Section 1, Topic 2

Section 1 (At Home ways to Reduce your Environmental Impact) - Topic 2 (Adapting to a Plant-Based Diet)

Hello, Save our Beautiful Planet members! We are onto our 2nd weekly discussion, which is about adapting to a plant-based diet. 

What is a plant-based diet? Well, it's in the name. A plant based diet is a diet that involves fruits and vegetables instead of meat and/or dairy. So, before I start diving deeper into our topic, I want to make clear that by 'meat' I am also including fish. 

So, let's start our 2nd Save our Beautiful Planet weekly discussion!

The first question off the top of your head might be: 'What does a plant-based diet have to do with the environment? Well, to answer that question, we'll have to dive into the manufacturing of non-fish meat.

It starts off at the part where trees are cut down to make way for the farm animals. What's crazy is that the amount of land cleared for the animals raised to be eaten is around the same amount of land in North and South America! But chickens, cows, pigs, and other animals bred to be eaten don't use all of that land. A lot of the land is used for the food for the animals to eat. Imagine that much trees being cut down just for food for people's food! Trees, which turn Co2 into sugar, are crucial to change climate change. In other words, trees being cut down is not helping the environment. 

When catching fish for food in large mass, people are unbalancing the food chain. With less fish, dolphins and other sea animals don't have as much to eat, meaning less of them. A single animal going extinct or having their species significantly depleted can move their full ecosystem into chaos. 

But that is only the beginning.

The food that the land animals eat need to be grown. And for that to happen, you need water. One burger alone uses up the same amount of water as a 90 minute shower. The average shower head uses up 2.5 gallons of water in a minute. So that's 225 gallons of water going into one burger. That water was previously taken out of places such as lakes and rivers, meaning less water for animals who live in aquatic habitats. 

For cheese, eggs, and other dairy products, the process is the same.

Not only is the environment effected, but the animals, too. When trees are cut down, animals who need the trees in order to survive will suffer from habitat loss. However, the animals raised for food and dairy sometimes come from factory farms. According to sentienceinstitute.org:

We estimate that 99% of US farmed animals are living in factory farms at present. By species, we estimate that 70.4% of cows, 98.3% of pigs, 99.8% of turkeys, 98.2% of chickens raised for eggs, and over 99.9% of chickens raised for meat are living in factory farms.

But what's so bad about factory farms? Animals are confined in small spaces their full life, sometimes never stepping even a foot outside. Terrible, right?

On a happier note, many people are pescatarians (meaning they don't eat animals, except for fish), vegetarians (meaning they don't eat any form of meat) and vegans (meaning that don't eat meat or dairy). Also, restaurants are starting to sell burgers made out of vegetables, not meat. So, instead of buying a burger made out of cow, buy a burger made out of beans. Not only will it benefit you health, but it'll benefit the environment and the animals. 

That's it for this week's discussion! 

Be back next week for an article on significantly reducing your electricity.

Click here for last week's article about Preventing Littering and Promoting Recycling and Composting. 

Have any ideas about future topics? Put your ideas in the comments down below!

-@earthmelon12345