After working til 3 yesterday, I spent the rest of the rainy day reading The Kind Diet by Alicia Silverstone.

I’ve heard rave reviews about it and was ecstatic when I learned Mark’s Mom had ordered it for herself. I haven’t gotten too far in yet but its already reminded me why I gave up meat. Just look at some of these stats:

• “42% of the fresh water available to Americans is used for agriculture. It takes 441 gallons of water to produce 1 pound of beef, according to the Cattleman’s Association. Dr. Georg Borgstrom, the Chair of the Food Science & Human Nutrition Dept. at Michigan State University, thinks it’s more like 2,500 gallons. One 16-ounce steak uses the amount of water you need for 6 months of showers!“
• “The poo, fertilizers, and other sludge from the meat industry not only gets into the soil, but also leaches into nearby rivers and water tables. One farm in Utah with 500,000 pigs produces more fecal matter than the 1.5 million inhabitants of Manhattan.”
• Methane (one of the gases – like CO2 – that traps heat in the atmosphere, therefore contributing to global warming) contributed by livestock accounts for 19 percent of the total global methane emissions. This is more than the amount produced by landfills and waste treatment plants.
• Even though corn seems to be in all our food nowadays (just ask Corn Free Cass!), only roughly 8 percent of corn grown is used for human food use in the U.S. and more than 50 percent is eaten by animals.
• Cattle grazing is the number one factor in the destruction of the rain forest, and we’re losing 2.4 acres of it per second. Rain forest used to cover 14 percent of the Earth, but now it only covers 6 percent.

Alicia has a website too – it’s called The Kind Life.

Sorry for posting such wordiness but I always forget stats like these when people ask me why I gave up meat. Now I have them easily documented

Can’t imagine ever giving up meat? Just go meatless one day a week! You’ll reduce your carbon footprint and possibly improve your health. There’s a whole non profit initiative called Meatless Monday about this if you are interested.

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Later in the day I got a call from my sister in law to see if I wanted to join her for a spin class at her gym. Although we’ve been on shaky terms lately, I had been a little down all day about not getting a call from a job prospect I was expecting to hear from and figured working out would take my mind off it.

Good idea. After a tough 45 minutes of cycling to loud music in a dark room, the only thing I was thinking about was taking a shower.

And, since this is a food blog, let me post my amazing bowl of oats from yesterday morning:

In the bowl:

• Almond milk
• 1/2 mashed banana
• Sunland cranberry vanilla pb
• Cranberries/raisins
• Sliced almonds
• Flax
• Coconut

Now that I’ve finally gotten a day off, I’m gonna work out and then spend some much needed time with the boyfriend.

Questions:

1. Do you ever use your blog to remember or document anything?

2. What’s your favorite class to take at the gym?

3. What do you do to take your mind off things?