The Hybrid Cheeseburger: I Can Haz Reduced Greenhouse Emissions?
An old friend emailed me the following quotation, which I found pretty fascinating:
“A vegan driving a Hummer produces less greenhouse gases than an omnivore riding a bicycle.” –Howard Lyman
This is especially interesting to me, because my reasons for being vegan mostly have to do with personal choice, not some sort of political imperative, but I do feel a lot of pressure to conserve fuel whenever possible. It’s interesting to know that the choices I made without even intending to lessen my impact have made a much greater difference than the ones I made with that intent.
Anyways, it got me thinking about the lack off effectiveness behind the EPA’s emissions standards, and fuel-efficient vehicles in general. Yes, I know the Prius is awesome and doing very well, but most people still get worse mileage out of them than they would a Geo Metro 20 years ago. There’s something wrong with that picture.
Considering that raising animals for food is responsible for more greenhouse gases than all of the vehicles in the world combined, it makes me wonder why the EPA isn’t setting standards for meat. Think about it, why not a hybrid burger? A little bit of googling actually reveals that I’m not the first person to have thought of this; a company called Solae has even created such a thing.
It makes a lot of sense, really. Sometimes when I go out to lunch with my coworkers, we go to One World Cafe, a local vegetarian restaurant. Being meat eaters, they usually get the meat substitutes and complain about how much they suck. I can’t help but agree with them, honestly, most of them really do. So what is somebody supposed to do, if they’re not vegetarian, but want to lessen the environmental and health impact of meat? I think hybrid meat products could really make a difference there. Just take your Morningstar Farms and Boca Burger products, and add enough real meat to them to get that flavor and texture you’ll never be able to reproduce anyways. Since most of those products aren’t even vegan to begin with, they wouldn’t even lose many shoppers. After all, is it really any different than putting casein and rennet in soy cheese?
Further reading:
http://www.virtualcentre.org/en/library/key_pub/longshad/A0701E00.htm
http://www-news.uchicago.edu/releases/06/060413.diet.shtml
http://www.dissidentvoice.org/2007/05/the-warming-globe-and-us/
