Can Peanut Butter and Jelly Save the World?
Friday February 8, 2008
OK, sure, it's a facetious question, but it's no joke that eating plant-based meals, including the humble peanut butter and jelly sandwich, can help conserve precious natural resources and slow global warming when compared with animal-based meals made from meat, eggs, fish and dairy products.
The amount of land, water and fossil fuels required to produce a pound of meat or other types of animal protein far exceeds what it takes to produce a pound of fruit, grain or vegetables. So, why not do the planet a favor. Once or twice a week, skip that hamburger or tuna sandwich at lunch and opt for a plant-based meal instead. Click through to the article and learn how eating a peanut butter and jelly sandwich just might save the world.
Photo by Digital Vision/Getty Images
Comments
I love peanut butter,and also jelly, but I don’t believe it can save the world. There is a huge cost in eliminating animal products. There are the loss of the jobs of the farmers who raise animals. There is the loss of jobs for people who raise food for animals. there is the loss of jobs in transporting animals to market. There is the loss of the jobs of the people who slaughter animals, and the meatcutters who prepare meat for market. There are the lost jobs in transporting finished products to market. There are loss of jobs in the refrigeration, and cold storage facilities . There is a loss of jobs of manufacturing and maintaining refrigeration and cold storage facilities, as well as refrigeration units, and cold storage lockers in stores. There is a loss of jobs in the industries that manufacture tractors, combines, and other machinery used to procduce food for animals, and many other related jobs. There would be aloss of jobs in all the steakhouses fried chicken places, barbecued ribs places,and plain hamburger and hotdog stands. I don’t believe it would be a very pleasant way to save the world. I know the loss of jobs and incomes would destroy many families.
I would not want to give up meat. I enjoy a good steak,ham, roast pork, fried chicken roast beef and I believe it would be very unpleasant for people to live that way. I believe people have been raising and eating animals from mans earliest history, as noted also in the Bible. Animals were put on earth for mans use. I think there are many other things to cut greenhouse gases, and carbon. I believe there are already technologies today if they were put to use would probably do a lot to save the world without people having to make drastic changes in their lifesyles.
Thank you
It’s good to read something that vegans have known about for a long time: a vegan diet has a minimal impact on this planet.
I started as an omnivore. In 2004, I became an ovo-lacto vegetarian. A year later, I went vegan.
When I was an omnivore, I couldn’t imagine not eating animals. And I called myself an environmentalist. However, I eventually realized how hypocritical I was being by refusing to even simply go ovo-lacto vegetarian.
We each have to take personal responsibility for what we do to this planet. In addition, we have to realize that our actions have an impact.
A vegan diet is the simplest thing one can do to reduce our impact on this planet.
Charles Semler:
You are ignorant. Yes, there may be a loss of jobs initially but the overall improvement of the environment as a result of the minimalized taxing of our natural resources would outweigh those costs, and eventually those jobs lost will be relocated to other markets. I suggest taking an economics course!
This project will really help us to conserve and preserve our environment that suffers now from global warming yet it is hard to implement it to everybody by a short time because of the lifestyle that the human had before till today. But if the people now a days are truly willing to help the mother earth to be healed again, this mission needs to start and there will be no loss if we try it and through it our lifestyle will change for the better of our surroundings and as well as to our health.
-It is true that, due to the 2nd Law Of Thermodynamics, it takes more vegetable matter to nourish a carnivore when the veggies are run thru an herbivore first than if it just ate the veggies directly, BUT (and vegans eating an equal number of calories as the beefeaters do have very big butts) the arguement is disengenuous in it’s simplistic view. It takes much more effort in production, distribution and procurement of enough of the variety of veggies required to supply an adequate mix of essential amino acids to equal the nutrient content of meat. There’s energy loss with each step there, too.
-H. sapiens evolved as a carnivore with ability to eat veggies in an emergency. As proof, besides our non-herbivorous dentition, we have an intestinal tract poorly adapted to digesting plant matter: copious proteases and lipase, meager amylase, no cellulase and very short length of small intestine. We won’t even get into the relation of insulin to arteriosclerosis.
-Ranchers have a saying that they are really grass farmers. Another advantage of ranching over row crops is that cattle and goats can forage and gain weight on land with sparse rainfall & vegetation where farming would be a dismal failure, thus expanding the total productive acreage in areas that would otherwise be devoid of productivity.
Above commenter is beyond ridiculous. I doubt you have ever seen a humans digestive track, or you would have known that it is perfectly, neigh, specifically, suited for plant matter. It takes more work to get nutrients from a slab of meat then from the direct source, plants.
Curiously, I wonder how you link humans as carnivores, yet meat is proven detrimental to our health, causes many major illness, including cancers, while the non meat eaters do not obtain these illness and live longer healthier lives.
Wow, mother nature, dropped the ball on that one did she? She should have spoken to you first to make sure she got the whole “carnivore” thing rig.