Salad Days

Ezra Klein has a piece in today’s Washington Post about meat and climate change. He highlights the fact that many top environmental groups, including the Sierra Club and the National Resources Defense Council, basically refuse to talk about diet.

Yet diet is often the easiest way to reduce your carbon footprint:

The pity of it is that compared with cars or appliances or heating your house, eating pasta on a night when you’d otherwise have made fajitas is easy. It doesn’t require a long commute on the bus or the disposable income to trade up to a Prius. It doesn’t mean you have to scrounge for change to buy a carbon offset. In fact, it saves money. It’s healthful. And it can be done immediately. A Montanan who drives 40 miles to work might not have the option to take public transportation. But he or she can probably pull off a veggie stew. A cash-strapped family might not be able buy a new dishwasher. But it might be able to replace meatballs with mac-and-cheese. That is the whole point behind the cheery PB&J Campaign, which reminds that “you can fight global warming by having a PB&J for lunch.” Given that PB&J is delicious, it’s not the world’s most onerous commitment.

I certainly have no ambition to curb my love for bacon. I’ll just point out that eating a juicy salad instead of a hamburger just one night a week will do more for improving the planet than eating a 100% local diet (which in all practicality is nearly impossible to do).