An Essay on Vegetarianism

Farting cows kill our climate and thousands liter of water are needed for just 1 kg of beef. So what effects has meat consumption and do we really all have to become vegetarians?

Nowadys it is most commonly known that when a mammalian is farting, methane is set free. Methane is one of the greenhouse gases that causes global warming. The overall meat consumption in industrialised countries is indeed declining in most of the countries, but emerging and developing countries have an increasing consumption of meat which causes a world wide rise in meat consumption. Therefore the turnout of methane is still rising. An interesting fact is that ecologically produced meat is emitting more methane than conventionally produced. This is because animals brought up according to ecological guidelines just need more time to grow up until they can be butchered and so they can produce more methane.

But it is not only the methane we have to focus on. Great parts of the rain forests are felled to get more grazing land or to grow feed for the animals. This feed is even exported to other countries to feed the animals there and animals are transported to Europe for example. And producing meat is in other words a waste of food that could be eaten itself instead. The area that you need to produce 50 kg of beef could instead be used to produce up to 6000 kg carrots! So tons of tons of our agricultural production are used year after year to feed cattle, pigs or chicken, but could be eaten itself instead. In the USA 80% of the crop harvest are used for the meat production. And what do you need apart from food? Water. And as you can guess: you need more water for 1 kg of meat than for 1 kg of wheat or corn. 1 kg crops need from about 400 l water to 4000 l water. 1 kg beef needs about 15000 l water and 1 kg chicken about 6000 l water.

Slurry is another point. The more animals you raise, the more excrements you get. These are used to manure fields, but are in fact the biggest source of ammoniac. Too much ammoniac in the soil is responsible for forest decline, for example. On the other hand slurry is needed indeed for dunging. But it is only reasonable, when it is used in the correct amount. Currently the ecological agriculture needs slurry to dung the fields. Ammoniac is also responsible for the contamination of (ground) water.

As you may see it is not only meat, but any animal product (eggs, milk, butter etc.) that causes at least some of these effects to our environment. In addition to the mentioned impacts of meat consumption there are still more aspects that should encourage one to cogitate about ones meat consumption. Antibiotics that are given to animals (mostly in industrial farming) make their way into our food. This can cause resistancies of bacteria against these antibiotics. And we do not have to forget what the animals that we eat have to suffer from. I just want to give one example here. Because there is such a great demand for cheap meat, the animals in abattoirs have to get butchered as fast as possible to butcher a maximum of animals in one shift. So the time to bemuse an animal is restricted so far that a lot of animals are slaughtered under their fully conciousness. This can definitely be described as cruelty to animals.

One last point that I would like to mention here is hunting. I did not originally intended to write about hunting in this article, but as I read about it, I thought to mention it. There are a lot of people who are against hunting. I do not believe that hunting should be done to have fun. I once read a document where hunting was also mentioned. The problem is that in a lot of regions today there are some animaly missing which used to live there before. These are bears or wolfs for example. Weak or ill animals or populations that had the chance to proliferate would naturally be their booty. If they are absent, humans have to take over their role to regulate populations and keep the level sort of 'normal'. Areas that are repopulated by wolfes i. e. should in my opinion be left alone as good as possible to get back to their natural processes again.

So do we all have to become vegetarians or even vegans? I am not a vegetarian, but since I know what our meat consumption can cause, my consumption of meat has drastically decreased. I think, I could resign eating meat. But as a vegetarian you have to consider other options, that make it very hard in my opinion. Gelantine for example. A lot of sweets contain gelantine which I don't want to miss or chymosin. Chymosin is used to produce cheese, but it comes from the stomaches of calves. I think that it is better (and surely more practicable) to focus more on vegetarian and vegan diets and get a acception of them. In rural areas where I come from, a dish without meat often is considered as filling or a component is missing. And the alternatives are often missing. In restaurants I often discover only one vegetarian dish on the menu. In groups (such as families, associations etc.) I often experience that vegetarioans are seen as annoying because they need extra food or other persons cannot get their chicken soup because the host chose a vegtable soup because of the vegetarians. In my opinion vegetarians should not be seen as outsiders but as archtypes for a 'better' food tradition. We need vegetarians to compensate the vast meat consumption of other men or women. But we all must realize that we have to reduce our meat consumption. A grater acceptance of vegetarians and a greater spread of vegetarian food options can be one way to a more sustainable (and healthier) diet.

So this is my opinion. I hope I have not been too patronizing. Just read some further articles yourself and try to understand what I mean, if this essay could not make up your mind. There is an awful lot of things you can do for our environment instead of just buying an 'environmental friendly car'.


Here are some articles that I used for my essay and that contain further information (mostly in German):
http://www.vegetarismus.ch/info/oeko.htm (other languages availiable, recommended to read!)
http://www.evana.org/ (other languages availiable)
http://www.utopia.de/blog/lebensrechte/schlachtzahlen-fur-2007-in
http://www.dlz-agrarmagazin.de/?redid=327527
http://www.frontal21.zdf.de/ZDFde/inhalt/1/0,1872,8061441,00.html
http://www.wdr.de/tv/quarks/sendungsbeitraege/2009/1117/uebersicht_klimarettung.jsp
http://www.proplanta.de/Agrar-Nachrichten/agrar_news_themen.php?SITEID=1140008702&Fu1=1264048264
http://www.proplanta.de/Agrar-Nachrichten/agrar_news_themen.php?SITEID=1140008702&Fu1=1266337428

Calling all Artists!

If you like drawing or sketching you maybe like to draw a little Picasso every day of the year. Just like a kind of diary or blog. I know, that it's already the 7th of January, but I found the blog today. So if you want more information continue reading here.
I think, it can be a good practice for every little artist and you can see if you get better over the year. Hope to find a little sketchbook in the next days.

Snow in the UK

Yesterday there has been a nice report about the winter in the UK on the German TV channel ZDF (see link here, if you can watch it). They said, that preperations for harder winters are too expensive and the chaos which is now on rail and streets is much cheeper. But the most funny thing of all: As they are short of road salt, cat litter was mentioned as an alternative. The good news for the cats is that it is short, too.