When I tell people that being vegan is the best thing one can do for the environment I often hear a response like, “Well, I’m not vegan but that’s okay because I buy all my food from local farms.”
People (myself included!) like to pat themselves on the back for eating local. And in many respects that pat is well deserved. Buying locally grown food keeps money within the community, it’s a way of showing support for small businesses over large corporations, provides less opportunity for the contamination that leads to massive recalls, and allows you to celebrate the seasons and products unique to your region.
But that’s if we’re talking about produce. To an animal whose life was taken, whether he was slaughtered for a local buyer or not doesn’t really matter to him. And despite what many well-intentioned people may think, it doesn’t really matter all that much to the environment either. While eating local is great, what we eat matters much more, environmentally speaking.
This is because the majority of greenhouse gases released from the entire food process come from the production, not the transport. Specifically, nitrous oxide and methane, inadvertently produced by fertilizers (for animal feed crops), manure, and gas expelled during the animals’ digestion account for a large portion of the CO2-equivalent gases created during production. The delivery– that is, the transport of food from the producers to the retailers– contributes only 4% of the greenhouse gasses.
If you eat an all-local diet, you save the greenhouse gas equivalent of driving 1,000 fewer miles a year. But if you were to eat a vegan diet just one day a week, you would save the equivalent of driving 1,160 fewer miles a year. So in terms of greenhouse gases, eating vegan one day a week is better than eating local every single day of the year.
Can you imagine the impact you could make by eating vegan every single day of the year, both for the animals and for the environment?
Check out this fascinating study by Carnegie Mellon University: “Food-Miles and the Relative Climate Impacts of Food Choices in the United States”
