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Much as we have
awakened to the full economic and social costs
of cigarettes, we will find we can no longer subsidize
or ignore the costs of mass-producing cattle,
poultry, pigs, sheep and fish to feed our growing
population. These costs include hugely inefficient
use of freshwater and land, heavy pollution from
livestock feces, rising rates of heart disease
and other degenerative illnesses, and spreading
destruction of the forests on which much of our
planet’s life depends.
Time
Magazine Report: Visions
of the 21st Century, “Will
We Still Eat Meat?”
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Click for another image.
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The industrial [livestock]
system is a poor converter of fossil energy. Fossil
energy is a major input of intensive livestock production
systems, mainly indirectly for the production of feed.
FAO, Livestock & the Environment:
Finding a Balance, 1996
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It takes more land, water, and energy to produce
meat than to grow vegetarian foods. It’s several
times more efficient to eat grains directly than to
funnel them through farmed animals. According to the
Audubon
Society, roughly 70 percent of the grain grown
and 50 percent of the water consumed in the United
States are used by the meat industry. A Minority Staff
of Senate Committee on Agriculture, Nutrition &
Forestry report states the beef in just one Big Mac
represents enough wheat to make five loaves of bread.30
See also these excerpts
from an ADA position paper.
A vegetarian diet can feed significantly more people
than a meat-centered diet. The State of World
Hunger, by Peter Uvin of the Brown University
World Hunger Program, reported the populations potentially
supported by the 1992 food supply on different diets:
- Almost purely vegetarian diet --> 6.3 billion people
- 15% of calories from animal products --> 4.2 billion
people
- 25% of calories from animal products --> 3.2 billion
people
Source: FAO, 1993.
World hunger is a complicated problem, and becoming vegetarian
in the U.S. will not necessarily alleviate it in the short-term.
However, being vegetarian is a positive step towards saving
resources that can be used to feed people in the future.
According to the Scientific American report, "Growing
More Food With Less Water":
Yet another way to do more with less water is
to reconfigure our diets. The typical North American
diet, with its large share of animal products, requires
twice as much water to produce as the less meat-intensive
diets common in many Asian and some European countries.
Eating lower on the food chain could allow the same
volume of water to feed two Americans instead of one,
with no loss in overall nutrition.
[I]f you follow the corn…back to the fields where it grows, you will
find an 80-million-acre monoculture that consumes more chemical herbicide and
fertilizer than any other crop. Keep going and you can trace the nitrogen runoff
from that crop all the way down the Mississippi into the Gulf of Mexico, where
it has created (if that is the right word) a 12,000-square-mile “dead
zone.”
But you can go farther still, and follow the
fertilizer needed to grow that corn all the way to
the oil fields of the Persian Gulf.… Assuming
[a steer] continues to eat 25 pounds of corn a day
and reaches a weight of 1,250 pounds, he will have
consumed in his lifetime roughly 284 gallons of oil.
We have succeeded in industrializing the beef
calf, transforming what was once a solar-powered ruminant
into the very last thing we need: another fossil-fuel
machine.
New York Times Magazine,
“Power Steer” by Michael Pollan, 3/31/02
|  Deadpile
of pigs.
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Most of the antibiotics sold in America end up in animal feed—a practice
that, it is now generally acknowledged, leads directly to the evolution of new
antibiotic-resistant “superbugs”.…
Escherichia coli 0157 is a relatively new strain of a common intestinal
bacteria…that is common in feedlot cattle, more than half of whom carry
it in their guts. Ingesting as few as 10 of these microbes can cause a fatal
infection.
Most of the microbes that reside in the gut of a cow and find their way
into our food get killed off by the acids in our stomachs, since they originally
adapted to live in a neutral-pH environment. But the digestive tract of the
modern feedlot cow is closer in acidity to our own, and in this new, manmade
environment acid-resistant strains of E. coli have developed that can survive
our stomach acids—and go on to kill us.
New York Times Magazine,
“Power Steer” by Michael Pollan, 3/31/02
|  A
downed, disemboweled calf is left to suffer
at a Pennsylvania stockyard. Stockyard workers
refused to humanely euthanize him.
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Dioxins have been characterized by EPA as likely to be human carcinogens
and are anticipated to increase the risk of cancer at background levels of exposure.…
Most of us receive almost all of our dioxin exposure from the food we eat:
specifically from the animal fats associated with eating beef, pork, poultry,
fish, milk, dairy products.
U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, “Persistent
Bioaccumulative and Toxic Chemical Program: Dioxins and Furans.”
During 1993–1997, a total of 2,751 outbreaks of foodborne disease
were reported.…
Salmonella serotype Enteritidis accounted for the largest number of outbreaks,
cases, and deaths; most of these outbreaks were attributed to eating eggs.
Centers for Disease Control
and Prevention, MMWR, March 17, 2000
A type of salmonella found in eggs
is turning up more often in chicken meat and needs
to be reduced, according to the Agriculture Department.
From 2000 through 2005, there was a fourfold increase
in positive test results for salmonella enteritidis
on chicken carcasses. Salmonella sickens at least
40,000 people and kills about 600 every year in the
United States.
Associated
Press, Nov. 20, 2006
Even though the drinking water
standard for arsenic has been strengthened, the standards
for arsenic residues in poultry-2,000 ppb for liver
and 500 ppb for muscle-have remained unchanged for
decades. Furthermore, neither the Food & Drug
Administration nor the Department of Agriculture has
actually measured the level of arsenic in the poultry
meat that most people consume. USDA has measured it
only in chicken livers. ... Chicken manure introduces
huge quantities of arsenic to agricultural fields.
"Arsenic
in Chicken Production," April 11, 2007
Widening the Circle
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In
the slaughterhouse, this pig has collapsed in
his own vomit. Click for larger
image.