As a vegetarian it is not seldom that I hear the comment “ohh so you are a vegetarian, but you do eat fish right?”. No, of course I don’t eat fish. A fish is NOT a vegetable and I am against all killing and suffering of animals – so of course I can’t accept it for fish either. I have never understood how anyone could call them-self a vegetarian but still eat fish?!? Perhaps they don’t recognise (or want to realise) that fish injure just as much pain as other animals when they are caught and slaughtered.

Like other animals, fish feel pain and experiences fear. According to Donald Bloom, who is the animal welfare advisor to the British government, the nerve system in a fish is almost the same as in birds and mammals. This means that when they are dragged from the depths of the ocean, the fish undergo a terrible decompression – the fast pressure change ruptures their swim bladders, pops out their eyes, and pushes their stomachs through their mouths. Then they are thrown onto the ship, where they slowly suffocate, are crushed to death or are still alive when their throats and bellies are cut open. Does that sound like a nice death to you…one that you can just oversee so that you can eat sushi and still call yourself a vegetarian (or just eat fish for that matter)???

Overfishing is also a problem for the commercial fishing industry. Having basically emptied out the sea for “desired” fish, they now raise fish in fish farms. This practise is known as “aquaculture” and uses either cages in the ocean or tanks on land. There are so many fish in one cage/tank that they can hardly swim and bump into each other and the walls of the enclosure all the time. This results in painful sores and damage to their fins. The huge amount of feces in the tanks also lead to outbreaks of parasites and disease (besides the environmental damage of the surrounding area). In order to keep the fish alive in such an unhealthy environment, large quantities of antibiotics and other chemicals are poured into the water. When the fish have reached the desired size, they are brutally killed by having their stomachs cut open or they die of suffocation when the water in the tank is simply drained away.

Bon appetite!

NB: This article is a tribute to my wonderful sister Gitte, who has always been a strict vegetarian. Happy birthday Gitte.

fruits, food

When it comes to vegetarianism, the number one question on most meat-eaters’ minds is, “What do you eat?” I have often met meat-eaters who says “so you just salad?”. No, I eat everything. There are vegetarian alternatives to almost any animal food, from soy sausages and “Fib Ribs” to Tofurky jerky and mock lobster (if you so desire).

There are also great alternatives to dairy products such as soy ice cream, soy chocolate milk, Tofutti cream cheese, and more.

Becoming a vegetarian today is certainly a lot easier than 17 years ago when I became a vegetarian. Seriously, in Denmark we had hardly any veggie products. We had one kind of (not delicious) canned sausages and some paté. That was it. I am glad I did it out of love for animals and not for health reasons because it would have made it harder to keep.

Today it is so easy to become and be a vegetarian and there is a lot of help and inspiration to find. The American animal organisation PETA is doing fantastic work to promote vegetarianism. They have a website called www.goveg.com which has all the information you need about becoming a vegetarian including: the issues at stake, meet the animals, recipes, literature, famous vegetarians and the most amazing part: A FREE vegetarian starter kit.

It’s a great vegetarian starter kit with information and recipes and they send it to your home address for no cost at all. I have already ordered it for my sisters and my mum and it is really nice.

You can order the free vegetarian starter kit on the following link: http://www.goveg.com/order.asp?c=pfvskvp09

Good luck!

The health benefits of a vegetarian diet are well-documented, as are the increased risks of heart disease and cancer that come with eating meat. But these are “merely” personal benefits, and personal risks. Most people will say that this is a personal “lifestyle” choice. Yes, I agree. What you do with your body – is certainly your choice.

However, the decision to eat meat or not to eat meat is actually broader than personal lifestyle. With the advent of factory farming, other factors have to be considered.Modern meat production is a completely automated, mechanised industry with billions of animals spending their entire lives – 24 hours a day, seven days a week – in tiny pens or cages, never seeing the sun, never feeling fresh air, never being allowed the freedom to walk even one step. By eating meat you not only decide on a lifestyle for yourself – you decide the cruel life of these animals.

How many of us can remain complacent in the face of such institutionalised cruelty?

