Week 4

This week was the biggest fail week for me. I can easily say that I gave up. It was the first week of my winter break and I was just snacking on everything. Uber eats was my best friend at 2 am when I was hungry and really craving a McChicken from McDonald's. So I gave in 3 out of the 5 times that I wanted it. I definitely will not be continuing this habit because I wouldn't be able to do it even if I really pushed myself. I guess I hope that what I was doing changed my environmental impact but because of the fact that I gave up the 2 weeks over break I don't think that I made any change. According to 6 Factors That Influence our behavior(1) "You must genuinely want to change your behavior" with this being said I don't think I was in the mindset of wanting to change. I purely made this change for this project and I wholeheartedly do not believe that I would have tried to change this habit.

Week 3

I am starting to hate this project. I am starting to just give up on it. It's so hard to do this because I constantly have been going around to different family just to spend time with them and they had very little vegetarian options so I would have to end up breaking and eating a cheeseburger. Then the next day I ate another burger because they are so great but I'm really conflicted on wanting to stop more and more. But I will keep going and keep trying.  If this project were to end today I would not continue but I feel like it is something that I would have to change if I did choose to continue. I would possibly go from 5 days of vegetarianism to 3 days max then begin to get used to that. My motivation is to keep pushing myself because I'm going to come across a lot of things that I don't enjoy but I have to learn to keep going with it rather than giving up. Like I said above I have not been doing this on a regular base. I think the hardest part is that I eat and snack a lot and sometimes it doesn't even cross my mind about what I am eating.

After reading the article I feel a lot better about breaking this change that I am supposed to be continuing. According to that article(1) on average it takes 66 days to break a habit and eating meat is one of my habits. I think that being a vegetarian has definitely caused me to be more conscious of what I am eating and it has made me question more about where the meat is coming from. I think that people need to take in consideration about how many meals they eat a day and if they are like me being a heavy snacker they should start at maybe 3 days just to get used to the reduction of meat in your diet. Knowing the amount of space that is needed for cows is crazy! By themselves they take up a large portion of the U.S.A(2).

1.) https://docs.google.com/document/d/1BKF8f_-HXrLnVvWLN72AAbwHM5eTivL0AqfLE1xsx68/edit

2.) https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2018-us-land-use/?fbclid=IwAR2sY87CdO9iLhiKCbkFJcRVrcOYOWHM8mW_AGex1V7nMpnbeioQw1ieUD8

Week 2

This week I have failed. I never thought it would be so hard to cut meat out of my life but it is! Last week was good but then I got sick! I wanted things like chicken noodle soup or congee which is like a rice soup that has a chicken base to it. Because I was sick I didn't want to eat anything that seemed heavy to me so I decided to go with congee. I didn't want anything else so I had to break it. But that was the only time I did. Other than that I was eating waffles, rice, and eggs. This was also the first weekend of my project and maybe you recall I have not cut meat out of my diet on the weekends. I didn't realize this until midway through Saturday but then I happily indulged myself in carne asada fries. When I was eating it I felt bad because I really questioned things like "where did this come from" and "am I actually achieving the point of this project if I'm not cutting meat out all the way?" But this won't change me eating meat on the weekend it's just making me question more things. I know that with the next few weeks I will face similar challenges but I just need to find a way to preserve through them and of course I will have some fallbacks but I will just need to bounce back!

