Could the roast beef sandwich that you may choose for lunch contribute to the destruction of the environment?
Image by Urban Mixer
Executive Chef Shannon Wrightson and Beekeeper John Gibeau – The inaugural Honey Harvest at The Fairmont Waterfront Hotel.
New guests of The Fairmont Waterfront Hotel in early June of this year were two notable queens. While they may not be of the royal lineage, their journey is unique. The queens hail from Italy with one raised in Kona Hawaii and the other in Santiago Chile. Their subjects have had an equally notable journey, travelling around the globe from their home of New Zealand to join the queens here in Vancouver. Today the honey bees are the newest rooftop guests of The Fairmont Waterfront’s culinary team. – read more at www.urbanmixer.com
Question by hwfreak: Could the roast beef sandwich that you may choose for lunch contribute to the destruction of the environment?
Think about and list ways that beef and wheat production can adversely affect the environment.
Add your own answer in the comments!
4 Responses to Could the roast beef sandwich that you may choose for lunch contribute to the destruction of the environment?
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Flatulence???
Xam
January 13, 2013 at 5:38 pm
Yes. The methane gas that you release in the form of flatulence after eating the sandwich has an adverse effect on the ozone layer and may contribute to global warming. At the very least it is offensive to my delicate nasal passages so please do not eat the sandwich.
LARRY H
January 13, 2013 at 6:10 pm
First of all, meat is murder. Second of all, it’s been proven that slaughterhouses emit gases which increase global warming. The polar bears are dying. Do you care?
The Common Liberal
January 13, 2013 at 7:01 pm
Absolutely, yes.
The beef industry is one of the heaviest polluters; the automobile is a distant second place (in most places) in terms of pollution and resource use.
The amount of grain needed to feed cattle in the Western world would easily solve world hunger. Instead, huge acreages are devoted to growing cattle feed. These grains tend to be heavy feeders themselves, leaving the soil depleted, and making the use of genetically modified grains, along with pesticides and chemical fertilizers seem like the logical choice–but of course, all of these products negatively affect the environment.
Fertilizer run-off damages the watershed, and in the effort to grow massive crops of cattle feed on the same land, year after year, enormous quantities of cattle effluent is added to the soil. The solid, liquid, and gaseous effluent from the cattle are already laden with the toxins from the genetically modified grain, plus the antibiotics that the cattle are fed.
The processing of meat requires a lot of water. This water is returned to rivers and streams after some cleaning, but it still contains the toxins from the fertilizers, the antibiotics from the cattle themselves as well as the growth hormones fed to the cattle.
Once the meat is processed, refrigeration is used to stop its decay. This requires large amounts of electricity, as well as coolants which are highly toxic substances, often accidentally spilled from industrial refrigeration units of all sizes.
When the meat arrives at the store, it looks fresh and red even though the decay process is already happening–the appearance has been altered using chemical colouring.
What happens when you eat the roast beef sandwich? All of the additives mentioned are still in the meat, and many are absorbed into the body, which have been shown to cause a variety of health problems, quite aside from the hazards of eating the quantity of meat that many Europeans and North Americans are eating.
In addition to all the destruction caused directly by the raising, processing and eating of beef, there is the indirect damage caused by the industrial agricultural practice of “monocropping.” Vast fields of the same crop reduce the foraging choices for bees, and has contributed to poor nutrition and disease among European honey bees. These bees are now in serious trouble, and their decline is so severe that there is less than 10 years of commercial viability in Europe, perhaps as many as 25 in North America. Also affected are our native pollinators, including mason bees, bumble bees and a variety of other insects.
Oh, did you want mustard on that roast beef sandwich? Think about this. Canada is the leading grower of mustard, but France produces most of the finished product. The product had to be shipped halfway around the world to be made into the condiment–and half way around the word again for you to buy it.
Gryphon Noir
January 13, 2013 at 7:41 pm