Did you know, for example, that 70 % of the grain grown in the United States is used to feed animals destined for slaughter? Or that 80% of the water used in the States goes toward animal agriculture? Or that land growing potatoes, rice and other vegetables can support 20 times as many people as land producing grain-fed beef? Or that many leading scientists now rank the environmental damage caused by the meat producing industry as second only to that caused by fossil fuels?

By eating meat you not only decide on a lifestyle for yourself – your decision influences the environment, global hunger and the cruel life of these animals. Don’t be cruel – be a vegetarian!

Photos of the Eco Yoga Park

People should consider eating less meat as a way of combating global warming, says the UN’s top climate scientist.

Rajendra Pachauri, who chairs the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), will make the call at a speech in London on Monday evening.

UN figures suggest that meat production puts more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere than transport.

But a spokeswoman for the UK’s National Farmers’ Union (NFU) said methane emissions from farms were declining.

Dr Pachauri has just been re-appointed for a second six-year term as chairman of the Nobel Prize-winning IPCC, the body that collates and evaluates climate data for the world’s governments.

“The UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) has estimated that direct emissions from meat production account for about 18% of the world’s total greenhouse gas emissions,” he told BBC News.

“So I want to highlight the fact that among options for mitigating climate change, changing diets is something one should consider.”

Climate of persuasion

The FAO figure of 18% includes greenhouse gases released in every part of the meat production cycle – clearing forested land, making and transporting fertiliser, burning fossil fuels in farm vehicles, and the front and rear end emissions of cattle and sheep.

The contributions of the three main greenhouse gases – carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide – are roughly equivalent, the FAO calculates.

Transport, by contrast, accounts for just 13% of humankind’s greenhouse gas footprint, according to the IPCC.

Dr Pachauri will be speaking at a meeting organised by Compassion in World Farming (CIWF), whose main reason for suggesting people lower their consumption of meat is to reduce the number of animals in factory farms.

CIWF’s ambassador Joyce D’Silva said that thinking about climate change could spur people to change their habits.

“The climate change angle could be quite persuasive,” she said.

“Surveys show people are anxious about their personal carbon footprints and cutting back on car journeys and so on; but they may not realise that changing what’s on their plate could have an even bigger effect.”

Side benefits

There are various possibilities for reducing the greenhouse gas emissions associated with farming animals.

They range from scientific approaches, such as genetically engineering strains of cattle that produce less methane flatus, to reducing the amount of transport involved through eating locally reared animals.

“The NFU is committed to ensuring farming is part of the solution to climate change, rather than being part of the problem,” an NFU spokeswoman told BBC News.

“We strongly support research aimed at reducing methane emissions from livestock farming by, for example, changing diets and using anaerobic digestion.”

Methane emissions from UK farms have fallen by 13% since 1990.

But the biggest source globally of carbon dioxide from meat production is land clearance, particularly of tropical forest, which is set to continue as long as demand for meat rises.

Ms D’Silva believes that governments negotiating a successor to the Kyoto Protocol ought to take these factors into account.

“I would like governments to set targets for reduction in meat production and consumption,” she said.

“That’s something that should probably happen at a global level as part of a negotiated climate change treaty, and it would be done fairly, so that people with little meat at the moment such as in sub-Saharan Africa would be able to eat more, and we in the west would eat less.”

Dr Pachauri, however, sees it more as an issue of personal choice.

“I’m not in favour of mandating things like this, but if there were a (global) price on carbon perhaps the price of meat would go up and people would eat less,” he said.

“But if we’re honest, less meat is also good for the health, and would also at the same time reduce emissions of greenhouse gases.”

Source: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7600005.stm

The truth: The more meat we eat, the fewer people we can feed. If everyone on Earth received 25 percent of his or her calories from animal products, only 3.2 billion people would have food to eat. Dropping that figure to 15 percent would mean that 4.2 billion people could be fed. If the whole world became vegan, there would be plenty food to feed all of us"”more than 6.3 billion people. The World Watch Institute sums this up rightly, saying, “Meat consumption is an inefficient use of grain"”the grain is used more efficiently when consumed by humans. Continued growth in meat output is dependent on feeding grain to animals, creating competition for grain between affluent meat-eaters and the world’s poor.”

