EATING GREEN
Renewable Energy Works!
The Meatless Diet
There are many reasons to eat less or no meat. One reason you may not have known is that meat production is energy and resource inefficient. I thank Walter Simpson for giving permission to publish the following article on the environmental effects of eating meat.
EATING GREEN
A Re-examination of Diet in Light of Environmental Concerns
by Walter Simpson
My wife, Nan, and I have been vegetarians for over ten years. We are raising two happy, healthy vegetarian children. Even our dog's a vegetarian. While a meatless diet has become second nature to us, we've never taken it for granted. Being vegetarian is basic to who we are.
Our primary reason for abandoning meat was concern for animals and a desire to be non-violent and compassionate. Since changing our diet, we've become aware of a number of other benefits of vegetarianism. A meatless diet is generally low in saturated fat and cholesterol and high in fiber, minimizing the risk of heart disease and stroke and certain cancers.
But as many University at Buffalo environmental studies students have reminded me, there are also good environmental reasons for becoming vegetarian. This powerful argument for abstaining from meat has just come to light in the past couple years. I've taken some time to acquaint myself with the facts and figures and have reached the conclusion that the vegetarian diet and lifestyle are as fundamental to being environmentally responsible as recycling, conserving energy and fighting pollution.
Conjure up in your mind an image of America's Midwest farm belt. Can you see those "amber waves of grain"? Do you think of it as America's bread basket? If so, try again. At most, only 30% of the grain grown in the U.S. is used to produce bread and other grain-based foods directly consumed by people. 70% of our annual grain crop is fed to livestock to produce meat.
Even when animals are permitted to graze, converting forage into meat, they are unlike(ly) to go from pasture to slaughter. The more likely scenario includes a trip to the feedlot for fattening on grain for 4 to 5 months.
All in all, nearly 150 million tons of grain are fed to U.S. livestock annually. All that to produce only about 20 million tons of meat-products. In a sense, this process wastes 130 million tons of grain a year. an amount estimated to be enough to supply every person on earth with a cup of grain a day.
Animals are inefficient converters of grain to meat. Besides producing meat, livestock use food to produce body heat and fuel body maintenance, muscular development and activity. Also some of the food they consume ends up being excreted as waste. With all this inefficiency, no wonder so much grain is needed to produce meat.
Disproportionate grain consumption magnifies the environmental impact of the meat industry and the practice of meat eating. What are the environmental consequences of the meat habit?
For one thing, it consumes a lot of energy. Jeremy Rifkin, in his book Beyond Beef, estimates that, all told, it takes the equivalent of one gallon of gasoline to produce a pound of grain-fed beef. To keep an average family of four in the meat habit for a year, it takes the equivalent of 260 gallons of gasoline. That's about half of the amount of gasoline the average family car consumes in the course of a year's driving.
Energy use and energy waste contribute to global warming and acid rain. Our addiction to oil also creates pressure to open up wilderness areas to the destructive effects of oil development and increases the chances of fighting yet another war for oil.
It takes a lot of water to raise grain-fed livestock. It has been estimated that a hundred times as much water is needed to produce a pound of beef than It does a pound of wheat. If it were not for livestock crop production, not nearly as much water would have to be pumped out of dwindling Midwest aquifers or diverted from rivers like the Colorado which no longer even reaches the Pacific Ocean. An estimated 6000 megawatts of electric generating capacity has been lost from rivers in the Pacific Northwest due to diversion for irrigation, much of it for livestock production.
The livestock industry is also responsible for the mega-use of fertilizers and pesticides. If it takes ten pounds of grain to produce a pound of meat, that makes the meat habit roughly 10 times as fertilizer-consumptive and pesticide-polluting as a diet based on eating grain directly. Pesticides and fertilizers significantly contribute to non-point source water pollution.
The feedlots used by the livestock industry also cause water pollution. The cattle on a large feed lot may produce a million pounds of excrement a day but feedlots have no sewage system. No wonder then that the livestock industry is one of the major sources of organic toxic water pollution in the United States. The recent contamination of drinking water in Milwaukee was linked to farm runoff containing infectious fecal matter from livestock.
Livestock also produce methane, a greenhouse gas. The World Watch Institute reports that each cow belches one third of a pound of methane for each pound of meat it yields. If you add in the carbon dioxide resulting from energy use, every pound of steak has the same global warming effect as a 25 mile drive in a typical American car!
As one record warm winter after another occurs, scientists are warning us that global warming could result in a rise in average global temperature of several degrees --enough to produce more heat waves and droughts, undermine ecosystems and agriculture, accelerate the rate of species extinction, cause a rise in sea levels which would flood coastal areas around the world, and produce generally more violent weather.
Interestingly enough, even when livestock are not gobbling down grain, their environmental impact is damaging. Nearly 70% of the 268 million acres of U.S. public land used for grazing livestock has been damaged by overgrazing. Moreover, federal predator control programs on these public lands have waged a war against native wildlife such as coyotes and mountain lions. The much publicized round-ups of wild horses (which end up being auctioned for slaughter for pet food) have also had the same objective, namely to eliminate wildlife that competes with livestock.
The environmental tragedy is compounded in tropical countries, like those in Central America. Where the creation of pasture for grazing is usually accomplished by clearing and destroying rainforest. Rainforest destruction has meant loss of biodiversity on an unprecedented scale. A hamburger made from export beef may cost 5 cents less but scientists have estimated that each hamburger is responsible for the permanent destruction of 55 square feet of rainforest. Is it worth it? Of course not.
Since the twentieth anniversary of Earth Day a few years ago, a wave of renewed environmental concern has swept across our country. It's time that we looked deeper at how our way of life, including what we eat, is damaging the environment and undermining the chances our children will have for a decent life.
Every thoughtful American should feel challenged by the fact that our eating habits (and the industry that supports them) are not only environmentally destructive but are also unhealthy and based on vast amounts of needless cruelty and suffering for the billions (of) animals raised and killed for food each year. Luckily, there is a sensible alternative which maintains all the pleasures of eating. If reason and caring dictate our actions, the future belongs to the healthful, humane and environmentally sustainable vegetarian diet and lifestyle.
UB Energy Officer Walter Simpson is a 15 year vegetarian. He and his wife Nan serve as vegetarian education coordinators for the Animal Rights Advocates of Western New York. For more information about vegetarianism, contact ARAWNY at 648-6423. For Information about the Simpson's introductory vegetarian workshop, contact UB Life Workshops at 645-6125.
Printed in UB Reporter, July 22, 1993