watervole | Climate change

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climate change

Climate change - 12 years

We have to cut our carbon emissions by 45% in the next twelve years to avoid catastrophic (and probably irreversible) climate change.

This isn't some dim, distant future: it's happening now. This is my lifetime, my children's lifetime, and all of my granddaughter's lifetime.

It's hard for many people to know what they can do to make a difference, so I'm going to try posting regularly on the subject. (I find it difficult to post much about climate change because so many people are in denial, and even people who understand the problem still tend to say "But I can't give up 'x', and the rest just move onto the next post because it's less stressful to read about cats.... But we have to take action, or we lose everything.)

It's hard to visualise what the effects of climate change are. We're already seeing the droughts,storms, floods and fires, but there is far more to it than that. eg. by 2050, the area where coffee is grown is expected to halve, as the climate becomes unsuitable for growing coffee.

So, what can you do? Because there are things you can do, and you CAN make a difference.

The big issues are:

Heat
Travel
Meat

Let's look at meat. Beef and lamb are the biggies here. Cows and sheep both fart methane, which is a very powerful greenhouse gas. The ideal solution is to go vegetarian, but you don't have to do that to make a significant difference. We don't eat meat more than once a day, and there are usually several days a week in which we don't have any meat at all. My son's fiancee is vegan, and that's given us a real motivation to find interesting meals that contain no meat or dairy at all.

I've made the decision to cut out beef and lamb entirely and only eat pork, venison and poultry from now on. Venison where I live comes from non-native sika deer that over-graze the vegetation in nature reserves and have to be shot for pest control (as they have no natural predators). That's definitely environmentally friendly meat!

In a nutshell, cut out beef and lamb. Eat pork and poultry, and if you're an Aussie, eat rabbit and kangaroo.

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We decided not so very long ago to cut out beef - and I think I can just quietly stop buying lamb and my Beast will not notice or miss it. Vegetarian mince is rather good these days. Bonus: it's healthier to eat more veggies, so win/win.

Hurrah! You score mega Brownie points.

There does appear to be a health gain as well. Bit like during the war when everyone had better health during rationing.

I've started using Quorn recently (which I think is what veggie mince is made from). I like the texture and it's really good at absorbing flavours.

Plus, a little bit of Marmite with the Quorn makes all the difference!

We haven't eaten much beef or lamb for years, largely because I worry about the colon cancer risk with red meat. Mainly chicken and fish, with asides into pork pâté/bacon and local shellfish, and a little vegetarian or semi-vegetarian (a rasher of bacon in tomato & herb pasta). (I'd increase the vegetarian proportion willingly, but my iron stores seem to be worryingly low, so I've actually been trying to eat more meat.) We've been meaning to try the local venison, which is pretty much farmed here, but it's very expensive and you usually have to hang & butcher it yourself.

The other point to make with meat is food miles... always better to eat local produce than goods that have been flown in. Though how that balances with the beef/mutton problem I don't know. (Here it's hard to know what to think about sheep/cattle; the local farming is extremely low density, manages the land in a non-birch-wooded state that most people think is 'natural', and provides employment for locals who would otherwise be replaced by energy-guzzling holiday homes populated by people who drive or fly here.)

Some interesting tips on iron here - https://www.nomeatathlete.com/iron-for-vegetarians/
The key ones seem to be to have something with vitamin C when you're eating as that greatly improves iron absorption.

And, sad to say, reduce tea and coffee intake around meal times as tannin inhibits iron absorption.

He also lists vegetarian foods with good iron content (contrary to Popeye, spinach is not a good choice)

Totally with you on food miles. We get our veg from Riverford, who grow organic, but also do food mile carbon calculations on everything they sell. eg. They import some stuff from France when the carbon cost of transport is less than that of heating a poly tunnel.

I never (knowingly) buy food that has been air-freighted. I always pick local over imported.

If I ruled the world, I'd employ your local farmers to manage the land for forestry and pay for carbon capture. We need to be realistic about paying for carbon capture and bogs and woodland are important carbon sinks. The odds are that they only manage to farm because of subsidies, so why not redirect the subsidies to a more useful end.

They need to be managed, both to ensure a mix of species and wildlife, and to maintain firebreaks.

Don't all animals (certainly all animals with multiple stomachs, and I believe humans as well) produce methane?

Animals with multiple stomachs produce far, far more methane. Pigs, like humans, only have one stomach and hence aren't as damaging.

Pigs, like humans (and poultry) can't eat grass. So if we remove all grazing animals -- which can't be factory-farmed -- from the British farming landscape, we get left with a fairly unbalanced set of inputs and outputs (and, I suspect, a lot of intensively-reared livestock that are fed on intensively cultivated food, now that you're actively forbidden from rearing pigs on the traditional diet of leftovers).

I don't think we need to remove all grazing animals, but we do need to greatly reduce their number. (Some cows for milk are needed, for starters)

Animals are a useful source of manure, which is a very good soil input, and we definitely need that.

