Infoporn is something I first saw in Wired magazine. They would have a few pages of their magazine with lots of pretty graphs and numbers. Here is a random example I just found:
http://www.wired.com/culture/culturereviews/magazine/15-07/st_infoporn
So. The idea I've had is to compose one page of pretty graphs that simplifies the material aspects of various food production methods. The graph I have in mind should use representative units like a blue cube for a cubic acre of water, green cube for an acre of land, bean pod icons for the vegetable input, brown cubes for poop, etc. And at the end there would be a burger icon for some thousands of beef or veggie burgers.
So a pair of food lines might look something like:
10[water]+1[land]+10[soy] -> 1[cow] -> 3[polluted water]+3[greenhouse gas]+1[burger]
1[water]+1[land]+1[greenhouse gas] -> 1[soy] -> 1[hamburger]
There are other elements that might fit into here as well (energy, factories, human labor, nutrition). Perhaps other lines as well (cows from factory farms vs grass fed cows). It should be simple and it should be easy to find the solid numbers for all this. Of course, this ignores all the unquantifiable aspects of animal cruelty that occurs on farms, but this is for a particular demograph of people who ignore anything based on unquantifiable aspects. Ideally getting this into something like Wired would be a great way to introduce lots of people to the ecological damage and resource waste they could avoid just by switching to a different hamburger icon.
I'll make a mock up of the diagram I have in mind, and if anyone with graphic design skills or is knowledgeable about the numbers I've proposed wants to contribute, just post a reply.
Update: this page has some of the stats I'm looking for:
http://www.vegansoapbox.com/an-environmentalist-who-eats-meat/
No comments:
Post a Comment