Vegetarian Winter Salads Made Easy

Eating locally grown foods is one of the most sustainable ways you can feed yourself and you get bonus points if the ingredients don't need to be cooked.  In the summer it is easy to make salads but this may seem more challenging in the winter and with supermarkets supplying all type of fruit and veg all year round it can also be difficult to know what is is season and what has flown halfway round the world to grace your dinner plate.  Help is at hand.  Below is a list of salad friendly vegetables and fruits that are in season in winter and with so many great winter veggies to choose from you won't miss tomatoes, avocado and cucumber etc.  One point of note though, even if you are buying from this list do check where the produce is from as supermarkets will still often import from far away if it best suits them.

Why going vegan won't save the world ...

... but not wasting food, changing what meat we eat and altering our lifestyles will certainly help.

Some proponents of a vegan lifestyle state that if the world's population were to turn vegan we would save the world from climate change and cite the following reasons why they believe this is the case:

1. Livestock farming (especially for beef) produces methane (a greenhouse gas) via the natural digestive process of the animals ie cow farts. Methane is 20 times more potent as a greenhouse gas than CO₂.

2. Areas of rainforest are being felled at an alarming rate with the cleared land used for cattle farming.  The forests previously would have absorbed CO₂ and when the soil is cultivated before being turned to pasture, it releases nitrous oxide and methane that are both stored in the soil. Nitrous oxide is 300 times more potent than CO₂ as a greenhouse gas.

3. A hectare of land can feed many more people if it produces plants as opposed to animals.

Sounds convincing but there is another side to these arguments.