Food Choice and Sustainability: Why Buying Local, Eating Less Meat, and Taking Baby Steps Won’t Work

In eight data-packed chapters, Dr. Oppenlander rants against the current meat-based diet that he finds detrimental to the sustainability issues that face today’s world. The excessive herds of livestock and poultry consume the nutritional plant foods that should go directly into humans. Global pollution and climate change can be directly ascribed to man’s dependence on animal consumption. The seas are being depleted of their aquatic populations, freshwater supplies are threatened, and biodiversity threatened. Animal products are suspect in contributing to the increased incidence of degenerative diseases such as cardiac disorders, cancer, cerebrovascular disease and the much publicized obesity epidemic. Animal protein negatively adds fat, cholesterol, endotoxins and pathogens to the consumer and also causes injurious inflammation to body components. These are contrasted with the positive phytonutrients, the plants’ antioxidant and anti-inflammatory elements. Sustainability demands that the public, along with organizations, as well as government realize and take measures to allay global exhaustion of our resources by making prudent food choices, especially by eliminating meat from the diet. The dynamic arguments offered in this text leave much for the reader to swallow, and chew on while slowly digesting the implications. Through education, change can be initiated.