Today I happened upon an article by newscientist that proves that eating local has far less of an impact on climate change than going vege for one day a week! An analysis of the environmental toll of food production concludes that transportation is a mere drop in the carbon bucket. It is foods such as beef and dairy that make a far deeper impression on consumers carbon footprints.

The research has been carried out at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh in the US, and looked at the greenhouse gas emissions of our meals. Christopher Weber, the researcher involved, maintains that shifting just one day a week to vegetable rather than beef consumption, makes a large impact.

To drive his point home, Weber calculated that a completely local diet would reduce a household's greenhouse emissions by an amount equivalent to driving a car 1600 km fewer per year. He assumed the car travels 10.6 km per litre of petrol (25 mpg). Switching from red meat to veggies just one day per week would spare 1860 km of driving. [newscientist]

Let me say it, before someone gets wind of it and blows it way out of proportion - I’ve never called myself a vegetarian (gasp). I very rarely eat meat, and if I do, it’s usually fish or it’s been cooked for me at a friend’s for dinner, but I’ve not taken the moral stance of eating absolutely no meat; dare I say that sometimes I even enjoy it! (yet another gasp).

What has prevented me from calling myself a vegetarian is the effect it has on those around you – they immediately become defensive and feel obliged to come up with the reasons why they haven’t yet converted, or have no intention of converting. And I have to say, greening the planet is not about being militant; at no stage of trying to get people to change the way they do things is one going to achieve anything by mowing people down with radical points of view.

So, I’m not trying to convert anyone to vegetarianism who doesn’t already lean heavily in that direction. What the research I’ve highlighted does reveal, is that little changes, in the right places, make a huge impact. And if one day a week of not eating meat (the despicable treatment of cattle, pigs and chickens and the controversy around cattle feedlots aside) can make that much of a difference, imagine if you ate meat only once a week….?