Should You Really Become Vegan?

On the 6th day of our seminar we had the chance to visit a husky farm and learn about eco-ethics. What made this trip a valuable learning experience is that we visited a "non-commercialized" farm. In many parts of Finland, husky farms will contain 200+ dogs, with improper food, shelter and treatment. The farm we visited was the complete opposite, the owner knew all of the dogs names, fed them properly, and taught us about the dogs before and after we mushed.

As my role a food scientist, this brought up some questions for me as I went about my day. In many ways, I compared the husky farm we visited to ethically sourced farms. These farms treat the fields with care, not adding hormones or pesticides to the product. This is a stark contrast to commercialized farms, who like, mass produced husky farm, don't take care of the products they sell.

This comparison leads many people to become vegan or eat all organic foods, and claim that are living sustainable, environmentally friendly lifestyles. Vegans will often claim that because their is no pesticides and the land is being cared for they are reducing pollution and therefore helping the environment.

To my surprise, in many parts of the world such as Finland it causes more CO2 emissions to be vegan than to eat meat. The amount of fuel from transporting fresh vegetables to parts of the world that do not have fresh produce all year long had a much larger carbon footprint compared to eating meat in your diet.

Therefore, unless you are living in a tropical island destination, being vegan most likely is doing more harm than good. I encourage you to stop and ask yourself when purchasing produce or thinking about becoming vegan, how your food gets from farm to table.