Joe Duggan (Reporter)
MEAT consumption in Spain is harming the ozone layer, a nutrition professor says.
In what seems to be a departure from the healthy Mediterranean diet, last year the average Spaniard ate a staggering 51 kilos of meat, which weighs in at tenth highest in the world.
Lluís Serra-Najem claims it would be more effective to consume cereals used to feed livestock, which produce methane and require vast quantities of water and energy.
“If Spain returned to a Mediterranean diet not only would people be healthier, but greenhouse gas emissions associated with food production would fall 72%,” his study concluded.
World wide, the agriculture sector is the main source of methane emissions, much more than transportation. The odor of methane is everywhere in the Asturian countryside. Moreover, livestock kill trees, which would have a positive effect on air quality. But the EU subsidizes livestock this form of green house pollution.
So we eat the cereals and do the farting instead of the cows? We should worry far more about fossil-fuel burning which produces many more (and varied) forms of pollution. Invisible particulates, CO2, nitrous oxides and the wrecking of landscapes in pursuit of them, fracking, mining, oil spills. ALL governments subsidize these measures.
We should control about all activities that ruin environment – agricultural and industrial.