It takes up to 16 pounds of grain to produce just 1 pound of edible animal flesh. According to the USDA and the United Nations, using an acre of land to raise cattle for slaughter yields 20 pounds of usable protein. That same acre would yield 356 pounds of protein if soybeans were grown instead"”more than 17 times as much!

Producing the grain that is used to feed farmed animals requires vast amounts of water. It takes about 300 gallons of water per day to produce food for a vegan, and more than 4,000 gallons of water per day to produce food for a meat-eater. You save more water by not eating a pound of beef than you do by not showering for an entire year.

It should be no surprise, then, that food for a vegan can be produced on only 1/6 of an acre of land, while it takes 3 1/4 acres of land to produce food for a meat-eater. If we added up all the arable land on the planet and divided it equally, every human would get 2/3 of an acre"”more than enough to sustain a vegetarian diet, but not nearly enough to sustain a meat-eater.

On top of this the industrial world is exporting grain to developing countries and importing the meat that is produced with it, and thus farmers who are trying to feed themselves are being driven off their land. Their efficient, plant-based agricultural model is being replaced with intensive livestock rearing, which also pollutes the air and water and renders the once-fertile land dead and barren.

If this trend continues, the developing world will never be able to produce enough food to feed itself, and global hunger will continue to plague hundreds of millions of people around the globe. There is only one solution to world hunger – A vegan diet is the only ethical response to what is arguably the world’s most urgent social justice issue.

So the less meat you eat – the more people we can feed! Think about it.

The simple answer is that I love animals and since the age of 16 I have refused to eat them. To me the notion of loving someone and killing them does not go together. And to me all animals are worthy of life and it makes no difference whether people eat a cow or a cat – you kill to eat and it is equally bad.

Now I am not a fanatic vegetarian in the sense that I don’t object to other people eating whatever they want, but I do oppose people categorizing themselves as something they are not – like the notion that people who don’t eat meat but do eat fish are "vegetarians". To me this categorization is wrong because a fish is NOT a vegetable.

According to the official definition of vegetarianism from Wikipedia “it is the practice of a diet that excludes all animal flesh, including poultry, game, fish, shellfish or crustacean, and slaughter by-products”. A vegan is a person who excludes all animal products from diet and in some definitions from attire also, whether or not the production of clothing or items has involved the actual death of an animal (dairy, eggs, honey, wool, silk, down feathers, etc.). I am a vegetarian but I don’t buy leather or feather pillows or covers. This is against my conviction (which is personal and not religious).

My main reason thus is ethical – an aversion to inflicting pain or harm on other living creatures, or a belief that the unnecessary killing of other animals is inherently wrong.

Environmental reasons also count high on my list – namely the fact that so many people are starving and the production of meat for consumption as oppose to grains is unsustainable. Did you know that the inefficiencies of meat, milk and egg production range from 4:1 energy input to protein output ratio up to 54:1 and as such the U.S. could feed 800 million people with the grain that the livestock eat.

Another argument is that farmed animals produce about 130 times as much excrement as the entire human population of the United States. Since factory farms don’t have sewage treatment systems as cities and towns do, this ends up polluting ground water, destroying the topsoil, and contaminating the air. Hence as a meat-eater you should consider yourself partly responsible for the production of all of this waste "” about 86,000 pounds per second.

There are an endless list of motivations and benefits of being a vegetarian including: religious and spiritual, health reasons, medical, ethical, environmental, economical, psychological, and cultural. In my next blog posts I will write on the topic in greater detail.

So as you can see there are plenty of reasons to stop eating meat – in fact you can improve the world by stopping today

Good luck.

In this podcast, I met up with Peggy and Jo – the two founders of Pun Pun. During the interview, we discussed their views on Sustainable living & farming, Earthen house building, how they started out, and the philosophy & vision driving their work.

Pun Pun (meaning ‘thousand varieties’) is an organic farm, seed-saving operation, and sustainable living and learning centre based about 50km North of Chiang Mai, Thailand in Mae Taeng district. The first I knew about Pun Pun was last year, when I heard about an amazing new organic vegetarian restaurant that had opened in the grounds of Wat Suan Dok temple. I visited it at the first opportunity, and quickly became a regular!

