Earth Equity News

One Less Burger, One Safer Planet. Commentary by Derrick Z. Jackson, Boston Globe, April 15, 2008. "When the candidates tell us to stay out of McDonald's, then we will know their light bulbs are on. The end of timid politics is when they say that with the planet being at stake, you must eat less steak. With fatal food riots in poor nations, and with China rapidly approaching Western levels of consumption, we in the obese United States must redefine what constitutes, to borrow from McDonald's, a 'happy meal'... The 2008 State of the World report from the Worldwatch Institute calls meat and seafood 'the global diet's most costly ingredients.' A huge problem in wealthy nations is that even when people cut down or give up meat for health reasons, they often substitute increasingly endangered fish near the top of the oceanic food chain such as swordfish, tuna, or shark or create a demand for shrimp and salmon that overwhelms the environments they are being raised in... In 1928, the Republican Party promised a chicken in every pot. In a 1984 Democratic presidential debate, Walter Mondale chided Gary Hart's 'new ideas' by asking, 'Where's the beef?' The next president needs to put meat on the bones of environmental policy, by telling us to eat less of it."