We love to devour meat—at least some of us who were not constrained by any religious cult or sect. But who would not fall prey to the sumptuous lure this kind of gastronomic delight proffers every so often? I presume that resistance against this kind of food seems pretty thin particularly if you were born and raised in a culture where grazing animals like swine, cattle, and goats flock on to on fields of grasses for days on end, waiting for the that fateful hour they’d be butcher and partitioned for human consumption.
Humans as we are, we just cannot deny ourselves this kind of food which often is, through man’s ingenuity, turned into different delectable cuisines—though varied pulls the same kind of appeal to man’s appetite for dishes.
But however irresistible meat is, we should keep in mind that our intake of it should be in moderation, always in moderation if not lesser than our usual intake. Aside from pragmatic reasons like staying fit, avoiding cardiovascular diseases like heart attack and hypertension, being just to animals and respecting their rights to live, there is another valid reason why it is being warned against.
It was identified just recently that too much meat consumption exacerbates the already high levels of carbon concentration in our environment, thereby making global warming more threatening than it already is. Five years ago, the “United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) published a report called “Livestock’s Long Shadow,” which maintained that 18 percent of greenhouse gases were attributable to the raising of animals for food”. The number was indeed sufficient a reason for the consuming public to stop overindulging in foods made and manufactured from meat. However, despite adequate warning and widespread dissemination of such findings, the masses remained laxed, unperturbed even, indulging in every fiber of meat their tongue can grace on, masticating on the flesh of animals which feast on plants, plants which is the main source of oxygen, oxygen that is highly indispensible if we are to maintain prevent global warming.
A high demand for meat means a high demand for raising livestock animals like swine and other herbivores, which pretty much tantamounts to wide areas of grasslands being devoured and never replaced. As such, countries such as Britain “urged its people to lessen meat intake not just to stop global warming but to protect the ecological welfare of developing countries from which the feeds for livestock are acquired”. The impression is, it is not the rich countries like UK who can first feel the setbacks of meat over-consumption but that of developing countries whose natural resources are exhausted just to produce the needs of wealthy countries.
Seeing that the resolve for such environmental chasm lies in the way we consume, we need to take careful inventory of how we lead our lives because the pit of the problem falls severely on our lifestyle. We need to re-asses the way we live and ask ourselves if our existence is much troubling and destructive for the next generation or otherwise.
Humphrey Kariuki Ndegwa is the Chief Executive Officer of Dalbit Petroleum, an energy company that caters to the East African region. Humphrey has several personal blogs, in which he writes about topics that range from the petroleum industry, to African economy and politics, to more globally-relevant ones such as sustainable development and climate change.
Humans as we are, we just cannot deny ourselves this kind of food which often is, through man’s ingenuity, turned into different delectable cuisines—though varied pulls the same kind of appeal to man’s appetite for dishes.
But however irresistible meat is, we should keep in mind that our intake of it should be in moderation, always in moderation if not lesser than our usual intake. Aside from pragmatic reasons like staying fit, avoiding cardiovascular diseases like heart attack and hypertension, being just to animals and respecting their rights to live, there is another valid reason why it is being warned against.
It was identified just recently that too much meat consumption exacerbates the already high levels of carbon concentration in our environment, thereby making global warming more threatening than it already is. Five years ago, the “United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) published a report called “Livestock’s Long Shadow,” which maintained that 18 percent of greenhouse gases were attributable to the raising of animals for food”. The number was indeed sufficient a reason for the consuming public to stop overindulging in foods made and manufactured from meat. However, despite adequate warning and widespread dissemination of such findings, the masses remained laxed, unperturbed even, indulging in every fiber of meat their tongue can grace on, masticating on the flesh of animals which feast on plants, plants which is the main source of oxygen, oxygen that is highly indispensible if we are to maintain prevent global warming.
A high demand for meat means a high demand for raising livestock animals like swine and other herbivores, which pretty much tantamounts to wide areas of grasslands being devoured and never replaced. As such, countries such as Britain “urged its people to lessen meat intake not just to stop global warming but to protect the ecological welfare of developing countries from which the feeds for livestock are acquired”. The impression is, it is not the rich countries like UK who can first feel the setbacks of meat over-consumption but that of developing countries whose natural resources are exhausted just to produce the needs of wealthy countries.
Seeing that the resolve for such environmental chasm lies in the way we consume, we need to take careful inventory of how we lead our lives because the pit of the problem falls severely on our lifestyle. We need to re-asses the way we live and ask ourselves if our existence is much troubling and destructive for the next generation or otherwise.
Humphrey Kariuki Ndegwa is the Chief Executive Officer of Dalbit Petroleum, an energy company that caters to the East African region. Humphrey has several personal blogs, in which he writes about topics that range from the petroleum industry, to African economy and politics, to more globally-relevant ones such as sustainable development and climate change.