While choosing local and seasonal are helpful for sustainability, eating plants is the most ethical choice that you can make because it adds a moral dimension of refusing to use animals as food.

Buying food produced locally reduces greenhouse gases, but the difference is less than the reduction in greenhouse gases made by switching to a fully plant-based diet.

Seasonal eating reduces the distance that food travels. Plus, it's healthy! Broccoli grown in season has 50% more vitamin C compared to broccoli grown out of season.* 

*Wunderlich, S. M., Feldman, C., Kane, S., & Hazhin, T. (2008). Nutritional quality of organic, conventional, and seasonally grown broccoli using vitamin C as a marker. International journal of food sciences and nutrition, 59(1), 34–45. https://doi.org/10.1080/09637480701453637

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If you can bear to watch, many people find films such as Earthlings or Dominion a powerful experience which gives them greater insight into how animals are used and exploited by humans, simply because we like the taste and convenience of eating them. 

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From an environmental perspective, any plant-based milk is a better choice than milk from an animal. (Yes, even almond milk, which uses more than 1.5x less water per litre of production than milk from a cow). When assessing a multitude of factors, oat milk has the lowest, overall, environmental impact of any plant-based milk - and it's deliciously creamy - making it a great option for coffee! 

Aside from environmental concerns, from an ethical perspective, there is a common misconception that (some) dairy cows live a happy life. Unfortunately this is a misconception as dairy cows start by being milked and end up as meat. As they haven’t been bred for meat production, they are usually turned into low grade products such as mince.

Due to the enormous toll continuous milking takes on their bodies, the lifespan of a dairy cow is reduced from a possible 20 years to as little as four or five, with only a few surviving past the age of seven. This is the equivalent of someone who could potentially live to 80, being so broken through overwork, that they are shot for being economically worthless at just 16 or 20 years old. In addition to this, the vast majority of calves that are born as part of the milk production cycle are also killed, with 300,000 or more male calves (known as bobby calves) butchered in Australia every year at just five days old. 

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Both caged and cage-free hens spend their entire lives indoors. "Cage-free" hens share just 1 square metre of space with 14 other hens (each hen has about the same amount of space as a single sheet of A4 paper).

Despite adhering to organic and free-range standards, hens bred for high egg production sadly endure a life of exhaustion, resulting in a considerably abbreviated lifespan. The egg industry also keeps quiet the vast numbers of unwanted male chicks, which are hatched every year and ground up, alive, on their first day of life. 

The good news for anyone looking to make an ethical change to their diet is that almost any meal you can think of has a delicious vegan alternative. There are many egg replacers available for baking (ground flaxseed is often used), but even dishes that are entirely based on eggs, like scrambled eggs or omelettes, can be created by following recipes which are widely available online. Many vegans invest in a "secret ingredient" called Kala Namak, or black salt, which gives a distinctive egg-like taste to anything it's mixed with.  

Source: RSPCA knowledgebase

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Vegan Australia was one of the groups who successfully lobbied against the introduction of a "Certified Humane" trade mark, which was rejected by the ACCC in 2019, stating that the standards underpinning the trade mark are, "likely to be inconsistent with reasonable Australian consumers' expectations of humane food production."

In countries where this standard is used, pregnant and newly nursing female pigs are allowed to be crammed into crates 1.8 metres by 2.4 metres in size, continuously,  for more than 4 weeks (a pregnant sow may be 0.5 metre wide by 2 metres long).

"Free-range" has no current legal definition. According to Choice, some free range standards for chickens allow for them to be confined in sheds until they're fully feathered (around 6 weeks of age - the same age at which they may be slaughtered), packed in at stocking densities of up to 15 birds per square metre, under almost unrestricted (i.e. continuous) artificial lighting. While Australian Certified Organic standards allow for chickens to have access to the outside, inside the shed, chickens can be stocked at 12 birds per square metre, with artificial lighting blazing for 16 hours per day.

The only truly "humane" labelling is the Vegan Australia Certified label, which you can see on items such as Nuttelex and Vegemite.

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From fish welfare concerns (yes, fish can feel pain), to environmental considerations, to health outcomes, to taste, algae oil is a better option then either eating fish or taking fish oil tablets. 

Fish get their omega 3 oils from feeding on algae - we can also get it directly from the source! Seek out oils that contain both DHA (omega-3 docosahexaenoic acid) and EPA (omega-3 eicosapentaenoic acid).

As fish are higher on the food chain than micro-algae, their flesh contains many contaminants which, if consumed, can adversely affect human health. 

From an environmental perspective, fish oil is usually made from fish caught using unsustainable mass-scale fishing methods. One third of the world's "assessed fisheries" are currently fished beyond their biological limits. 

Sources: CSIRO Sustainable production of omega 3 oils and World Wilflife Organisation: Overfishing

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