PB&J: Good for You. Good for the World.

How many people out there like a good old fashioned Peanut Butter and Jelly sandwich. I know I do and I think quite a bit of our population would agree with me. However, like many PB&J loving Americans, I haven't eaten one of those delicious brown'n'purple delights in a while.

Well, a new organization say that that's got to change. The PB&J Campaign is on a mission to save our environment one Peanut Butter and Jelly sandwich at a time.

Every time you eat a plant-based lunch, like PB&J, you reduce your carbon footprint by 2.5 pounds of carbon emissions. If you want some comparison thats almost half the about of carbon emissions you would cut by driving a hybrid for a day.

The PB&J campaign also points out that eating a plant-based meal conserves about 133 gallons of water, meaning that "five PB&Js or other plant-based lunches per month would save more water than switching to a low-flow showerhead." You'd also be saving approximately 24 square feet of land that could be deforested, overgrazed or subject to pesticide and fertilizer.

So how does this all work?

Well, according the PB&J campaign, when you eat an animal-based lunch, anything that contains meat or dairy, you are being extremely energy inefficient. In effect, all food comes from plants because even if the food isn't a plant itself, it took plants to give the animals energy to grow and make meat or produce dairy. And as anyone who takes a basic course on Environmental science knows, energy is always lost to heat as you move up the food chain. So, when you eat equal proportions of meat and plant, you are getting about 10x more energy with the plant.

There are also many destructive factors that go into meat and dairy production such as the fossil fuels needed to power machinery, irrigation and transportation, and the vast amount of plants that need to be grown (taking up lots of farmland) to produce small amounts of meat.

When you eat a PB&J sandwich you are reducing the vast amount of resources put into meat and dairy production, which means cutting carbon emissions, and water and land usage.

So as they say, "Eat a PB&J, Save the world today!" Sounds delicious.