Medium: The Economics of Veganism

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…