Episode 201

[FOCUS] Vegetarian Diet To Help Our Carbon Problem (go cold turkey?)

Episode Summary: This is a segment from a previous episode in which Leekei and Jenn discussed how a vegetarian diet can help reduce carbon emission

After explaining how carbon emission is linked to meat consumption, Jenn and Leekei went on to discuss the environmental benefits of a vegetarian or flexitarian diet and how to implement gradually small changes in our daily eating habits.

At the end of their conversation, Jenn shared with Leekei an easy recipe to make oat milk quickly at home and with a relatively low cost.

Go here to listen to the full episode

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Visit thecarbonalmanac.org/podcasts and send us a voice message on this episode or any other climate-related ideas and perspectives.

Don’t Take Our Word For It, Look It Up!

You can find out more on page 200, 203 and 207 of the Carbon Almanac and on the website you can tap the footnotes link and type in 243, 099 and 236

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Featuring Carbon Almanac Contributors Jenn Swanson and Leekei Tang

From Langley in British Columbia, Canada, Jenn is a Minister, Coach, Writer and Community Connector, helping people help themselves. 

Leekei is a fashion business founder, a business coach, an international development expert and a podcaster from Paris, France.

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The CarbonSessions Podcast is produced and edited by Leekei Tang, Steve Heatherington and Rob Slater.

Transcript
Speaker:

Hi, I'm leaky.

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Hi, I'm Jen, what are

your thoughts right now?

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What are we talking about now?

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We are going to talk about how

becoming vegetarian or vegan

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can help the carbon problem.

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Oh, you say something that made me laugh.

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maybe you can say that again.

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I said, right, right off the bat,

you don't have to go cold Turkey.

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And you don't have to become vegetarian

or vegan to make a difference.

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You can just start a little bit at a

time, but what is the problem with meat?

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Well, we have.

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Basically three kinds of meat that

are part of the food industry.

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I mean, there's lots of different kinds

of meat, but, but some of the biggest

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defenders are cows and pigs and poultry.

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And, uh, I think, uh,

sheep may be a little bit.

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Less.

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So they take an awful lot of, uh,

resources to feed mm-hmm and then

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cows, particularly their digestive

system produces methane, which

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is a greenhouse gas, which is far

more potent than carbon dioxide.

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And then their manure, their poop emits.

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Additional greenhouse gases

and they take a ton of land.

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So there are so many reasons why

cows, although I think cows are

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fantastic creatures and I love cows

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I don't wanna eat them

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you don't want to eat because it

takes a lot of land to, uh, for

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them to live and because they poop.

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Default well, every creature does that.

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The default is even worse than.

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Regular.

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Yeah.

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Well, and just some of the ways there

are some humane treatment of, of

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animals out there, but the factory

farming is a problem in multiple ways.

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There's just a lot of things that

mean that, you know, choosing food

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that comes from a cow can be a choice

that isn't the best for the planet.

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So, so.

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We're talking about meat,

but also there is, right?

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Yeah.

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And I love cheese.

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I'm not, you know, I, I can't, it doesn't

love me, so I can't eat very much of it.

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And most of the time in our house,

we are major for the majority.

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We are plant based.

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Although we call ourselves flexitarians

because , we have one vegan, we

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have one vegetarian and we have a

couple who are sort of flex on that.

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And by that, you know, we bought

it, had a Turkey at our Easter.

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Turkey dinner, but we also had

vegetarian and vegan options.

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We don't buy milk.

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We use oat milk.

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We use plant based milk.

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We do other things.

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Um, but it's not, we're not a

hundred percent in our family either.

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So we try to be the majority of

the time, try to be plant based

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mm-hmm and once in a while, yeah.

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Who doesn't enjoy, you know, having.

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A piece of steak or having something else.

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So it's a little bit of a dance, I think.

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Uh, but our attempt is to reduce the

carbon footprint as much as possible and

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not get things that will damage the plant.

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Yeah.

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I think I've read somewhere that at

the world scale, uh, we are eating

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more and more meat as compared to

some time ago that as a population

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gets richer, have more money.

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We are spending more money on.

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Meat and, um, and we want people

to be rich and have more resources,

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but it means that we are eating more

meat well, and, and it's not even

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just the, the consumption of it.

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It's the production of it.

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Yeah.

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So, you know, a chicken breast, one

chicken breast, I read takes 735

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liters of water to produce really.

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That's a lot of water.

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Mm-hmm and that's a lot of

water that'll fill bathtubs.

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Yeah.

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You know, four, four and a half times.

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So that's a lot of water and what's

happened is that some of the ways that

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chickens are, are treated are just.

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. I mean, I can't even , I don't think I've

had chicken in a really long time and I

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like chicken, you know, mm-hmm but it's

just the thought of how they're produced.

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That's a bit hard to take.

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So

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LYNN: You've been listening to Karbon

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