This article on Medium "The Economics of Veganism" summarises the findings of a 2016 study by the Oxford Martin Programme on the Future of Food, published by PNAS, which researched the health and climate benefits of dietary change. The full study can be found here: Analysis and valuation of the health and climate change cobenefits… Continue reading Medium: The Economics of Veganism
Vegan Gardening Guide
An article I wrote for Vegan Directory UK about gardening without using animal inputs. Original article here: https://vegandirectory.uk/2020/04/07/vegan-gardening-guide/ Introduction On the face of it, gardening appears to be a gentle, benign pastime close to nature. But take a walk around any garden centre and you will see a large number of products made with slaughterhouse… Continue reading Vegan Gardening Guide
word: sarchotic
home » words & language » words » sarchotic Sarchotic - when you're so sarcastic, people aren't sure whether you're joking or whether you're just crazy.
Self-Sufficiency in the UK
I heard this on Radio 4 (can't remember which programme it was): 55% of farmland in the UK is used to grow feed for farmed animals, a highly inefficient way of producing food. If we were plant-based, the UK could be self-sufficient for food. According to Global Food Security UK: The UK is not self-sufficient… Continue reading Self-Sufficiency in the UK
The Best Wildflowers for Wild Bees
The research paper "The Best Wildflowers for Wild Bees" published in the December 2019 edition of the Journal of Insect Conservation looks at the wildflower mixes available in Governmental agri-environment schemes (AES) aimed at improving pollinator abundance and diversity. The researchers found that the wildflowers in such mixes were not particularly great for wild bees, and suggests… Continue reading The Best Wildflowers for Wild Bees
Meat’s link to World Hunger
This article first appeared on the website of the Woodstock Sanctuary in 2013: Of the world’s nearly 6.8 billion humans, almost 1 billion people are malnourished, and 6 million children starve to death every year. Feeding half the world’s grain crop (1) to animals raised for food instead of directly to humans is not only… Continue reading Meat’s link to World Hunger
What about land that can’t be used to grow crops?
Little Green Seedling dismantles the argument that because some land can't be used to grow crops, it should be used to farm animals, arguing that if we all followed a plant-based diet we wouldn't necessarily need to use this land for crops anyway, questioning whether such land is really not suitable for plant crops and… Continue reading What about land that can’t be used to grow crops?
Eating vegan is better than eating local
On Monday 8th October 2018, the IPCC (the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change), issued their special report (https://www.ipcc.ch/report/sr15/) focused on the importance of keeping global warming to within 1.5°C of pre-industrial levels, or else the world will suffer dire consequences. Since then, the news media has been full of articles, letters and posts on… Continue reading Eating vegan is better than eating local
Why some vegans become lactose intolerant
And why its perfectly natural Lactose is a form of sugar, or disaccharide, found in animal milk. Like all mammalian milk, human milk, the natural food for human babies, contains lactose. In fact human milk contains more lactose than cow's milk (but less protein). In order to fully digest milk, an enzyme called lactase is… Continue reading Why some vegans become lactose intolerant
Livestock vs Wildlife vs Humans
Taken from "Biodiversity, land use and ecosystem services—An organismic and comparative approach to different geographical regions" - Scientific Figure on ResearchGate. Available from: https://www.researchgate.net/Estimations-of-the-total-global-biomass-organically-bound-carbon-regarding-humans-wild_fig3_314653548 [accessed 10 Aug, 2018]: Fig. 3. Estimations of the total global biomass (organically bound carbon) regarding humans, wild terrestrial mammals and large domesticated animals (livestock) for the years 1900 and 2000… Continue reading Livestock vs Wildlife vs Humans
Meat and greenhouse gas emissions, and the grass-fed fallacy
In this edition of the BBC Radio 4 programme Inside Science - first broadcast BBC Radio 4 on 17th November 2016 - the question of meat's contribution to climate change is discussed after in the previous week's broadcast a climate change scientist confirmed that being vegan would reduce your carbon footprint by 50% compared to… Continue reading Meat and greenhouse gas emissions, and the grass-fed fallacy
PNAS: The opportunity cost of animal based diets exceeds all food losses
This article published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences shows how growing plant-based food to replace animal-based foods can produce 2x to 20x more nutrition per unit of crop land, and complete replacement of animal-based products would produce more benefit than attempting to eliminate all supply chain losses: With a third of… Continue reading PNAS: The opportunity cost of animal based diets exceeds all food losses
The Independent: Vegan Protein from Nuts and Seeds Better for Heart Health than Meat
The Independent reports on a study of 81,000 people published in the International Journal of Epidemiology in which researchers concluded that those who consume significant amounts of meat experienced an increased risk of heart disease, while conversely those who consumed the majority of their protein from plant-based sources, such as nuts and seeds, the opposite… Continue reading The Independent: Vegan Protein from Nuts and Seeds Better for Heart Health than Meat
FAO Newsroom: Livestock a major threat to environment
The ecological disaster associated with meat has been known about for a long time. This news report from 2006 by the FAO (Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations) describes how livestock production is responsible for 18% of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide, 37% of methane (which is 23 times as strong as CO2… Continue reading FAO Newsroom: Livestock a major threat to environment
The Ecologist: The under-reported ecological disaster of meat
Dr Julian Vigo writes in The Ecologist magazine how the massively negative environmental impact of meat production is largely ignored by the largest environmental charities, how the meat industry's "holy grail" of grass-fed beef is unsustainable as an option, and thus our best option is to become vegan. Link to the full article on The… Continue reading The Ecologist: The under-reported ecological disaster of meat
Guardian: Avoiding meat and dairy is ‘single biggest way’ to reduce your impact on Earth
On 31st May The Guardian newspaper published an article that explains why avoiding meat and dairy products is the single biggest way to reduce your environmental impact on the planet citing the biggest analysis to date which reveals huge footprint of livestock and that it provides just 18% of calories but takes up 83% of… Continue reading Guardian: Avoiding meat and dairy is ‘single biggest way’ to reduce your impact on Earth
A Better Definition of Veganism
The Vegan Society has a definition on their website for veganism as: “Veganism is a way of living which seeks to exclude, as far as is possible and practicable, all forms of exploitation of, and cruelty to, animals for food, clothing or any other purpose.” However this definition makes it seem as if veganism is… Continue reading A Better Definition of Veganism
How to Help the Bees
It seems that almost every day we see reports in the news about how bees are in decline, and that something needs to be done to help bees. Public concern over the issue is at a high level. Even vegans are advocating creating honeybee hives, even if not to consume their honey. But is this… Continue reading How to Help the Bees
Why Honey Isn’t Vegan
Many people think of honey as a benign product, peacefully collected by bee keepers. This (false) image, as well as the public concern over bee populations, has prompted even some vegans to consider buying honey. This article explores the ethical concerns of honey production, and describes some of the practices involved in bee keeping. My… Continue reading Why Honey Isn’t Vegan
The meat farmer’s fallacy
Its a proclamation I have seen many times expressed by animal farmers "but we're feeding the world!". Actually, as many scientific studies have found, the opposite is true - meat is a contributing factor in world-wide poverty and starvation - it uses or redistributes resources from poorer nations to richer, and the nutritional returns from… Continue reading The meat farmer’s fallacy
