INHERITANCE

My daughter was twenty-one yesterday.  Do you know what some of her birthday presents were? A water jug with several months supply of filters and a stainless steel water bottle.  And guess what, she was thrilled!  Yes, because now she will not have to buy so-called mineral water in plastic bottles, which creates more and more waste.  What a blessing she is in my life and what a role model she is to me.  After asking myself all these years what I want to be when I grow up, I finally realized that I want to be like my daughter.  She is the one who gave me the idea of turning the front lawn into a vegetable plot.  

You see, she belongs to the generation that is inheriting the appalling mess that we have made of life on Earth.  Wonderful being that she is, my daughter is doing a master’s in public administration, with a focus on international non-profit-administration.  Her particular area of interest is Hunger Eradication.  If you ask her, she will tell you that the Earth’s resources can take care of all our needs if used wisely and consciously.  Wisely and consciously are the keywords.

Although ours is a family that enjoys a meat casserole or a roast chicken, we are learning that a vegetarian diet is one of the best ways to conserve the Earth’s resources and maintain a balanced economy.  Figures from the Department of Agriculture show that it takes sixteen pounds of grain to produce one pound of meat.  More than ninety per cent of all grain produced in America is fed to livestock.

An authority in food geography, Dr. George Borgstrom  estimates that more than one third of Africa’s protein-rich-nut-crop, is fed to Western Europe’s cattle and poultry.

World food authority Lester Brown tells us that the average meat eater goes through some two thousand pounds of grain a year, feeding ninety per cent of it to animals for meat as opposed to the four hundred pounds consumed per person in underdeveloped countries.  Brown says that the average meat eater uses five times the food resources of the average vegetarian.  It is facts such as these that have led food experts to conclude and point out that the world-hunger problem is unnecessary as we are even now producing more than enough food to feed everyone on the planet.

Harvard nutritionist Jean Mayer said that the reduction of meat production by just ten per cent, would release enough grain to feed sixty million people.

Now that’s food for thought! As I said, my family and I enjoy a nice piece of meat as much as the next person.  The mouth-watering smell of ribs or hamburgers on the B-B-Q makes me hungry just thinking about it, but how can one ignore the facts?  How can one pretend that the problem does not exist?  Let us look at this some more*:

• One acre of land can produce 20,000 pounds of potatoes; the same amount can only produce 165 pounds of meat.
• It takes 16 pounds of grain to produce one pound of meat.
• More than half of the harvested agriculture acreage goes to feed livestock.
• It requires 3½ acres of land to support a meat-centered diet, 1½ acres to support a vegetarian diet and 1/6 of an acre for a vegan diet.
• It takes approximately 2,500 gallons of water to produce one pound of meat and 4,000 gallons of water to provide a day’s amount of food per person on a meat-based diet. 1,200 gallons of water are needed for one vegetarian person and 300 for a vegan person.
• Developing nations predominantly use their land to raise beef for wealthier nations instead of using that land for sustainable agriculture practices.
• In order to support cattle grazing, South and Central America are destroying their rainforests.  These rainforests contain close to half of all the species on Earth, including thousands of medicinal plants.  More than a thousand species a year are becoming extinct and most of these are from rainforests or tropical settings used for the meat industry.  This practice is also rapidly causing the displacement of indigenous people who have been living in harmony in these environments for thousands of years.  And this is contributing to global warming.
• For each acre of land that is cleared for human purposes, seven acres of forest are cleared for growing livestock feed.  This policy is fast destroying the few remaining forests.
• Topsoil is the dark, nutrient-rich soil needed to grow food.  It takes more than 500 years make one inch of topsoil.  This soil is rapidly vanishing due to clear cutting of forests for cattle grazing.
• Water is being contaminated by chemically-based farming methods used to raise animals.  Because of such poisoning of our freshwater resources, we are quickly running out of clean drinking water.

 

Cheerful isn’t it? And this is what our children are inheriting from us.  And we haven’t even talked about methane yet.  But we’ll leave that charming subject for next time.

 

Happy Birthday Florentina

Mummy

xoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxooxoxo

 

p.s. Tomato update – Sadly, the broken branch of one the plants I got last week has not mended.  Other than that, and the fact that they are cherry instead of plum tomatoes as I had thought, all three plants are doing fine.  We have eaten a handful (small one) already and they are very sweet.  I will be making mozzarella before the summer is over.

*Source: Ayurvedic Nutrition by Nibodhi and Gunavati