2016 Animal Agriculture and the Fruitcake Industry. "What do you have for vegans?"
It's the holidays and I see lots of fruitcakes lurking in the grocery store. The fruitcake industry is about the right goal-size for the animal agriculture industry. Right? That is really going to freshen up the atmosphere and make us happy. It's a fresh new lifestyle of the future, we can love. I love the idea of walking in the grocery store and seeing just a small case -- about 3 foot by 3 foot for meet and cheese, milk and eggs. None is better. Right now the USDA sets the dollar value of the animal products at $100 billion per year. A bit much.
Fruits, vegetables, grains, and all that good stuff is yummy. It's filling and it's real food. You can get the same foods you love in veggie versions -- talk with your grocery. Sadly, there is way too much methane for this planet to handle. It rises up in a cloud from the farms and factories that raise animals for food. It's choking our planet. It's trapping heat and creating warming and cooling and swirling air -- ice storms, wind storms, hurricanes, tornados, floods. These are killing people and guess what....this new weather is starting to ruin our food supply. It's already become too hot to grow food in some places. Eating animals is making it harder for us to grow fruits, vegetables and grains and everything we depend on.
Example: You order a turkey sandwich. To grow that turkey, methane is floating up into the air and trapping more heat in the atmosphere. It's creating weird weather that damages crops so they are now able to grow as much of the fruits, veggies and grains we have now. If you order the veggie meat sandwich the ingredients are grown from plants. Plants use up the greenhouse gases CO2 and they give off oxygen. That actually creates clean air. Two good things happen: one, the plants you eat are creating more clean air. You can also take a win on the second good thing. Putting less methane in the atmosphere is a great personal contribution.
Our ability to grow food worldwide is projected to decline by 16% by 2080 due to global warming. It's happening aready and it's project to be double that in some countires. India could see a drop of 30 to 40% in food production [http://www.iie.com/publications/newsreleases/cline_global-warming.pdf]. You can reverse that by what you eat. You can reverse it by talking to others about how you changed your diet.
The writing on the wall is that our blind insistance on eating animals will cut our entire food supply down. It takes obvious and easy personal behaviors -- eating less and less animal products, and talking openly about it. This is a real step that will alleviate this global destruction caused by swirling hot and cold air trapped in our atmosphere.
Each of us personally has the power to make a huge difference in this. Stop buying animal products. Stop ordering it in restaurants.
Feel it for yourself. You are really and truly making a difference every single time you order the veggie burger, soup, portebello. Every time you speak up for the vegans, every time you let the restaurants and grocery stores know we need more vegan choices you are making a huge difference. If even one out of 10 people start talking about it -- a huge difference. It's good for the future of the human race when you walk into a restaurant to say "What do you have for vegans?"