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Can PB&J save us?

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As I was browsing the internet today I came across the this website: www.pbjcampaign.org

 


According to the website:

"The
PB&J Campaign is an effort of private citizens concerned about
the environment. We've been a little surprised and amused by
speculation that the PB&J Campaign is a front for the National
Peanut Board, animal rights groups, or even Smuckers. To be clear, the
PB&J Campaign is not funded or coordinated by any business or
advocacy organizations. We are proud to be a project of Social and
Environmental Entrepreneurs
. "

 

And this is how it works:

Reduce the Impact of
Agriculture

Everything we eat comes from
plants, whether we eat the
plants directly or through an animal intermediary. The basic problem is
that
animals are inefficient at converting plants into meat, milk, and eggs.
Relatively
little of what they eat ends up in what you eat because animals use
most of their food
to keep them alive – to fuel their muscles so they can stand up and
walk
around, to keep their hearts beating, to keep their brains working.

That cow, pig, or chicken has
to eat a lot more protein,
carbohydrates, and other nutrients than it yields in meat, eggs, or
milk. The
result is that it takes several pounds of corn and soy to produce one
pound of
beef, or one pound of eggs, one pound of milk, etc. This holds true
even if
we’re measuring calories or protein; it takes several times the
calories or
protein in livestock feed to produce the calories or protein
we get from the meat, eggs, or milk.

If we're wasting livestock
feed, we're also wasting what it takes to grow that feed. This includes
inputs like
fossil fuels (with all the emissions they produce) to run
machinery, to pump water for irrigation, for transportation, and to
produce
the pesticides and fertilizers. Then there’s the land (= cleared
rainforest and
grasslands) for growing the crops, along with fertilizers (which
produce their own greenhouse gas emissions) and pesticides.

Here's a diagram of the flow
of inputs through our human ecosystem. The
inefficiency of transferring energy from step to step
means each step in the food chain requires a relatively big layer of
inputs to support it. So each step you add multiplies the inputs you
need at the
very bottom (water, land, fertilizer, chemicals).

 


Overall, this is an awesome idea. Every little bit helps! And I think I will go back to my elementary school days and start eating PB&J everyday!

 

What about you? 

 

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Comments

This is a cute campaign and also a good idea to get young children started on caring about the planet, and I am sure they would not mind eating a lot of PB&J!