So my family mainly goes to Safeway to get our meats and I decided to go more in depth about where their meat comes from. Specifically their beef because that's what we normally get. So I looked it up and Safeway(1) specifically stated that they got it from a farm called Aspen Ridge. I personally have never heard of this place so I looked it up and found out that it is nowhere local! I went to their personal website(2) and I personally couldn't find on their page anywhere where it stated where they are located but at the bottom it gives a zip code that I went to google looked up the area code and found out Aspen Ridge Natural Beef is located in Colorado! Knowing this I went to google and typed in "How much gas would I need to drive from Washington to Colorado" they couldn't give me a straight answer so I went to AAA (3) and put in the car that my family drives because that was just the easiest for me. So according to their website(3) with all of my input about my car it would take 45.19 gallons of gas to get from here to there! Imagine how much gas it would be to drive a semi truck! When looking up how much CO2 is released I found that with 1 gallon of gas (which averagely weighs 6.3 pounds) releases 20 pounds of CO2(4)!  So in my family Subaru to get to Colorado we would be releasing 284.69700 pounds of CO2. Once again imagine how much a truck would release! Imagine how many trucks full of beef is needed to be shipped for the number of people that there are that buy beef from Safeway. If people were to know this they would hopefully change where they get their beef from. I defiantly will be informing my mom about this fact. What's even crazier is that that's not the only CO2 that is being released in the process of getting our beef here! We all know the animals (including yourself) fart. According to PennState Extention(5) 20% of the methane in the world is released by cows!





1.) “Beef.” Safeway, www.safeway.ca/whats-in-store/meat-and-seafood/beef 
2.)  “Home.” Aspen Ridge Beef, aspenridgebeef.com/.
3.) “AAA GAS COST CALCULATOR.” AAA Gas Prices, gasprices.aaa.com/aaa-gas-cost-calculator/.
4.) Fuel Economy, www.fueleconomy.gov/feg/contentIncludes/co2_inc.htm.
5.) https://extension.psu.edu/carbon-methane-emissions-and-the-dairy-cow 

Week 1

This week has been very interesting for me. I had forgotten the I begged my mom on Sunday to get me honey ham from the store so that I could make lunches for school. So on Monday when I came to class and was told that I was going to have to start this project that day I was heartbroken because I couldn't eat my honey ham. The second I got home I made myself a sandwich while telling myself that it was ok to break it that one day because I couldn't let my moms money go to waste. I put my mayo on the bread and cut myself some cheese and lettuce then went back to the fridge to get the ham AND IT WAS GONE! My sister and mother ate it all! In 2 days! I was so upset and on top of that I could just throw away the halfway made sandwich that I had already made so I had to eat lettuce and cheese. It was a sad day for me. The rest of the week went by smoothly but I did question why I couldn't eat the meat the was already in my house and pre-bought.

Currently, I would consider myself a heavy meat eater meaning that I eat meat or a meat based product with every meal. According to this website by Brad Plumer(1) being a heavy meat eater I produce about 15.8 pounds of CO2 per day but with going vegetarian I would cut back the amount of CO2 to 8.4 pounds of CO2 by being vegan it would reduce the amount of CO2 to 6.4 pounds. Being vegan or vegetarian already helps the planet in a major way. Just meat and dairy alone cause 60% of the greenhouse gases that come from agriculture(2) alone. So by taking meat and dairy out of your life you would be contributing to the amount of methane that is being produced.

Before this I have never had an urge to want to cut meat out of my life. I didn't really look at the environmental impact that it was more of eating it because I liked it and everyone else in my family ate it. I have known that there was a reason that our earth was dying but I have basically just relied on scientist to figure it out then tell us that we needed to not eat meat. I was also in the mindset that I should just eat it because it was already in front of me and it would be weird not to eat it if it has already been cooked.

1.)Plumer, Brad. “Going Vegetarian Can Cut Your Food Carbon Footprint in Half.” Vox.com, Vox Media, 13 June 2016, www.vox.com/2014/7/2/5865109/study-going-vegetarian-could-cut-your-food-carbon-footprint-in-half.

Petter, Olivia. “Going Vegan Is 'Single Biggest Way' to Reduce Our Impact on the Planet, Study Finds.” The Independent, Independent Digital News and Media, 29 Aug. 2018, www.independent.co.uk/life-style/health-and-families/veganism-environmental-impact-planet-reduced-plant-based-diet-humans-study-a8378631.html.

2.) Petter, Olivia. “Going Vegan Is 'Single Biggest Way' to Reduce Our Impact on the Planet, Study Finds.” The Independent, Independent Digital News and Media, 29 Aug. 2018, www.independent.co.uk/life-style/health-and-families/veganism-environmental-impact-planet-reduced-plant-based-diet-humans-study-a8378631.html.