Meatless in May

Last week I received a challenge for the month of May. The challenge = go without meat for the month to help bring awareness to the environmental impact of animal consumption .

Even though I consider myself 80% vegetarian I felt like I needed more than ones days notice to ponder changes in my diet. Although after reading about the negative effects of animal meat production on the environment I am trying to make the commitment.

Here is what The Daily Thread shared with me...Besides giving you too many extra inches around the middle and increasing risk for heart disease, meat consumption accounts for a large portion of global green house gases. The production and raising of livestock uses 30% of the Earth’s arable land for pasture, an additional 33% of the land to grow and cultivate their feed and 5,000 gallons of water to produce a single pound of meat (compare that to the 25 gallons of water that to produce one pound of wheat). Cattle also contribute substantial amounts of pollution to the water supply due to manure, antibiotics and the pesticides used to produce their food. In fact if we each chose to go meatless this month, we can individually keep up to 420 lbs of carbon emissions out of the air (for our first campaign with 200 participants we kept over 80,000 lbs of CO2 from entering the atmosphere).

I'm giving it a try.