Are tHe Vegans Right? : What It Really MEans To eat Sustainably
April 4th, 2024
Let’s start talking about the bigger picture of how your food choices impact the planet.
Meat. To eat or not to eat? Perhaps one of the most nuanced questions an environmentalist may ask themselves.
I’m like 90% sure that every single person in my major has probably been a vegan or a vegetarian for the environment for some portion of time. I’m not embarrassed to admit that I was one of them.
I was a vegan for three whole months. It all ended on my mom’s birthday with a plate of fried chicken doused in Mike’s Hot Honey. It was absolutely divine. My stomach also felt like it was going to explode for 24 hours, considering I hadn’t even had a shred of cheese in three months.
I know that people go vegan for like a million reasons, and I’m not here to tell you to quit being vegan, especially if it’s been a part of your lifestyle for years. I DO NOT HATE VEGANS!!!! (Yeraz, if you’re reading this, kisses. I miss and love you. Keep being vegan, do not kill me)
I respect the hell out of vegans, and those who choose to do so for the environment. Regardless of whether or not veganism is the most sustainable option (disclaimer: it’s definitely not), it shows a lot about a person when they’re willing to commit to something like that, albeit most of the time without doing all the appropriate research.
Since y’all vegans and vegetarians are VICIOUS, let me tell you that this is all my OPINION!!!!! This is not to be taken as fact, merely as an informed take and maybe encouragement? I don’t know. Do what you want. I’m scared of you and writing this article feels like sitting a child down to tell them their parents are getting divorced.
This is the most long-winded intro I’ve ever written. Welcome to my take on eating meat (and eating in general) sustainably.
Here’s what you should know first. The world of agriculture is like the worst ball of yarn you’ve ever tried to untangle. I cannot tell you how many tears I have shed thinking about how the world of food production is full of problems. The cultivation of food has been critical to the essence of humanity since the beginning of time. We need to eat. Agriculture, the practice of farming, is something we can never just hit the undo button on, because every single day, every SINGLE person has to eat.
Every single piece of food you have put in your mouth over your entire life has come from a farm. Even the most highly processed stuff you eat has a component that comes from a farm. Somewhere, an ear of corn was grown for your cheeto, a bushel of wheat for your oreo, a cocoa pod for your Reese’s peanut butter cup.
Let me paint you a picture. There is not a single sub industry of agriculture that is entirely sustainable.
The cows are burping methane, sure. But there were neonicotinoid seed coatings all over the soybeans that made your tofu, and those are killing bees and beetles that are essential for the prosperity of the land you walk on. The orange juice you drank this morning comes from trees that migrant workers slaved over for an entire season, and those people can’t afford to keep their kids fed. Your almond milk uses 371 liters of fresh water for every one liter of product.
The whole thing absolutely SUCKS. Like it’s bad. I’m not even scratching the surface.
So here’s the thing that I want you to take away from this. Cutting something out of your diet and dumping yourself blindly into everything that isn’t meat is quite literally just as bad.
I want you to start thinking intrinsically. Fine, if you don’t eat meat you’ll reduce carbon emissions, because animal agriculture produces the most carbon emissions of all types of agriculture. That is a fact. BUT! If you spend the rest of your life eating a plant based diet without being conscientious about it, you are tearing families apart, upholding racism, destroying hydrology of historic land, feeding into colonialism, leaching essential nutrients out of soils, and obliterating biological legacies. And, literally so much more.
The key to being a “good” environmentalist is to stop thinking that the only thing that contributes to climate change is carbon emissions. Every problem that I just mentioned is an environmental problem. YES, social injustices are environmental problems.
This is why I urge you to focus on being CONSCIOUS of what you’re eating rather than going vegan or vegetarian.
Here are some tips that I currently try to implement into my lifestyle to eat sustainably. I’m a 22 year old college student. As much as I would love to be a subsistence farmer that never steps foot in the grocery store, I can’t. I’m also POOR. Trust me, this guide is doable for many.
AVOID HIGH PROCESSED FOODS!!! - I love a snack. I really do. But the fact of the matter is, factory processed foods produce insane amounts of carbon emissions, and most of the time have horrible labor practices that keep people experiencing injustice for years on end. A lot of food processing factories are also responsible for pollutants like chemical concentrations in local watersheds, which further impact everyone living in that area. Highly processed foods should also be the easiest to cut out, because they are the least necessary.
