Does that include fish? Presumably the concern with the leetle feeshes is whether they are sustainably fished, rather than inefficiency of the food chain and flatulence - the other drawback of livestock.

I'd love to come along with you, but I do like to eat meat. Is there a middle way where we could cut out farmed beef and pork (since that land is usable for arable crops), and stick to wild mountain goats and (maybe) sheep (which can efficiently proteinise uncultivatable land), wild boar, rabbits and hares which are eating all sorts of non-foodcrop veggies.

What about chickens?

John: I think you're right; only eating animals that fend for themselves is one option. Meat Credits is another. You could pay someone else to cut out meat on your behalf.

And how much might meat credits cost?

(Or would I just set up an account at your local Dominos for vegetarian-only pizzas for you?)

Oh, except if you're giving up anyway, that mean under additionality principles your meat savings wouldn't count. Offsetting's hard to do!

John: well, you'd need a trading/auction site. Say I'm planning to buy and eat a nice steak for my tea - I log the fact on the trading site and see what the highest bid to eat veg instead is. If it's a big enough sum, I accept it. There'd need to be a legal framework in place, so that if I don't accept a bid I'm bound by law to eat my steak (and vice versa if I accept a bid). It'd be great for poor people: after a few days of borrowing money to buy steak and then being paid not to go ahead with it, they'd eventually be able to afford the steak out of their own money - or lots of veg instead.

Can't. I have an iron deficiency and am hypoglycemic. I tried to stop eating meat ten years ago and became anemic. Sorry. I guess I'm evidence that we need a Meat Credit system.

John, chickens definitely count as carbon-gulping meat. As I understand it, the only fish that's really being groused about is swordfish, because it's being overfished. I could be wrong, though. Rob?

Hey, can we start touting Snowbooks as the first all-veggie publishing house?

Katharine -- Before I went veggie, my iron levels were always really low, right on the border of being TOO low. Now that I eat loads of greens, my levels are always tip top. And everybody agrees that plant-derived iron is better for you than the meaty kind. Not that that's a reason alone to go veggie; I just don't like it when vegetarianism gets a bad rap on account of something that's not true.

Well said, Anna. The best source of iron, by a long way, is spinach. Meats are relatively iron deficient compared to a lot of green vegetables and pulses. And I don’t see the connection between hypoglycaemia and meat-eating; the term means low blood sugar and the fastest-acting treatment is to take carbohydrate in the form of fruit juice, preferably orange, apple or grape. Sorry, Katherine, but someone is spinning you a yarn.

No one needs to eat meat. I've been veggie for nearly 40 years. My partner has never tasted meat in his life. It’s a luxury the planet cannot afford. It takes 5 lb of grain and 2,500 gallons of water to produce 1 lb of beef. That, to my mind, is an environmental obscenity.

Dee

If we all (in Europe) switched to a veggie diet carbon pollution would increase dramatically. If we all switched to a veggie diet quite a few fragile developing economies would collapse. (Because developing nations would switch production to maximise exports etc etc etc...) Most pulses, beans and lentils etc consumed in the UK are imported from Canada, India, Pakistan, Brazil, Ethiopia etc etc. India has the largest population of vegetarians but India's agricultural economy is geared around the demand. A Guardian article (from way back, Saturday May 10, 2003 - and I think the situation has deteriorated since then) stated the following:
"We bought a basket of 20 fresh foods from the major retailers on one day last month and tracked the food miles it had clocked up. We found apples from America; pears from Argentina; fish from the Indian ocean; lettuce from Spain; tomatoes from Saudi Arabia; broccoli from Spain; baby carrots from South Africa; salad potatoes from Israel; sugar snap peas from Guatemala; asparagus from Peru, garden peas from South Africa; red wine from Chile; Brussels sprouts from Australia; prawns from Indonesia; chicken from Thailand; red peppers from Holland; grapes from Chile; strawberries from Spain and beef from Britain. Our total basket had travelled 100,943 miles. "
Yes, ok, it's not just veggies, but also cheap chickens from Brazil via Holland, cheap rabbit from China, expensive lamb from New Zealand, pizzas from Ireland etc etc etc. I think rather than a meat-free diet a SLOW FOOD diet is the way to go.

Is this the right time to bring up the iron content of spinach urban myth?

I'm not quite following that Bill; why would carbon pollution go *up* if we switched to veg? Because it all comes from so far away? Surely the balance is still dramatically in *favour* of switching to veg. I must be missing a step in your reasoning there. I take your point about food miles though.

Dee, no one has spun me any yarns about the connection between meat and hypoglycemia except my own body. The only diet I've found that keeps the shakes away is one of high animal protein and relatively high fat. I've tried diets with beans, diets with grains, diets with fish, etc. A high meat content seems to be what works for me.

Incidentally, I eat a great deal of leafy greens and I still have an iron deficiency. Maybe John has something there?

Nothing is simple is it - here is yet another thing for women (and I think it is mostly women since they do most of the food shopping and cooking in our society) to be guilty about. I have been trying to avoid air freighted food this year and have, I think, largely succeeded on vegetables - the supermarket doesn't seem to put the little blue planes on fruit so I'm hoping bananas and pineapples and the like come in big boats, as I am unable to condemn my children to a winter of nothing but tasteless French golden delicious. But I do worry about how the poor growers in Kenya will live
if I boycott their green beans. I get an organic veg box delivered although I think most of that comes in a big van from Holland as not much grows in Aberdeenshire in the winter. I worry about whether Spanish tomatoes use more carbon to ship then Dutch tomatoes use in their greenhouses. I would also like to buy my meat and game from a local mail order supplier who is much praised in the national press but am put off by the fact that it arrives in the most enormous amount of packaging (plastic bags inside cardboard boxes inside pads of ice inside polystyrene). How do people balance all these conflicting issues?

Sorry to be a day late reading the blog but I had an intestinal interruption of service. I went to a writers' conference once which was strictly veg. - even salt was forbidden - and the atmospheric pollution was audible!
[Newpara.] It is my understanding that the major cause of defoliation of the North African landscape (Sahara) after the Romans left was caused by goats who eat every growing thing. If only the poor in dry parts of the world were given paraffin for cooking and powering artesian pumps, they might be able to render the crops they could grow edible and stop destroying what bushes do survive.

Judith, it’s incredibly difficult, because there are so many factors to consider. Bananas, for instance: buy organic (to reduce chemical pollution), and fairtrade (to give the growers a sustainable life). That goes a long way to offset the carbon deficit from the air freight (incidentally, don’t worry about organic bananas sometimes being a strange colour – it just means they haven’t been bleached… I'm not joking!)

In the end, we all have to draw our own personal lines in the sand and say ‘This is the point I will not cross.’ Sometimes we have to (or feel able to) move the line. That’s fine, so long as we are aware and are willing to do something. If everyone made one simple change to their lifestyle it could make a massive difference. Better to light one small candle than to curse the darkness… as they say.

Dee