Some treated sewage ends up as fertiliser on farms, so there is an input from people to the soil. That needs to increase, as wasting or burning it is crazy.

You'd be amazed how much cattle food come from intensively cultivated crops. The biggest driver of deforestation in the Amazon is for soy for American cattle. I'm afraid you can come pretty close to factory farming with cattle. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feedlot

I just looked up a random supplier of UK cattle feed to see what they are fed in addition to grass:
Cereal blend is a mixture of cereal meal and mixed pellets. We grind a range of cereal together such as wheat, barley, maize, breakfast cereals with confectionery by-products, peas and beans to produce a meal consistency. Into that, we add mixed pellets such as pea and bean pellets and cereal pellet

Basically it takes more land than you think to feed a herd of cattle. You don't see a field of barley and assume it's being grown for cattle. Same goes for peas and beans.

for pigs, (again Google) Farmers feed pigs a high-quality, grain-based diet consisting mainly of crops such as barley, wheat and corn, which provide pigs with energy, and soybeans and canola meal for protein.

Again, intensive crops. Not really any better or worse than those grown for cattle.

I personally wish we could still feed pigs on leftovers. I'm sure there must be ways of making it safe - though bacon and pork should obviously not be included.

Personally, I'm unworried about my meat consumption overall - we're spending about twenty pounds a week on fruit and vegetables and about four pounds a week on meat, with no need to worry about balancing protein types and achieving maximum iron intake (which my vegetarian sister-in-law is constantly concerned about; yes, they use iron pans on a solid-fuel range). We've just had a week's worth of meals out of a total of one pound of shin of beef, three thin rashers of streaky bacon, and one slice of black pudding (today's dinner, made into pasta sauce with onions and a dose of lentils). Oh, and some dripping left over from last week's roadkill roast pheasant ;-)
I feel the British Isles can probably support that level of consumption quite happily...

The cattle feed sounds rather like the sort of stuff they used to feed to working horses -- it occurred to me last night that you could probably replace ungulates with ponies and rabbits for grazing purposes if you considered their native digestive systems beyond the pale. Although this has the drawback that you can't eat the horses, use their skins for leather and drink their milk (or at least, people won't!)

Cattle do need to be fed during the winter, when the grazing isn't adequate; the alternative is to do what they had to do in the Middle Ages, and slaughter all but the core nucleus of your herd before the end of autumn to store as preserved meat. I hope we don't intend to import 'feedlots' into the UK (along with other American beef production processes...)
https://www.cuttingedgeservices.co.uk/2018/06/15/are-us-style-cattle-feedlots-on-the-rise-in-britain/

I still feel that ruminants are a natural part of the ecosystem, and presumably so are their digestive processes (we can't very well kill off all the elephants, bison, etc. because we think they're polluting the atmosphere). So presumably it's an issue of stocking levels.

I think barley IS mostly grown for animal feed, as there's very little demand for barley flour. There's malting for beer, of course, and a certain amount of cooking ('pearl') barley, but I can't imagine it accounts for much. The traditional advantage of barley and rye is that they grow where wheat can't (just as sheep are grazed where cattle can't) -- hence barley bannocks from thin soil in Scotland!

It would make far more sense to cook 'waste' food from supermarkets, restaurants, etc. into pig food (the traditional route of vegetable peelings etc -- ours go to the worm bin outside the door, to be magically disappeared into liquid fertiliser!) than to padlock the bins so that starving people can't attempt to eat it and potentially cause bad publicity by poisoning themselves.

I'm not sure what the effect of putting sewage from millions of contraceptive-treated women on food crops would be -- I don't think sewage farms sieve out hormones. (I believe the effects on the water system are already worrying.)

Occasionally we eat vegetarian, or something like a tuna salad. Our beef intake isn't particularly high, we lean more to pork, chicken and fish. Currently we have stocked up on "interesting" meats for the festive season, which includes venison, kangaroo, horse, goat, elk and reindeer.

I really like lamb, but that is a rare treat for us.

I've often wondered what kangaroo tastes like. I had reindeer once, but it was so long ago I've forgotten.

Why not try a challenge of eating vegetarian once every week? There's an amazing variety of vegetarian food and traditional recipes from all round the world. (to make the challenge harder, try and do it without fish - makes you think more about different protein sources)

I grew up eating a lot of veggie (sis is pescatarian, Dad is vegan) so I've got a lot of experience at cooking and eating interesting veggie meals. I do make an effort to include a bit of oily fish in my diet and have meat once or twice a week (for iron - even with all the tips around iron absorption, I still don't do it well from purely plant sources).

It's one of the easiest lifestyle changes to me - people don't have to give up anything, just reduce consumption of meat and replace with more plant-based sources. It's less painful than trying to change the way people travel, anyway!

As you say, veggie is the easy sell.

In reality, we are going to have to go well down the veggie route, insulate like mad and reduce travel as well, but I know from the outset that travel will be the hardest, in spite of being the easiest for people to achieve.

