Jay
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Council members cannot be mandated to eat vegan meals, however they may accept a friendly challenge. Like other Vancouverites, they may also be swayed by communications and education about the ecological footprint impacts of various dietary choices
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We should be encouraging agroecosystems as well as human diets based on entirely pasture-raised ruminant animals such as cows, sheep and goats for their dairy and meat products. They are naturally equipped to digest grass, which is arguably the only renewable agricultural resource. Grass-fed animals ACTUALLY BUILD SOIL rather than deplete it. Additional nutrition should be derived from perennial plantings of nuts and fruits. Small, controlled harvests from the sea may be sustainable, depending on the scale of demand. A small amount of market-scale gardening for vegetables, close to the point of consumption, is also potentially sustainable, as long as great effort is put into making sure that what is taken from the soil is returned in the form of mature compost. That means not flushing it down the toilet, which besides wasting soil nutrients and organic matter and ruining any chance of true "zero waste" also contaminates vast quantities of potable water, wastes energy, and contributes to ecological damage when it is finally released into the ocean or applied agriculturally along with toxic heavy metals and hospital waste, as well as personal pharmaceuticals, all of which are also flushed away and collected in the most insane invention of civilization, the all-in-one sewage collection and treatment system.
A vegan diet is radically destructive to the environment, the human body, and to society. Viz. eating only from plant sources requires massive topsoil depletion and dependence of fossil fuel-driven agriculture. It also means massive displacement of other forms of life for the sake of human sustenance. Eg, the entire North American prairie ecosystem has now been totally colonized (and is also being destroyed) by humans growing corn, wheat, and other grains, leaving no room for the vast biodiversity that used to inhabit that ecosystem; rainforests cut for soybeans and corn, destroying the habitat for countless species. Without animals, including humans, incorporated into agricultural production systems, there is NO RENEWABLE SOURCE OF SOIL FERTILITY and soil CAN NOT BE SUSTAINED but is instead mined of nutrients and other life giving properties, turning it from a sink for atmospheric carbon into a source, among other catastrophic consequences. Our current agricultural paradigm of monocropped annual grains, from which a vegan diet is mostly derived, IS NOT SUSTAINABLE and is actively destructive to entire ecosystems, up to and including the very soil from which all terrestrial life comes.
In terms of human health, there are few if any plant sources for a number of essential nutrients including saturated fats, some vitamins, and complete proteins. They can only be supplied by animal products.
Socially: just ask the 2% (down from more than 30% 60 or 70 years ago) of the Canadian and US populations who still consider themselves farm folk how their communities are doing. Or ask peasants and/or wage slaves in the third-world "agricultural debtor nations"/"banana republics" who provide your out-of-season fruit, chocolate, sugar, coffee, tea, rice, etc, how they are doing. They aren't happy, and a vegan diet is doing nothing to solve their problems; it's probably worsening them.
Read the book called "The Vegetarian Myth," by Lierre Keith. It's well worth it.
