Today's post is not directly about food, but indirectly related.
This evening, I attended a workshop about how to live more sustainably, presented by Santa Monica based non-profit, Sustainable Works, and led by my good friend Becca. The six week long workshop discusses different topics of sustainability each week. Tonight's was about water.
During the workshop, we talked about water usage at home and how we can cut down by taking shorter showers, turning the water off while brushing our teeth, soaking our dishes instead of keeping the water running, reusing shower and dish water for the lawn, etc.
We also talked about water waste and usage for agriculture. This is where my favorite part of the workshop came in. Becca brought up that it takes over 2400 gallons of water to raise one pound of beef, in comparison of 24 gallons for one pound of lettuce. The class consisted mostly of young community college students. One particular student shared that the bulk of his diet is meat, and he was stunned to learn this information. He also sounded shocked enough to want to make a change and started asking questions. Becca did a great job of encouraging the class to make small steps to change their diet to make big impacts on the environment. Her suggestions (and of course my back up support) to start with one meat free meal a day, then one meat free meal a week were helpful to perhaps encourage a difference in the way these students eat.
There will be an entire workshop session dedicated to the topic of Food and Shopping. Becca will be asking the students to bring in examples of their favorite meal so that we can discuss ways to change them to be more sustainable (and plant based!). I am really looking forward to this particular class and am sure that I will be Becca's unofficial assistant.
If you live in or near Santa Monica and are interested in taking these workshops, check out the schedule at http://www.sustainableworks.org.
that's awesome that agriculture and water was brought up. it seems that it's often over-looked in a lot of "go green" articles and seminars and such. people skip over the issue of farming non-human animals and the pollution and waste it creates, not to mention the amount of water it takes. extra awesome for someone in the class sounding interested in making changes. hooray!
ReplyDelete