The iron thing is interesting. eg. nearly 6% of Americans are anemic, yet they probably have more cheap red meat than anyone. (possibly lack of vitamin C, folic acid, etc)
On the other hand, It's easy to see why an enormous number of Indian women are anemic. Periods, childbirth, low meat intake and probably a poor diet overall.

One interesting tip that I just found is to cook in an iron pan (no non-stick coating, obviously) There does appear to be research to back this one up - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12859709

I think I might get a cast iron pan myself. (you have to look after them properly, but it's not terribly difficult.)

I've looked at cast-iron pans, but they're too heavy for my easily-dislocated-wrists :-(

I suspect Americans are just eating bad combinations, yes, while it's easy to see why so many Indian women are anemic. I have bowel disease, which always complicates everything. When I'm well, eating a balanced, low-meat diet is easy and provides everything I need. I could probably even go veggie. When I'm not so well, all the good plant source of iron are incompatible with my bowel, plus I lose a lot of blood, so my diet is "whatever I can eat and get nutrients with, plus a ton of supplement", which makes full-time veggie tricksy.

insulate like mad and reduce travel as well, but I know from the outset that travel will be the hardest, in spite of being the easiest for people to achieve.

I'd love to insulate like made, but my (incredibly badly insulated) flat is a rental so I've got no ability to affect that.

I use public transport as much as possible, but I don't live in a city so local trips really require a car if they're beyond walking distance. It's probably the same for many. I plan to buy a hybrid next year. If I had anywhere to charge it, I'd go electric, but I don't (rental flat, argh) and the infrastructure isn't there in my area to charge on the go. So I suspect travel is one of the hardest to achieve without some fairly major infrastructure changes (as well as lifestyle changes to reduce everyone's international travel).

I eat vegan meals a few times a week - I'm lactose intolerant so can't include dairy. Otherwise, I rarely eat beef, never eat pork/bacon/ham (I'm allergic to it). I do eat fish and poultry. For milk, I use unsweetened coconut milk on cereal.

Your diet scores really well on the environment front. I love vegans. (and semi-vegans)

If you eat fish, tinned fish is likely to be better than fresh, simply because there's less wastage. Unsold fresh fish goes off and has to be binned. But there's a balance against that if you can buy local or from stocks that are MSC certified. My current choice is MSC tinned fish or occasionally locally caught.

I eat a combo of tinned and fresh fish. For the latter, I prefer various types of sushi, but they're frequently sold out or nearly so if I go to the market in the evening. For other food, for a light meal I like hummus sandwiches. I know the market I go to works with a food organization to distribute unsold food to food pantries. I don't know how much of their perishable food makes it to these pantries. I understand the organization has refrigerated trucks to pick up donated perishable items. As you said, fresh fish is highly perishable, so my guess would be not very much makes it to the pantries.

Thanks for taking the bull by the horns and posting. It is such a hard topic, as you say, and at time I certainly tend to move on to the next cat post! I was brought up, in many ways, in what seems a remarkably forseeing way - reduce, reuse, recycle, including eat local as far as possible. However I still find myself conflicted and confused by some of the trade-offs - e.g. food miles/environmental impact for various items. Carry on reading and thinking hard I guess.

Thanks for taking the time to read :) Helps my morale.

Reduce, reuse, recyle is really important. I'm like you there. I think clothing and jewellery are the areas where this approach to life counts the most.

With regard to food miles - avoid imported food wherever possible when there is a choice. eg. Eat apples rather than exotic imported fruit. Or import from Europe only if you live in the UK.

I don't buy any food from the USA or Australia. I'm a compulsive label reader...

I love Riverford - https://www.riverford.co.uk/ - I get organic veg from them and they do all the CO2 calculations so I don't have to. If importing tomatoes from France causes less CO2 than growing them in a heated greenhouse in the UK, then they'll import from France.

They never air freight. They grow nearly all their veg in the UK, with a small amount grown in France.

They import some fruit like Fair Trade bananas simply because there is a lot of demand, but always by sea, near to the UK if possible, and always organic, and always trying to work with small local producers.

They're also a worker-owner cooperative, which they're rather proud of.

I used to get a box from Riverford on average every four weeks. I stopped when they became absolutely insistent about me storing card details with them. I'm lucky in that I grow some fruit and veg in the garden and, more recently, look after the fruit and veg bits of the Fen Cottage garden at Wicken Fen; I stock that from my seeds etc. so I feel I am allowed to decide where the produce goes! Also round here there's the market, also a greengrocer in a neighbouring village and the social firm Darwin Nurseries and Farm Shop, all of which carry a lot of local veg (which is why the box was largely monthly). In Darwin's case that includes grown on-site and other local produce too. I can't say I avoid all imported fresh produce, but I do try hard to eat seasonal which cuts the problem down in size a lot. Again, seasonal eating as far as possible is something I was brought up with. I had a slightly unusual upbringing in several ways!

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Climate change - 12 years

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