New Earth

food
a lot of the problems connected to food come from cattle breeding.
One kilo of red cow meet leaves you with a footprint of 15500 liters of clean drinking water.
A way to reduce your footprint is to start eating vegan, as this diet is fully plant based.
If the entire world went vegan the worlds food-related emissions would be 70% down by 2050.
If the world went vegetarian the emissions would also drop with 60%.

But for a lot of people who grew up eating meat, this switch in their diet is seen as a huge change which is difficult to make. Whereas I found out eating nicely cooked vegan food ain't that hard at all, especially when choosing for a meat substitute every now and then.

With this information in the back of my mind I want to start this project and do some further research.

emissions of the food industry

people don't like change

vegan substitutes can be found expensive

Details.
WHY:
A lot of people find it hard to start a new habit or to change. But if they found out how easy and delicious vegan food can be maybe they won't anymore.

WHAT:
A visual booklet that encourages you on going vegan written in an easy language, in very easy steps.

HOW:
because of the easy visual and textual language people don't look at going vegan as impossible anymore. The easier you make it the more appealing it would be, adding to this what collectively going vegan could do makes it quite appealing at the same time. Especially if you been wanting to go vegan for a while.

TARGETAUDIENCE:
Students and teenagers

MESSAGE:
Going vegan shouldn't have to be as hard as it seems.

SENDER:
instagram adds, could be accompanied by an app which tells you what products are vegan.

CONCEPT:
A small (digital) booklet which visually and textually shows you that some things aren't as hard as they may seem.

FUTURE:
As I was working on this exercise I realised this could be possible for a load of other subjects too, so i sketched out a second booklet. One on decolonisation and it's connection to climate issues, this one informs on intersectionality and it's importance.

ESSAY
The research I did started off by doing a quick research on the the five given topics, salt, water, food, oil and soil. I looked mostly into salt and food because the salt sculptures like SEAt from Karlijn Sibbel were mesmerising to me. But I decided to do a project about something a little bit more close to home, food, especially eating vegan and its' effect on the environment.

The first thing I did was mapping out the things i thought of when i think about food: these were things as the food industry and its' effects on the climate; veganism, vegetarians, pescetarians, emissions caused by cattle breeding, the effect eating has on your foot-print and a whole other list of interesting subjects. Why I chose to go into veganism is because of an article I read on BBC which claimed that if everyone went vegan the emissions caused by the food industry would be dropped 70% percent in 2050. This huge percentage intrigued me. Especially after I compared these numbers with the "environmental benefits"-list from Chloe Rutzerveld, because if everyone went vegan a lot of her points could be achieved as well

So I did some self reflection and asked myself why I'm still not fully vegan. Apart from myself I also asked my three roommates because we tend to cook a lot for each other and we all are vegetarians trying to eat vegan as much as we possibly can. So why aren't we there just yet?

A couple of the answers were:
- A lot of products, which you otherwise have to make from scratch, contain milk or whey powder.
- We have money for vegetarian cheese but vegan cheese is a tad too expensive.
- If vegan options are out of stock in the supermarket we go for the vegetarian one.

Basically if we summarise our answers the outcome is that we don't always have the products at home to make replacements our the money to afford them. But after some research making replacements, like seitan, are a bit of an investment. A "buy a lot, make a lot more" situation. So, this obviously is an easy fix.
From a lot of other people I heard they were interested in becoming vegan, but they just had no clue where to start. My final idea I created for them.

I wanted to make becoming vegan as simple as it can be, to take away some of the doubts people can have beforehand, the "Will I even be able to make such a big change in my diet" kind of thoughts. I wanted to do this visually to create a fun atmosphere around it. Changing things up is scary in a lot of peoples eyes, but it can be so much fun.

In another article I read that eating a kilo of cow meat is about 500 days of showering in clean water. This gave me the idea to connect my project to water as well. This is were I noticed I was complicating things unnecessarily, I had to take a step back and just start sketching it as simple as possible. If I had the time I think I'd add a page or two.