Well, I say 'reasons' but I've only got one and a bit, though they're enough that I'll never use eBookers again - they don't appear to pass on meal requests. And they don't respond to customer queries, so I've no explanation as to why, or even if they could have blamed the airline for the stuff-up.
Since eBookers never responded to my comment, I might as well post it here:
Dear ebookers,I wish to make a complaint about your service. I recently flew long-haul on tickets booked with you, yet the airline I flew with had no record of my special meal request. This may sound like a relatively minor issue, but the thought of facing another eight hour flight without food is enough to stop me using ebookers again.
I'm just glad it wasn't a flight to Australia. If you're also vegetarian, or need to make special meal requests for any other reason, you might want to give eBookers a miss. The prices are pretty much the same across all those cross-search sites anyway.
[This is in no way a random post made up from a random old email I found while doing some tidying. Ahem.]
A useful summary from the Guardian, presumably prompted by Ghent's going vegetarian on Thursdays. (Yay Ghent). Can vegetarians save the world?
The breakthrough came in 2006 when the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) published a study, Livestock's Long Shadow, showing that the livestock industry is responsible for a staggering 18% of all anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions. This is only the beginning of the story. In 2008, Brazil announced that in the 12 months to July it had lost 12,000 sq km (3m acres) of the Amazon rainforest, mainly to cattle ranchers and soy producers supplying European markets with animal feed. There is water scarcity in large parts of the world, yet livestock-rearing can use up to 200 times more water a kilogram (2.2lbs) of meat produced than is used in growing wheat. Given the volatile global food prices, it seems foolhardy to divert 1.2bn tonnes of fodder - including cereals - to fuel global meat consumption, which has increased by more than two and half times since 1970....
In September 2008, Dr Rajendra Pachauri, chair of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a vegetarian himself, called on people to take personal responsibility for the impacts of their consumption.
"Give up meat for one day [a week] initially, and decrease it from there," he said. "In terms of immediacy of action and the feasibility of bringing about reductions in a short period of time, it clearly is the most attractive opportunity."
So that should knock the 'but vegetarians eat soy and soy is evil' thing on the head - most of that soy goes for animal feed.
I do tend to assume that vegetarians try to eat local and seasonal where possible - I read one piece that said simply going veggie isn't the answer - well, der. Hopefully people smart enough to change their lifestyle to try and reduce the effects of human-created climate change will also read up and check the air miles of their fruit and veg.
The perspective of a 'food historian' is useful.
Towards the end of the 18th century, two consecutive bad harvests in Europe created shortages. There was a huge public clamour for the wealthy to cut down on their meat consumption in order to leave more grain for the poor. The idea that meat was a cruel profligacy became current, and led Percy Bysshe Shelley to declare that the carnivorous rich literally monopolised land and food by taking more of it than they needed. "The use of animal flesh," he said, "directly militates with this equality of the rights of man."
As reported by the BBC, etc.
Belgian city plans 'veggie' days
The Belgian city of Ghent is about to become the first in the world to go vegetarian at least once a week.Starting this week there will be a regular weekly meatless day, in which civil servants and elected councillors will opt for vegetarian meals.
Ghent means to recognise the impact of livestock on the environment.
The UN says livestock is responsible for nearly one-fifth of global greenhouse gas emissions, hence Ghent's declaration of a weekly "veggie day".
Public officials and politicians will be the first to give up meat for a day.
I've never been to Ghent. I'm definitely going to go now, and I guess I'd better make it a long weekend so I can be there on a Thursday. And I guess it'll be easy to find something vegetarian to eat when I'm there. The Guardian reports:
Every restaurant in the city is to guarantee a vegetarian dish on the menu, with some going fully vegetarian every Thursday. From September, the city's schools are to make a meat-free meal the "default" option every Thursday, although parents can insist on meat for their children. At least one hospital wants to join in.
