Meat. Juicy, chewy meat. In your burrito, on your pizza, as your steak. It’s delicious, isn’t it? But each juicy bite holds consequences, consequences that reveal themselves in our environments, communities, and health.
Most Americans eat meat during every meal, or at least once a day. A typical American meal includes either chicken or beef, and the meat is usually the main part of the dish—whether it’s the huge beef patty in a burger or the bucket of fried chicken. Those meat heavy meals, of course, add up when one stops to consider the astronomical number of animals that are consumed. In her mesmerizing presentation—Hidden in Plain Bite--to the Environmental Stewardship Program on March 4th, Katie Cantrell, executive director of Factory Farm Awareness Coalition, described a scene of cows on cows and pigs on pigs stretching interminably for miles and miles as she was trying to show us what our voracious meat consumption depends on.
In the United States alone, over nine billion animals are bred and killed every year as food. In fact, animal agriculture is one of the leading causes of climate change. Animal agriculture’s greenhouse gas effect on the world is even greater than that emitted by the entire world’s transportation sector. If every sector’s greenhouse gas emissions were completely eliminated except for the food sector’s, the latter’s alone could result in a 2 degrees Celsius rise. In fact, three-fourths of all greenhouse gases would be eliminated if all Americans replaced beef with beans.
Animal Agriculture and Deforestation
In addition to the greenhouse gas emitted through the process of rearing, feeding, transporting and processing of animals for food, animal agriculture is the major reason why deforestation is occurring at a rapid pace around the world. And we all know that deforestation is a leading cause of climate change as we are losing the world’s most significant carbon absorption areas (carbon sinks). Where there used to be forests, there are now vast expanses of farmland. In fact, over 65% of the Amazon forest has been converted into farmland, and there is no end in sight to this rapid deforestation. Most of the soy and corn grown are not used to feed humans. Rather, they are fed to feed cattle; in fact, over 95% of soy is used to feed animals. For every one hundred calories used to feed animals, we are able to obtain a mere forty gallons of milk or three calories of beef. If everyone in the world ate half the amount of meat they currently do, the land could be used to feed everyone and an extra two billion people. By eating lower on the food chain, we could save millions from starving. Furthermore, deforestation results in the loss of natural ecosystems that support many wildlife species. 18.7 million forests are lost each year—mostly to grow commercial cash crops such as soy, corn, and palm oil--and with this loss, valuable wildlife species are gone forever. To name just a few—the West African Black Rhinoceros, the Pyrenean Ibex, the Passenger Pigeon, and the Tasmanian Tiger have all recently become extinct. Today, the critically endangered list has grown in leaps and bounds and include, among many others, animals such as the orangutan, the Sumatran elephant, the Sumatran rhino, and the Sumatran tiger.
Water Usage
Not only does the rapidly growing animal agricultural industry require more and more valuable resources such as land and energy, but other scarce resources such as water are also increasingly siphoned off to support animal agriculture. A tremendous amount of water is used to raise cattle from birth to slaughter. So much, in fact, that one gallon of milk equates to twenty-seven showers. After all, beef requires hydrating cows their entire life. Depending on size and weight, cows need up to 30 gallons of water daily! Furthermore, if a cow is lactating, their water consumption is doubled. Consider this fact: 75% of the earth’s surface consists of water, but only 2.5% of the water is fresh, and animal products use up one-third of this precious fresh water supply.
Impact on Poor Communities
As for animal agriculture’s direct impact on communities, a seldom reported phenomenon is the toll it exacts on many rural low-income neighborhoods. Many farms, such as the pig farms of Smithfield, Inc., consist of building after building of pigs crammed together so tightly they cannot move. Mother pigs are forced into cages where they cannot even turn around for months at a time. The floor has a system that flushes out the waste of the pigs; the urine and feces gather in an enormous cesspool that fills up with the pig waste. Since cleaning the lake of feces and urine would be expensive, many companies opt instead to spray the urine and feces into the air as a mist. Neighboring communities downwind of the cesspools sometimes are blanketed, then, with the putrid scent of pig urine and feces as the fine mist rains all around them, making it impossible for them to even open their windows. Many children in those areas experience asthmatic symptoms, too. Those who are the least likely to find themselves gorging on steaks every Sunday are the ones most directly impacted by these factory farms of abused animals.
