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Kathy Freston Talks Skipping The Chicken

Written by Vegetarian Star on Friday, April 3rd, 2009 in Authors, Flexitarian.

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Author Kathy Freston, the lovely lady who inspired Oprah Winfrey to do 21 days of vegan, recently blogged at the Huffington Post on the statistics of the effects going vegetarian has on the environment.

Fun facts to take with you to the party tonight:

If everyone went vegetarian just for one day, the U.S. would save:
100 billion gallons of water, enough to supply all the homes in New England for almost 4 months

1.5 billion pounds of crops otherwise fed to livestock, enough to feed the state of New Mexico for more than a year

70 million gallons of gas–enough to fuel all the cars of Canada and Mexico combined with plenty to spare

If everyone went vegetarian just for one day, the U.S. would prevent:
Greenhouse gas emissions equivalent to 1.2 million tons of CO2, as much as produced by all of France

3 million tons of soil erosion and $70 million in resulting economic damages

But Kathy’s favorite statistic of all is this:

“According to Environmental Defense, if every American skipped one meal of chicken per week and substituted vegetarian foods instead, the carbon dioxide savings would be the same as taking more than half a million cars off of U.S. roads.”

Vegetarians normally want others to refrain from meat altogether, forgetting the improvements that can occur when omnivores “meat” them halfway. A flexitarian diet not only holds bonuses to the dieter, but every living thing on the planet.

So what are you waiting for, potential flexitarians? Don’t be a chicken, put down that chicken!

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Lessmeatarian Mark Bittman Cares If Pigs Were Raised In Prison

Written by Vegetarian Star on Tuesday, March 3rd, 2009 in Authors, Flexitarian.

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Food writer and New York Times columnist Mark Bittman once said that “if pigs were raised in prison”, he “wouldn’t care as long as they tasted good.”

Ten years later, he tells what is seemingly a more caring storing about animal welfare.

“I don’t know if that means they’re subhuman or just different than humans, but there’s certainly no reason to mistreat them as badly as we do,” he told Josh Hardow and Michael Rau at the Library Journal.

“I guess if you’re going to kill them and eat them, you’re mistreating them to some extent anyway, but there are degrees of that.”

One has to question some of his motives for better animal welfare, as he added that if anything would affect the taste of meat, it would be the industry’s disregard for both animals and the environment through their mass production methods of bringing it to the supermarket.

But you must give him credit, as he’s including fewer and fewer meat meals in both his personal diet and his cookbooks.

While by no means a vegetarian (yet), in his newest book, Food Matters: A Guide to Conscious Eating with More Than 75 Recipes, he’s advocated switching to a more plant based diet.

It all started while he was revising one of his How To Cook Everything books (one of which is vegetarian) in 2005-2006. “If I’m eating less meat, and I think everybody should be eating less meat, maybe I don’t need 600 or 700 recipes including meat,” he said of his revisions.

While going all the way is ideal, part time vegetarians or flexitarians still have much to gain in terms of reducing food costs and improving health, not to mention lessening environmental impact and animal suffering.

And Bittman seems to agree.

“It was going to be called The Food Matters Cookbook, but if I could get people using the word “lessmeatarian,” I’d be ecstatic.

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Anne Hathaway’s A Quitter-Of Meat And Fish, That Is

Written by Vegetarian Star on Thursday, October 2nd, 2008 in Actresses, Flexitarian.

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Anne Hathaway is probably one of the most beautiful actresses in Hollywood and adored by both men and women. And let’s face it; she has that wholesome appearance to her-how much deviance could a diary writing Princess get into?

She’s been known for awhile as one of those flexitarians-people who have on again, off again relationships with eating meat. After the breakup of her convicted charity frauding ex-boyfriend, Raffaello Follieri, she’s back on again with vegetarianism.

On a recent “David Letterman Show”, she said she’s quit smoking and eating meat and fish.

‘When I was quitting smoking I thought ‘Ok this is probably a good time to make some changes’, so I quit drinking and I quit meat and fish – and fun,'” she said.

She also mentioned that she is “vaguely vegan.”

We’re not sure how “vague” her veganess is, but maybe she’s the new female Tobey Maguire.

via Daily Mail

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