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Green Dinner Parties: Getting Techie
The Meat Question
When planning your green dinner party, the menu may be at the heart of your carbon cutting. Despite the big hype around driving Smart Cars and wearing organic cotton, choosing to eat vegetarian even a few days a week may significantly cut your carbon footprint. Meat production is a definite climate changer. Livestock, particularly cattle and pigs, release a serious amount of methane into the atmosphere. According to Reuters, in New Zealand, the 55 million animals the country sustains produce ninety percent of its methane emissions.
Thirty percent of the Earth's ice-free land is devoted to raising livestock for meat according the UN Food and Agriculture Organization. This livestock contributes to a fifth of the world's greenhouse gases, beating out transportation as a contributor to global warming. According to a New York Times article, a Japanese study estimated that 2.2 pounds of beef is responsible for the same amount of carbon dioxide emitted by the average European car during a 155 mile trip.
If you decide to meat at your dinner party, check out the Eat Well Guide for information on sustainable meat in your area.
Eating Locally
With the Slow Food Movement inspiring the world, eating locally has become a more common move when going green. Our How to Guide: Eating Local Food points out that getting local food for your dinner party doesn't just mean buying something from nearby. To really buy locally you must also take into account the processing, production and distribution of the food you choose: "when you buy local food, not only do you know where it came from, you're often buying it from the person or people who grew the food."
Local food will taste fresh to your guests and will do the environment well, too. By reducing packaging, transportation emissions and climate change contributing processing, storage and packaging, local food conserves energy and materials. It also supports the local farming community instead of large scale industrial agriculture. Your neighborhood farmers' market is a great place to find local goods for your dinner party.
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