Not that I had any idea it was 'world vegetarian week'... Top Ten Reasons to Go Veggie During World Vegetarian Week includes:
"While there is ample and justified moral indignation about the diversion of 100 million tons of grain for biofuels, more than seven times as much (760 million tons) is fed to farmed animals so that people can eat meat."" A recent United Nations report entitled Livestock's Long Shadow concludes that eating meat is "one of the ... most significant contributors to the most serious environmental problems, at every scale from local to global.""
Sir Paul McCartney sums it all up, "If anyone wants to save the planet, all they have to do is just stop eating meat. That's the single most important thing you could do. It's staggering when you think about it. Vegetarianism takes care of so many things in one shot: ecology, famine, cruelty."
From the Independent in December last year: Raw deal! The vendetta waged against vegetarians
A new survey reveals that diners who don't eat meat are dished up a poor choice by high street restaurants. But it's all too true, says Martin Hickman, our consumer affairs correspondent, who became a vegetarian 18 years ago and is fed up with being offered boring cheese bakes...A lack of effort and imagination characterises the failing of vegetarian food in Britain.
It isn't a problem of availability, generally. Apart from the countryside, pubs, or an Aberdeen Angus Steakhouse, you can almost always find something a vegetarian can eat.
No, the problem is that the lone, sad "vegetarian option" is there because the restaurant is expecting to serve a lone, sad vegetarian. It is not meant to be delicious; it is perfunctory it ticks the box.
...
But, as Ethical Consumer magazine has found in a new survey, most high street restaurants are emphatically unimpressive when it comes to vegetarian food. The author, Sarah Irving, writes in the January edition: "Vegetarianism is a fairly mainstream dietary choice nowadays... so it is surprising and depressing how poorly vegetarians and especially vegans are served in chain restaurants."
My emphasis above. I guess I'll never really understand it - it's as if chefs in the UK have a huge blind spot when it comes to vegetarian food. So many places don't go beyond 'take the meat out and serve what's left, which is a real shame because other countries manage to produce amazing vegetarian food. If Montreal can combine a French and English heritage with an open imagination to come up with tasty veggie meals, why can't they manage it here?
Anyway. It's not like food is generally amazing here anyway, though it gets better all the time, and in the meantime, check out The New Vegetarian column in the Guardian (and go to Ottolenghi's for properly amazing salads when you're in London).
The difference a photo makes is interesting.
Out of Sight, Out of Mind: Loving Our Oceans to Death has a Landsat satellite image of the Gulf of Mexico
The cloudy water that you see is the direct result of commercial bottom trawlers dragging large, heavy nets across the seafloor, denuding it of all life in their quest for a few marketable fish and shrimps. Unfortunately, most bottom trawlers destroy as much as 20 pounds of "bycatch" -- unmarketable corals, sponges, fishes and other animals -- for every pound of commerically valuable "seafood" that they retrieve, while they leave behind huge, choking clouds of mud and sediment that take weeks or longer to settle. ..."Until recently, the impact was basically hidden from view," he continued. "But new tools -- especially Internet-based image sites, like Google Earth -- allow everyone to see for themselves what's happening. In shallow waters with muddy bottoms, trawlers leave long, persistent trails of sediment in their wake."
...
What can you do to reduce this enviromental destruction? Until the industrial fishing industry proves that they are acting in a more environmentally responsible manner, you can boycott eating orange roughy, Chilean sea bass (Patagonian toothfish), and all shrimps. (Keep in mind that those shrimp species that are not caught by trawling are usually farmed in shallow coastal mangroves, which also leads to tremendous, and possibly irreversible, environmental damages).
But don't just stop buying trawler-caught seafood - tell your supermarket or fishmonger why you've stopped buying it. Your consumer action can make a huge difference.
Their 'Quick guide: Sustainable food' covers what sustainability is, and how you can eat sustainably.
The Observer also finally acknowledges that maybe eating fish just isn't sustainable.