On Saturday I met up with CS and MO for the afternoon at CS's place in Bow. I was finally able to give her all the very pink things I've been knitting for her since she left my office as her belated birthday/holiday gift. So that was very exciting. We had a good time, as it's always nice to catch up with folks.
Sunday I met up wit BG who I had somehow missed meeting up with a few weeks earlier. We met at Hampstead Heath silverlink station and walked to this place called 'The Holly Bush' (which I thought sounded particularly naughty) for roast lunch. Then we wandered our way back to the train stopping at shops along the way.
It was in this way that I ended up purchasing two pairs of shoes that I do not need. One pair I want to see about turning into a more 'daily' pair of funky shoes. But the other was purely frivolous. Of course, they were reduced from £120 to £39, so it wasn't too much of a hardship, still, it wasn't my intention to buy shoes. But I guess it's entirely true, a girl really can't have too many shoes.
Then I spent a reasonable part of my weekend pondering the ethics of vegetarianism vs the ethics of your personal carbon footprint. Whether it is more or less ethical to eat fruit and vegetables flown in from the opposite sides of the earth versus eating organic locally raised meat. I'm sure even by how I've phrased that statement, my personal view is clear. I've started to make an effort recently (I've noticed) to try to limit the distance travelled of my fruits and vegetables, so this is of particular interest to me. Being ethical about your food choices is a really messy bag of worms I think. I guess everyone has to just be comfortable doing the best they can and what they think is right.
Okay. Back to work!
8 comments:
Hey at last.
THANK GOD YOU AGREE!!
There is NO such thing as too many shoes!
;op
2 possible problems with even local organic meat. first if it's grain-fed, then that magnifies the environmental impact many times over. it's an inefficient use of resources and adds a lot of extra transport miles. second, even grass-fed livestock produce a lot of greenhouse gases. a UN report last year put the total livestock contribution to greenhouse gases at 18 percent - more than all transportation combined. not to mention a variety of other environmental damage and the questionable ethics of killing a sentient being for food.
tlsd- it's not that i have never agreed in principle, it's just that i have no space to put them all....
jake- that's a somewhat flawed argument. air travel is one of the largest contributers to carbon emissions. and not only do you have to fly all these fruits and vegetables to wherever you are, but before that you have to get the airplane fuel to these far away places as well. if you want to talk hidden costs, there are plenty. not to mention child labour and inhuman working conditions of your fellow man in these far away countries. animals eat animals. why do you think we're any different?
i must admit ignorance on the environmental effects of eating fruits and vegetables in the UK. in the states, it's easy to buy fruits and vegetables that are either locally grown or shipped by rail or truck rather than plane. if it's true that the only produce available in the UK has been flown in, then the damage is pretty significant. but i'm guessing it'd be possible to expand local produce, or produce shipped from the continent on rail/boat/truck, if people had the right incentives (eg if prices reflected the environmental damage of your food choices).
but i want to stick with my point about grain-fed meat. it takes 5 pounds of grain to produce one pound of beef, so you have to figure in all the land, water, and energy needed to grow all the grain as well as that needed for the cow (and all the methane and waste the cow produces) when calculating the environmental impact. if that grain is flown in, then the impact is even greater.
"animals eat animals. why do you think we're any different?"
well, we are biologically pretty different from most carnivores because we can easily survive without eating meat. but the bigger difference is that humans can think ethically. that's why, unlike other animals, we have rules against murder, rape, and assault. i do not, however, see any difference in the moral value of a human life vs another animal's life. so i don't kill humans or animals.
Jake-
Again, I question at least a couple of your assumptions. Trucking fruits and vegetables long distances is also a highly polluting and poor way to eat. Add to that the Americans pay ridiculously low prices for gasoline and you have an un-sustainiable and false economy.
If you want to stick to points about meat, then I also wish you'd branch out a bit beyond beef. There are many more meats than beef and they don't all require the same resources. Pigs eat slops and other food byproducts as one example, and chickens, from which we get eggs, can round out their benefit by being meat once they're older and not laying. Goats and sheep tend to eat grass- in fact most beef in this country also eats grass, not grain. But even when animals do eat grain, that's what silos are for. Grain isn't 'flown in' when talking about sustainable farming, it's produced on-site and stored, as it's been done for centuries.
I'd also carefully point out that humans are actually animals, have pointed teeth and only one stomach for a reason. Because we are meat eaters by design. That death is part of life, and killing is part of a natural process.
Humans have been unable to recreate a sustainable eco-system as of yet. For as much knowledge as we have about living things and how they link together, we still haven't cracked it. As much as we may think being rational makes us different, we are still products of the system that created us and to which we are linked. Fuck with that, and you destroy everything.
Being a vegetarian is sort of an intellectual indulgance. This is why I believe more in the 100 mile diet and supporting sustainable farming practices. When oil runs out and you don't have a choice, then really the argument is moot.
-K
oh, and i agree that it's better to eat local produce and that gas prices are far too low. however, an environmentally sustainable society wouldn't have to do without produce that's been shipped from far away. if we stopped using cars in cities, used trains for most long-distance travel, switched to renewable electricity and used less of it, and stopped consuming so much, i think there'd be room for some winter california produce in chicago.
shit, my first comment didn't post. well the upshot was that you're right about grass/scrap-fed meat, it's not bad for the environment. but if you dismiss vegetarianism by saying that we're just animals, then i think you have to dismiss moral opposition to war or the killing of someone you don't know as well.
Jake- Oh, I completly agree that in an environmentally sustainable society there will be room for mass transit of goods and people, frankly. However, we don't currently live in that society. So while in the future that may be a possibility, indulging in such commerce now equates to a significant contribution to all things bad.
And you can't really equate war with the food chain. After all, we aren't eating our opponents. We aren't even securing territory for our own biological survival. War, as we currently know it is not biologically intelligent, so it's easy to oppose.
Murder of someone you dont know is in some ways similar- unless your life depends on the death of that other person (and we do have justifiable homicide or 'self defence' within our courts) then again, not too difficult to oppose baseless killing. Or, even worse, killing simply because of our higher and more developed intellect or sentience. Now there's a quandry.
-K
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