Our next stop in our week-long road and food trip with the BYD Seagull battery electric vehicle takes us further south of the Metro—to Lipa City in Batangas province.
The BYD Lipa dealership was hard to miss, as it’s just a few hundred meters away from the southbound Lipa exit at the STAR Tollway. The dealership is located right along President Jose P. Laurel Highway in Barangay Tambo, Lipa City.
From TessDrive HQ in Las Piñas City, the Seagull only had 30% battery charge left. We plugged in at BYD Lipa for 30 minutes, just to get enough juice for the trip to The Farm at San Benito and back to Las Piñas.
With the charge level of the Seagull up to 51%, we drove about 10 km to the upscale Alive! Vegan Restaurant inside The Farm at San Benito (a luxury wellness resort) to get our hungry selves back to 100% plant power level. Freshly prepared meat-free, dairy-free Spinach and Vegan Cheese Pizza, Plant-Based Burger, Vegan Lasagna, black sticky rice with mangoes and coconut milk, Halo-Halo Deluxe with vegan vanilla ice cream served in a coconut husk, mango sago with coconut milk and several more vegan dishes were our dinner fare.
Not only did we load up on tasty, meat-free food that both refueled and cleansed our systems, we also got to breathe in fresh air, as Alive! is situated right in the middle of the sprawling 50-hectare forest estate of The Farm at San Benito.
Going back to Las Piñas from The Farm at San Benito late at night took less than 90 minutes via the STAR and SLEX Tollways. The battery level of the BYD Seagull went down from 50% to 23%, more than enough power for us to drive to the nearest charging station suggested by the EVRO app the next day (more on this in our next stories).
Dining plant-based, driving electrified: Connections
This correlation between fueling up for humans and machines is what drives TessDrive’s belief that the best way to minimize our individual carbon footprints is not just to switch to new energy vehicles (NEVs), particularly to EVs for zero tailpipe emissions, but to transition as well to a purely plant-based diet that’s devoid of animals and animal byproducts.
More than 50% of worldwide greenhouse gas emissions are attributed to raising, feeding, and processing cattle, buffalo, sheep, goats, camels, and pigs, according to comprehensive studies by environment scientists.
Raising cows, pigs, chicken and other animals for food have been shown to cause water shortages and water pollution, deforestation, topsoil erosion, increase in greenhouse gases, and overall environmental damage.
Adopting a vegan diet and switching to an electric car are 2 significant steps toward greatly reducing our individual carbon footprints. Veganism, with its focus on plant-based foods, generally results in lower greenhouse gas emissions, land use, and water consumption compared to diets including meat and dairy. Electric vehicles, while needing electricity to charge, produce zero tailpipe emissions and are generally more energy-efficient than gasoline cars.
And with the world’s available land getting scarcer for more farms, marine resources are now being exhausted, as well. “Since the early ’90s the total number of fish caught globally has leveled out. The ramification is that we’ve maxed out the ocean. About 85–90 million metric tons of fish are pulled from the ocean every year, and that hasn’t increased since the late ’90s. It has leveled off not because we’ve decided to be really proactive and be kind to the ocean and not fish anymore. It’s leveled off because we can’t get any more fish out of the ocean,” said Bruce Monger, who teaches oceanography at Cornell, for the T. Colin Campbell Center for Nutrition Studies.
So, we’re getting deeper into our unique “EV x plant-based” journey, so that this menacing stalker called greenhouse gas will have a hard time tracking our (carbon) footsteps.
Stay tuned for the full story and video feature of our vegan road and food trip with the BYD Seagull EV coming out soon!
Top composite photo shows Day 2 destinations in Lipa City: BYD Lipa and Alive! Vegan Restaurant in The Farm at San Benito