Our EcoCounts Monday Feb 9 workshop looked at what we could take away from trying Veganuary.
According to our calculations, a plant-based AKA vegan diet will cut your emissions by on average over a tonne of CO2 a year compared to average.
Vegan diet per year: 900kg CO2
Average diet per year: 2,146kg
This is great news if you know and love vegan food, but it could otherwise be a bit of a challenge. Since the subject of challenges has come up, then it seems like a great point to lay all our cards on the table, because there is more we can do as well – we could aim to buy local, we could limit ourselves to seasonal produce, and we could even start growing our own.
There are many more reasons why we might want to do this – it is certainly not all about CO2, so if we take on this challenge, how should we approach it? We agreed on a few things which make it easier:
- doing a vegan meal with guests or together with friends
- not worrying about regressing into a red-blooded feeding frenzy – it happens
- taking it slowly and combining it with other things like Dry January and New Year’s Resolutions to give it more impact
- having some culinary successes because they stay in our repertoire
We ran a little quiz as well – answer these questions:
- What is Besan?
- What is nutritional yeast?
- Genghis Khan and the Mongols ate a lot of toasted millet – a kind of grain, milled like oats, also popular with campers and adventurers – why?
- What is Kala namak?
- Aquafaba is what?
Answers:
- Chickpea flour: mix with water & fry like eggs
- A flaky powder that tastes like parmesan cheese – nutty & delicious
- Its low glycemic value compared to oats/rice etc (won’t get a sugar crash)
- Black salt that smells like sulphurous egg yolk!
- The liquid left over after boiling chickpeas. If you beat it for 5 – 10 mins with a mixer, it turns into stiff glossy white peaks like egg white
Just to conclude, if we want to be resilient in future, being able to cook good plant-based meals will be a major asset. The UK currently imports around 50% of its non-animal food, but only 10% meat, dairy and eggs.
The latest UK National Security Assessment highlights a “High” risk around the future supply of meat, dairy and eggs due to global environmental issues. The reason why global factors will impact our UK market is that we will have to pay a lot more to import grains, vegetables and fruit because we grow so little of it ourselves.
The knock-on effect is that farmers in the UK will switch from meat, dairy and eggs to grow the expensive foods, and thus the price of meat, dairy and eggs will go up in turn. The security assessment recommends developing more resilient and varied diets now (that is code for vegan).
Ecotip: Simple, Delicious, Vegan
