Tanzania: Love Letters to Tanzania – Beans or Beef for Dinner Tonight?.
Hearing young people thoughtfully articulate their visions for a better future is a wonderfully uplifting aspect of teaching.
Recently, I had the pleasure of assessing students’ persuasive speaking skills as they presented on a range of environmental issues.
When a student began to speak in favour of vegetarianism, her words fell on fertile ground and ruined my dinner plans – partially because she is a gifted orator, and partially because my self-image as an environmentally-friendly citizen was suddenly under threat.
Urged to reflect upon how ethical it is to eat meat, I would have liked to plead ignorance but remembered why, during my teenage years of idealism, my food choices had reflected ethical considerations.
Unable to dismiss as naïve the typical belief of youngsters that they hold the key to all problems faced by humanity, I felt guilty about having fallen back into my carnivorous habits decades ago when youthful ideals gave way to realism and convenience.
If this sounds familiar, dear reader, let us face an inconvenient truth together: the careless food choices of financially comfortable citizens help destroy our global environment.
Our insatiable appetite for meat exacerbates a range of environmental problems from deforestation and water pollution to land degradation and climate change.
In addition, raising animals for meat consumption is a very inefficient way of producing food.
Currently calling the driest inhabited continent on earth home, I see the injustice of using scarce fresh water resources for meat production – of us meat eaters claiming around fourteen times as much water for our diets as vegetarians.