What you eat and climate change

It matters. Not only to your health and the well being of other animals besides humans, it also matters to the environment. Take a look at this excerpt from an article entitled, "Does meat-based diet contribute to global warming?":

What we eat affects not only our health but also our environment. Any nutritionist will tell you that most Americans are damaging their health by over-consuming meat and animal products, while under-consuming healthy and nutritious whole foods -- fresh fruits, vegetables, grains and beans.

If you are going to eat meat, consume it in moderate quantities, and limit your intake to organic products coming from healthy animals that are grass-fed and raised humanely. Keep in mind that the bird flu pandemic, looming ominously on the horizon, is a direct result of raising larger and larger numbers of poultry under unhealthy and inhumane conditions.

Every day, for example, several hundred chickens routinely are crammed into manure-saturated 8-by-8-foot cages on poultry farms across China and other Asian countries. Living in filthy conditions, reared on contaminated animal feed laced with dioxin residues, antibiotics and slaughterhouse wastes; these animals are a biological time bomb waiting to explode.

On the environmental and climate change front, the facts are equally clear. Unless the U.S. and other nations drastically reduce the amount of our climate-destabilizing greenhouse gases by at least 75 percent over the next decade, our children and grandchildren will be condemned to live in a chaotic and dangerous world, where food and energy shortages will become the norm.

To avoid climate chaos, Americans must change our lifestyles and diets. We must decrease our consumption of energy and chemical intensive meat and animal products, along with highly processed and packaged convenience foods transported over long distances.
...
Organic farms worldwide use 50 percent less petroleum-derived fuel and inputs than conventional farms.

I buy organic food whenever possible because I don't want to consume pesticide residue. I'm also a vegetarian because animals are my friends and I don't eat my friends. But now there's another good reason to be faithful to both of those principles. Because I'm a vegetarian and buy organic I'm contributing less to global warming than I would be otherwise.

Please think about it.