How to Be a Conscious Eater

environmentally inefficient source of food (see page 191),

doing so is also a big waste of our collective water and land.

Our excess demand for animal protein sucks up a heck of a lot

of the earth’s natural resources while emitting tons of green-

house gases. The excess also means robbing yourself of the

room in your diet to eat what most people are actually lack-

ing—namely, whole grains and produce. And don’t get me

started on powdery protein supplements. Talk about money

down the drain. Not to mention the taste. Blech.

There can also be long-term risks in consuming too much

protein. Most notably, high-protein diets have been tied to

THE PARIS CLIMATE AGREEMENT

The United States is the only country of the 195 United

Nations members worldwide to withdraw from the Paris

agreement on climate change that took place in 2015.

The UN set a goal to keep the average rise in global

temperatures to no more than 2 degrees Celsius, or 3.6

degrees Fahrenheit, compared with the levels before the

Industrial Revolution. That zone is an irreversible tipping

point we want to collectively head off. It’s the only way

to avoid suffering from the most catastrophic disasters

of global warming—from super-extreme weather events

and unsafe heat and drought to lack of drinking water, and

ultimately, political upheaval and warfare over scarce natural

resources critical to human survival. To fully appreciate how

much of an outlier the United States is on this issue, consider

that only two other nations originally did not join this

commonsense accord, which is backed by heaps of science:

Syria and Nicaragua. The former because of being engulfed

in years of catastrophic civil war and being too busy racking

up human rights violations, the latter because the target in

the agreement wasn’t ambitious enough. (Nicaragua is a

global leader in renewable energy.)

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