the energy available by a factor of 10. That's because the pig uses most of the energy just staying alive, and stores only a fraction of the energy in its body. 
* Each step up the food chain - from plants, to animals, to animals fed with other animals - requires a ten-fold increase in energy input. For example, farmed salmon, a carnivorous fish, is two steps up the chain, with fossil fuel being expended to catch fish to feed them.

Do you eat organic?

 * The average diet consumes 1600 liters of fossil fuels each year, 256 liters are for the "food miles," the fuel used to transport food from the farm to the plate, and there's also the fuel used by factory farm equipment and for processing and cooking, but 496 liters are used in the chemical fertilizers that are banned in organic production.

 Do you eat processed, packaged foods?

 * Even vegetarian processed foods require some ten calories of fossil fuel input for every calorie of food value. A 2-pound box of breakfast cereal requires the equivalent of burning half a gallon of gasoline.

 Eat low on the food chain. Buy local. Buy in season. Buy organic. Avoid processed foods and even packaged foods.

Sources: http://www.anotherinconvenienttruth.org/ http://www.organicconsumers.org/btc/gasfood112105.cfm

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