Week 2

My 2nd week of being a veggie head went surprisingly unwell. Well not totally, in the begging of the week I went to the grocery store with my family to pick out some good veggies I enjoy. I ended up getting some corn, cauliflower, snap peas, potatoes, and bell peppers. This was so I could be prepared for the upcoming week, and make sure that I would not slip up.

For the most part, my mother makes my food, so I eat what she makes. Which has made my life a bit difficult since I know barely know how to cook. One day she was working and ended up getting dinner with my stepdad instead (which was a bummer.) But this ended up putting my expertise cooking skills to the test. I took out my veggies and made something happen. I made myself a nice yummy dinner. It does not really look that great in a photo if I am being honest, but I never remember to take a photo before I start eating. So this is what it looked like after I had a bowl (I also put an over easy egg on top of this.) So at the moment I was doing good and actually felt prepared for the upcoming days.

The upcoming days defeated me, and my carnivores habits took over. I was at dinner with family from out of town and we were going out to eat Thai food. I felt like being basic and ordered Pad Thai, and if you have had that before with chicken, you know it tastes amazing. So I broke and ordered the Pad Thai with chicken. It was delicious I was extremely satisfying. Although it was a little less satisfying when my sister ordered the same thing as me, with tofu, she wasted all of the tofu because she did not enjoy it. Again a photo will be posted below, and it does not look good just FYI because I forgot to take a photo before I started eating.

2) Calculate the impact of your behavior change. How many resources (water, trees, carbon, greenhouse gases, food, plastic, etc.) do you save by doing this behavior daily? Weekly? How many resources will you save after 30 days? Yearly?
*If you want to know how much you save, you need to find out how much you used before you started this behavior/habit.
Before this project started, I ate meat about 5 out of 7 days of the week. Which is a lot of meat, also that's a lot of carbon and water that are being used up, just for me time to enjoy my meal. For instance, if I were to go vegetarian fully for a year I would save so much water. I would approximately save 62,486 gallons of water annually (1). That is insane, on a global scale that could reduce the water drought situation. One person would save that much water, so how much would the city of Seattle save? Well the city of Seattle has roughly 724,745 of a population size, so 724,745 x 62,486= 45,286,416,070 gallons. We would save 45,286,416,070 gallons of Water! We have T 326 million trillion gallons of water on Earth (2).

For this month I am reducing a lot, I am reducing carbon, animals being killed, and pounds of meat I am not eating. For this month I would not have eaten 17 animals, I would save 134 lbs of carbon, and 16 pounds of meat not eaten (3). For someone who has been vegetarian for a year they would save 1,609 lbs of carbon. To put this into perspective one gallon of gasoline is used for a car is 20lbs of carbon, so for one month I would be saving over 5 gallons of gasoline, and for one year I would save about 80 gallons of gasoline (4).

Going back to Seattle, if everyone went vegetarian for a year we would save 57,979,600 gallons of carbon dioxide. This would greatly reduce our carbon being released into the ozone and would reduce global warming as well.


This amount did surprise me. For 17 years I have been eating meat religiously and have not really thought about the impact I have made on the environment. But now that I know how much carbon and water I have been saving it blows my mind. Now that I know this information I feel split on giving up meat fully or saving the place I live. It sounds like a simple choice but maybe after this project, I will just reduce my meat-eating habit.

5) Considers where this data/information came from. Is it reliable? What are the gaps or limitations to this data? *Cog Skill: Interpreting Data/Info


All of my links did not come from the government and are not 100% official. So this could all be false information I am being fed and you are being fed. I am hoping this is all good information. On top of that when I calculated how much carbon I was saving in a month this could be inaccurate because I am only being a vegetarin for 5 out of 7 days. So I am not fully saving that much carbon, I am saving less than that. But to put into an easier perspective I used a month.

1.http://www.onegreenplanet.org/animalsandnature/eat-for-the-planet-meat-and-the-environment/

2.http://coolcosmos.ipac.caltech.edu/ask/67-How-much-water-does-Earth-have-

3.http://vegetariancalculator.com/

4.https://www.chegg.com/homework-help/much-co2-produced-driving-100-miles-drying-load-clothes-watc-chapter-9-problem-13p-solution-9781133710844-exc