Veg Meal #3: Zandi Baguette

[asterroc]

Modeled after the Black Sheep Baguette, my third vegetarian meal is the Zandi Baguette. You take some favorite bread type and split in half. One side you coat liberally with basalmic vinegarette, the other with a good pesto. The fillings are fresh mozzarella, some lettuce, and avocado slices. The original used actual baguette bread (I forget what type we used), and didn't have the lettuce and avocado but had sun dried tomatoes instead. We had a side of cheesy rice and broccoli. Make sure you get a nice dense and textured bread.

Cost was more reasonable than the meat substitute meals, but still slightly higher than it could've been b/c we made poor choices in how to purchase ingredients. We bought bread rolls individually instead of in a pack, avocado's always expensive, and we could only find fresh mozzarella at the "Mediterranean salad bar". So the price ended up comparable to a meat meal for "just a sandwich." But it's a yummy sandwich! ^_^

Anyone know how the environmental impact of cheese compares to that of eating meat?

Comments

Water use might be a good metric.

[galbinus-caeli.livejournal.com]

Per a dairymen's association

A cow drinks 35 gallons of water a day and produces six gallons of milk. It takes ten pounds of milk to make one pound of cheese. A gallon of milk weighs about eight pounds.

So a cow drinks 35 gallons of water to make 48 pounds of milk, which makes 4.8 pounds of cheese. 35/4.8 means that it takes about 7.25 pounds of water to make a pound of cheese. Lets just round up for simplicity 1 gallon of water makes one pound of cheese.

A cattleman's association website claims that it takes only 435 gallons of water to produce a pound of beef. (Other sources claim higher amounts.)

So it takes 435 times as much water to produces beef as it does to produce cheese.

Just for fun lets look at feed use too. Same two websites.

Beef takes 2.6 pounds of grain per pound of beef (plus unspecified forage). A dairy cow eats 20 pounds of grain and "concentrate feed" (plus forage) to produce the milk for the 4.8 pounds of cheese. So 4.2 pounds of feed per pound of cheese. So about 60% more. Pretty comparable I think, given the mismatch of data sources. I also suspect that first figure is artificially low, it specifies "grain" where the second figure specifies "grain and concentrated feed".

I would think on this basis that cheese wins.

Re: Water use might be a good metric.

[zandperl.livejournal.com]

Ah, good ways to actually measure it. My thought was that cheese is a more renewable resource than beef - that a cow produces many more pounds of cheese in its lifetime than it does beef, and that it produces cheese for a sustained period of time while beef is a one-shot deal. So I am not surprised that cheese wins.

Happen to feel like fishing for how chicken compares to beef? or pork, turkey, or fish?

Re: Water use might be a good metric.

[galbinus-caeli.livejournal.com]

Looks like Chicken water use is 6 gallons per bird so about 1.5 gallons per pound of marketable meat. Feed consumption is 2.5 pounds per pound of body weight, but "dressed" weight is 60% of body weight, so about 4 pounds of feed per pound of marketable chicken flesh.