Impact on Health
The adverse health effects of animal agriculture are not only limited to poor communities downwind from large scale animal farms; eating as much meat as most Americans do is harmful to everyone’s health . For example, cow’s milk can contain hormones known to cause breast cancer. Overconsumption of animal flesh in general can cause heart diseases, obesity, increased risk of death, diabetes, and much much more. In fact, data show that if everyone were vegetarian, in the U.S. there would be 7.3 million preventable deaths and 973 billion preventable health-related cost savings each year. If everyone switched to a vegan diet, the savings in health costs would be even greater-- there would be 1.067 billion preventable health-related dollars saved each year.
Fish Farming
Finally, if we limit ourselves to just eating fish, would that solve the problems caused by land-based animal agriculture? No, it would not, as fish consumption has similar impacts. Fish in wild environments have been completely overfished. Also, the method used by most fish operations has been to use a large net to trawl up everything within a certain radius, a method that scoops up “incidental” marine life along with the target fish. This method--long used and only recently banned by some countries--has inflicted severe damage on ocean ecosystems. In aquaculture, the fish farms are overcrowded (in the same way that there are too many pigs or chicken crammed into small spaces), and the large amounts of waste from these fish farms often flow into the ocean, creating dead zones where no life flourishes.
Katie Cantrell’s Recommendations
According to Katie Cantrell, it is difficult to change our lifestyles and become vegans quickly. Instead, she offers useful alternatives: The Impossible Cheeseburger, Beyond Meat, and more, are all foods that taste meaty and delicious but are not made from animal products. Also, committing to eating 3 meatless meals once a week on Meatless Mondays, or even committing to eating just one meatless meal weekly would help. Alternatively, just switching half of the meat products to vegan products would make a difference. Even abstaining from eating one meat burger is enough to save the same amount of water as a month of never showering! The message Katie wants to convey is that it’s acceptable to not convert to veganism and to think along the lines of reducing meat intake—if growing numbers of people can just skip one meat burger or one steak a week, it will have an effect on reducing the demand for animal products. And such small changes by an ever increasing population will add up and can mitigate the environmental damage and animal abuse problems that accompany our insatiable appetite for meat.
Moreover, there are alternatives for those who crave the taste of meat as many companies are switching to more vegan or vegetarian options because of the growing popularity of veganism. Ben & Jerry’s, Haagen-Dazs, Breyers, and more have all started producing vegan ice cream, and Tyson Foods, the second largest meat (chicken, beef, and pork) processor and marketer in the world, has announced a series of plant-based meats. When visiting the grocery store and confronted by a vegan and meat option of the same price and amount, why not choose the vegan one? Why not take this small, seemingly inconsequential step to help the move away from meat products and toward a cleaner, healthier diet and planet?
After Katie Cantrell’s riveting presentation, our March 4th Environmental Stewardship Program event concluded with the presentation of an action item by one of our activist leaders, Kristel Wickham. The action item focused on trying to convince local city councils to transition our building stock (commercial and residential) to non-polluting energy sources by the end of 2019. Because Peninsula Clean Energy (PCE) and Silicon Valley Clean Energy (SVCE) are now supplying 32 cities in the South Bay and Peninsula with 90 – 100% greenhouse-gas-free electricity, decarbonizing buildings means taking the next step towards shifting from natural gas to electricity. This is an exciting opportunity to help our cities make the transition to a carbon-free future. If you are interested in joining this movement, please contact Kristel Wickhm at: kristel@timetodream.com