BSustained

BSustained doesn’t preach to you about what you should or shouldn’t eat. Instead, it serves up vegan or vegetarian food to delight the eye and tickle the tastebuds even of diehard meat-eaters who thought veggie was boring. Or it teaches you to make it – and grow it – yourself.

Meatless Thursdays in Belgium

But we’re happy to share information about the wider benefits of eating less meat, and the world is gradually catching up with the implications of animal farming for climate change. The city council in Ghent, Belgium, are encouraging everyone to go veggie every Thursday. On the first Veggie Day, in May 2009, the city council restaurant offered pancakes stuffed with cheese and spinach or mushrooms, and a salad. The city is also promoting vegetarian meals in its canteens, schools and restaurants. Kindergartens and primary schools will offer vegetarian meals on Thursdays from September 2009. The council hopes Ghent University and at least one of the hospitals will soon join in.

There’s more: free vegetarian recipes in the city magazine, cooking workshops for professionals, and a map of Ghent showing restaurants with vegetarian options. Birmingham City Council has got a long way to go – though Birmingham Vegetarians & Vegans may plug some of the information gaps, and BSustained provides training.

Ethical Vegetarian Awareness, which is behind the campaign, says that if every Ghent resident were to go meatless for just one day a week for a year, it would be the equivalent of taking 20,000 cars off the road.

How meat-eating heats the planet

Bryan Walsh put it like this in Time Magazine:

In a 2006 report, the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) concluded that worldwide livestock farming generates 18% of the planet’s greenhouse gas emissions — by comparison, all the world’s cars, trains, planes and boats account for a combined 13% of greenhouse gas emissions. Much of livestock’s contribution to global warming come from deforestation, as the growing demand for meat results in trees being cut down to make space for pasture or farmland to grow animal feed. Livestock takes up a lot of space — nearly one-third of the earth’s entire landmass. In Latin America, the FAO estimates that some 70% of former forest cover has been converted for grazing. Lost forest cover heats the planet, because trees absorb CO2 while they’re alive — and when they’re burned or cut down, the greenhouse gas is released back into the atmosphere.

Then there’s manure — all that animal waste generates nitrous oxide, a greenhouse gas that has 296 times the warming effect of CO2. And of course, there is cow flatulence: as cattle digest grass or grain, they produce methane gas, of which they expel up to 200L a day. Given that there are 100 million cattle in the U.S. alone, and that methane has 23 times the warming impact of CO2, the gas adds up.

Health

Ghent officials also cite lowering the risk of heart disease, diabetes and obesity as a reason for their initiative. They believe they are the first city in the world to take such a step – though many Orthodox Christians in countries as far apart as Russia and Ethiopia have had vegan diets on Wednesdays and Fridays from time immemorial.

The information about Ghent came from Reuters