AVOID BIG NAME BRANDS!!! - As a subset of the last point I made, a lot of big name brands that you would recognize have HORRIBLE environmental impacts. Nestle produced 1.7 MILLION TONNES of plastic YEARLY. Coca-cola is the largest plastic producer GLOBALLY, and nearly every factory in the U.S. has been determined to be an environmental cancer hotspot. Dole, a company that used to label their bananas with a sticker that read “ethical choice”, was taken up by a coalition of Latin American worker’s unions regarding severe worker’s abuse.
EAT SEASONALLY!!! - Ever wonder why the strawberries that you buy in December taste like nothing?? Tell me the last time you saw a strawberry growing in a snowbank. When you are eating something that would not be growing in the place you bought it at, it means it is coming from somewhere else. If you want to go crazy, more than 75% of your produce is not even native to the land you eat it on. (Check out that map! It’s super eye opening!) If you are eating an avocado in the middle of January, it is likely it is coming from Mexico. Your avocado took planes, trains, and automobiles to get on your kitchen counter, which is belching unnecessary carbon into the atmosphere. Not only that, but it takes ridiculous amounts of energy to keep harvested food fresh for travel. If you eat what is in season, it is far more likely that you are eating something that was harvested much closer to you, and therefore produced way less carbon emissions getting to your plate. Here’s my favorite resource for knowing what’s in season, directly from our very own USDA! Seasonal food guide :)
SUPPORT SMALL BUSINESS!!! - You’ll probably start to notice as I write more for this website that I will constantly suggest avoiding big corporations. The same goes for food. From farm stands to small restaurants, food ethics are much better the smaller you go. I can essentially guarantee that the farmer down the road that is selling you eggs from their carefully selected, free range, foraging hens are going to give you eggs that are way healthier for YOU and way healthier for the planet than anything you’ll see at the grocery store. Getting a chicken sandwich from your local farm-to-table vs Buffalo Wild Wings is essentially certain to give you a way more ethical meal.
USE YOUR NOGGIN!!! - Google is free, people. Whenever you buy something at the grocery store, it can take a mere few seconds to figure out whether the people who supplied it to you supplied it to you ethically. Trust me, there is TEA constantly being spilled in the food world. Ask questions at the deli counter!! Ask people where it came from, who made it, etc. It’s not embarrassing to want to know where your food comes from, I promise.
TAKE NOTE OF VOCAB!!! - This can be important for any consumption of food, but especially for animal products. Look for things like grass fed, pasture raised, no antibiotics for beef and dairy. Look for things like free range, humane certified, vegetarian diet on chicken and eggs. Look for a wild caught label on fish. It’s pretty easy to familiarize yourself with what to look for. If you’re really curious, here’s the federal food labeling guide from the USDA. (This isn’t even all of it!)
ADVOCATE!!! - One of the best ways to truly impact food sustainability is to HOLISTICALLY advocate for the practice of sustainable agriculture. Like I said previously, this goes far beyond carbon emissions. Make sure the people growing your food are safe and well, make sure the animals that you’re eating were raised responsibly and ethically, make sure the rivers near where your food was grown aren’t full of pollutants. Get in touch with your senators, the USDA, etc. Make sure labor laws are being practiced effectively on the farms you buy from. But most importantly, love your farmers. As someone who spent years working tirelessly on a fruit farm, I watched my boss put out the most delicious peaches I had ever had in my life with little to know appreciation. A key to sustainable agriculture is making the culture aspect of food production well rounded, and that starts with making sure our agriculturalists are taken care of.
EAT INTUITIVELY!!! - This is more of a personal thing. Eating sustainably goes beyond eating to sustain the planet, you have to sustain yourself. I am personally of the philosophy that any restrictive eating, such as cutting out a massive food group can be a really fine line to walk. Killing yourself over ethics, especially if you’re misinformed about them, is never as important as making sure you are eating what you want, when you want it in order to optimize living the best you possibly can. Even if it was the superior option, veganism would not be the best option to fuel my body, and that is more than okay. Put yourself first. Sustain yourself and the planet. We need you around. :)
Writing this made me so hungry. I hope if you take anything away from this, that it is to constantly consider all aspects of every environmental problem. I hope I was able to begin to reframe food sustainability for some of you, and maybe encourage you to eat more sustainably. Food and agriculture is a massive passion of mine, and I hope it can become one of yours too.
With a sadly empty stomach,
Zoe.
(For the planet)