The Pros And Cons Of Meat Consumption

While I already knew that I eat a lot of food, what I did not realize was how much of the food I eat is packaged. In the tables 1 and 2, I put everything that was a local food into a bold font. It was only one item for each week, four brats the first week and three the second. They are from a local meet market, but even they are not very sustainable. Meat is very resource intensive to produce. Many more pounds of grain are fed to the animals to fatten them up than we get in return as meat. According to Lester Brown (2011), 35% of the world’s grain harvest each year goes towards making animal protein. Brown (2011, pg. 173) also states, “With cattle in feedlots, it takes roughly 7 pounds of grain to produce a 1-pound gain in live weight. For
One animal protein supply that is a little more efficient however is fish. To produce one pound of fish takes under two pounds of grain (Brown, 2011, pg. 173). Eating more fish is an option that I think more people would be in favor of than switching straight over to vegetarianism. Unfortunately for me, this is simply not an option. I am severely allergic to fish, so eating fish is not a sensible solution for me personally. One of the things I can do to reduce the ecological footprint of my food consumption however is to reduce the amount of packaged food I eat. Both of my weekly logs show a heavy consumption of packaged food. My second week was less, but it is still not as low as it should be. As a college student, packaged food is just so convenient and cheap that it is tough to avoid. In the future though, I will try to reduce my consumption of packaged foods. This is my last semester at Concordia and living in the dorms, so in the future hopefully I will have a kitchen of my own. That way I can cook more whole foods and eat less packaged ones. Whole foods will be healthier for me and the environment. This leads me to my next topic which is