Friday, March 1, 2013

Edible Weapon

You don't need a bomb detonator in your hand to kill tens of thousands of people in a single day, a kitchen knife will suffice.

Food, along with water, which are the basic necessity for the survival of a human being can be used as a deadly weapon to control or to create mass destruction. Almost 1,50,000 people die every day and starvation alone accounts for 25,000 lives out it. This number is much larger than AIDS, malaria and TB combined or any terrorist attack till date. If any other country would have been responsible for so much death, countries would be waging wars against each other. But in this case, its not some other country which is responsible for death on such a large scale, but that country itself.

When a country is under an attack by a foreign force, it spends billions of dollars to offset the attack, but in case of starvation why don't governments do something to prevent it? Is it that the world doesn't produce enough to feed everyone? Mahatma Gandhi's answer to this question would be, “The world has enough for everyone's need, but not enough for everyone's greed.”

The world produces enough food to feed everyone, but most of the food gets wasted. This happens mostly when cooked food gets un-utilized/uneaten or when raw food are fed to livestocks.

Food wastage by being un-utilized/uneaten accounts to 300 million tonnes of food while by feeding to livestocks accounts to nearly 760 million tonnes of food.

We can mitigate the wastage of un-utilized/uneaten food by doing weekly auditing of our grocery so that we don't buy new grocery before consuming the previous ones, by only cooking the amount of food that is actually required, by completely eating what is served in our plates and in the case of excess, by distributing excess of food among the needy.

The wastage of food by feeding to livestocks is the largest part of wastage and which poses severe threat to both, human health and environment.

We feed millions of tonnes of grain to factory farmed animals to filter nutrients through their organs and getting very less amount of food (meat) thus we are wasting a large chunk of food which would have been fed directly to the starving people.

In United States itself, some 95% of soybean and 75% of corn is used as livestock feed in order to produce 1 pound of beef from every 16 pound of grains. If this amount of grain would have fed directly to people, we could have ended world hunger by now.

Out of 22% of the global total Greenhouse gas emission which is caused by the agriculture sector, nearly 80% of it is accounted for the livestock production. As the available technologies for reduction of emissions from livestock production would reduce non-carbon dioxide emissions by less than 20%, we advocate a contraction and convergence strategy to reduce consumption of livestock products, mirroring the widely supported strategy proposed for greenhouse-gas emissions in general.

It is estimated that nearly 70% of the former Latin American forest cover has been cleared for grazing of the livestock, which takes 1/3rd or Earth's entire landmass and hence is the major cause of deforestation.

By choosing a completely plant base diet, we can not only safe billions of animals from terrible fate but will also be able to feed millions of starving people in addition to saving environment from a catastrophic destruction.

Philip Wollen have said, "Every morsel of meat we eat is slapping the tear-stained face of a starving child." Stop using your kitchen knife as an instrument for mass murder. The change is in your hand. Give priority to fork over knives.

Think before you eat and save the planet, humans and animal. Go Vegan!

By Harshad Gupta


No comments: