Are you an environmentalist?

If you would like to join Public Citizen, go to citizen.org.

One way to help the environment is to eat more vegetarian meals, like spaghetti-with-vegetables instead of spaghetti-with-meat-sauce. It takes 16 pounds of grain to make one pound of beef. Farm animals are fed grain, and they use most of it just to maintain themselves, and so raising cows, pigs, or chickens is an inefficient way of producing food.

In America, 70% of the grain grown is fed to farm animals. Producing all that grain consumes water, and it also consumes gasoline for farm equipment.

Some people start out by not-eating beef or pork. Then at a later point, they may stop eating chicken and fish as well, to become vegetarians.

At VegSource.com, you can get vegetarian recipes and post on message-boards for people interested in vegetarianism.

At factoryfarming.com, you can read about factory farming.

Here is what Time Magazine says about meat as an environmental problem (July 15, 2002 issue, pg. 55):

"In terms of caloric content, the grain consumed by American livestock could feed 800 million people-and, if exported, would boost the U.S. trade balance by $80 billion a year. Grain-fed livestock consume 100,000 liters of water for every kilogram of food they produce, compared with 2,000 liters for soybeans. Animal protein also demands tremendous expenditures of fossil-fuel energy - eight times as much as for a comparable amount of plant protein. Put another way, says (Cornell ecologist David) Pimentel, the average omnivore diet burns the equivalent of a gallon of gas per day - twice what it takes to produce a vegan diet. And the U.S. livestock population-cattle, chickens, turkeys, lambs, pigs and the rest-consumes five times as much grain as the human population. But then there are 7 billion of them; they outnumber us by 25 to 1."

You can email me about these subjects or about "Buffy Stories:"

To reduce spam, I'm not writing my email address in the usual way, but if you want to copy-and-paste,
the first part is: EricJaffaPlace
and the second part is: yahoo.com