At Darya’s Daily, we’ve been learning about ways our diet impacts the earth. The news about dairy wasn’t that great. We’ve learned that meat and dairy provide only 18% of our calories and 37% of our protein, yet use up 83% of our farmland. Since livestock production is the single largest contributor of emissions around the globe (more than planes, trains and cars combined), removing it from our food system could allow the planet to regenerate. We know that a vegan diet can help the earth.

But, we are growing into change. Darya’s challenge to our family has been to find achievable steps that we can make, every day, and to make them! So, today’s eco-challenge is to reduce the carbon footprint of the daily you consume.

First, reduce waste! A lot of milk is packaged in cartons – which are made of paper with a plastic (polyethylene) coating. The ones that are shelf-stable also have a layer of aluminum. We checked one of our favorite sites: earth911 to see if they are recyclable and they are! Still, we challenge you to use milk cartons because glass is super easy to recycle. Let us know in the comments if you think that is better for the earth than cartons!

The medium challenge is to go light on the butter. That’s hard for us because we love butter! But it turns out that butter ranks third on NRDC’s chart of 10 common climate-damaging foods. It takes 21 pounds of milk to make one pound of butter!

Our hard challenge is to buy milk that was produced locally and organically in order to reduce the carbon footprint. It takes a lot of energy to raise a cow, and at least we can do that locally. We consider this challenge hard because organic milk can be double the cost of regular milk, and times are hard right now!

We would love your input on healthy ways to raise kids without dairy. How have you encouraged your family to eat more plants and fewer animal products.

Please let us know below so we can share your ideas with the Darya’s Daily community!