Pun Pun offers a variety of workshops and training courses, from their 10 week internship program offering an in-depth, hands-on experience in organic gardening (including seed saving, earthen building, and community living) through to 3-5 day earthen building workshops, and sustainability study trips. If you’re interested in finding out more, you can contact them via their website – the details are below.

Further information

www.punpunthailand.org – For further information on Pun Pun, including upcoming workshops and internships at Pun Pun farm. Map of how to get to Pun Pun restaurant.

You Sabai – You Sabai Home is located in Mae Taeng, next door to Pun Pun’s organic farm and sustainable living learning center outside a village in Mae Tang province, 50 km from Chiang Mai. They also build and live in simple earthen houses, close to nature.

You might also be interested in reading this article proving a rather interesting slant on the use of organic farming techniques in Africa – Green activists ‘are keeping Africa poor’.

The American Dietetic Association have declared that vegetarians have "lower rates of death from ischemic heart disease; lower blood cholesterol levels, lower blood pressure, and lower rates of hypertension, type 2 diabetes, and prostate and colon cancer" and that vegetarians are less likely than meat-eaters to be overweight. This of course doesn’t mean that you are necessarily skinny just because you are a vegetarian – but you are definitely healthier. Research has shown that vegetarians are 50 percent less likely to develop heart disease, and they have 40 percent of the cancer rate of meat-eaters. Meat-eaters are furthermore nine times more likely to be overweight than vegans are.

The consumption of meat, eggs, and dairy products has also been strongly linked to osteoporosis, Alzheimer’s, asthma, and male impotence. Scientists have also found that vegetarians have stronger immune systems than their meat-eaters and this means that they are less prone to everyday sicknesses like the flu. Vegetarians and vegans live, on average, six to 10 years longer than meat-eaters. Some may infer that it is not worth living longer if you can eat what you want – but there are more reasons than "merely" health to be a vegetarian (read: Global hunger: The more meat we eat, the fewer people we can feed)

A good vegetarian diet is perfectly sufficient for you to get all the nutrients you need, and without all the saturated fat, cholesterol, and contaminants found in animal products.

Highly recommended: On PETA’s website you can request a great, free vegetarian starter kit and they even send it for free (amazing!!!). I ordered one online for both of my sisters and my mum and they were delivered free of charge to their house: http://goveg.com/order.asp

The best vegetarian guide for Chiang Mai is made by Ath (Phongsathon Kitchawet), who is a webdesigner, artist, photographer, writer and idealist.

When Ath moved to Chiang Mai in 2000, he found the Vegetarian Restaurant Guide to Chiang Mai, Thailand map by David Freyer (15 March 2000). This map showed 39 vegetarian restaurants and 8 veggie-friendly restaurants, giving a total of 47 restaurants.

Chiang Mai Municipal city’s area is 40.216 square kilometer, so in 2000 the average was almost one restaurant per square kilometer…true heaven for vegetarians like myself.

Chiang Mai definitely has the most vegetarian restaurants in Thailand.

Surveying in September 2007 by Ath, there were more than 28 vegetarian restaurants in Chiang Mai City Municipality area. Less than 2000 because of closure or change from vegetarian to vegetarian-friendly (also meat) restaurant.

However, the Chiang Mai vegetarian scene is still vibrant, with more than 18 new vegetarian restaurants opening since 2000 (half the restaurants currently open) and the average is 1 restaurant per 1.43 km2, which is still high.

Chiang Mai’s broad cultural mix also plays a large role with Thai, Chinese, Korean, Vietnamese, Indian, Muslim and western influences evident in Chiang Mai’s vegetarian restaurants.

Local culture seems to be less of an influence with some notable exceptions. The famous Northern Thai monk Khruba Sriwichai became a vegetarian in 1903. However this seems to have had only a limited effect on local people.

Even though there are more vegetarian restaurants in Chiang Mai than other Thai cities there is still only 1 vegetarian restaurant for every 5,356 people in the municipal area (population of 149,959, March 2006).When you consider the social, ethical and environmental factors, this is still very few.

Besides all of this very interesting information that Ath could give me, the website also has Thai language learning (with audio), a great map of vegetarian restaurants, and sight seeing information for Chiang Mai etc.

To visit the website – go to: http://www.geocities.com/chiangmaivegetarian/indexeng.htm