Rethinking the Meat-Guzzler

Mark Bittman does a yeoman’s job of summarizing the meat industry’s impact on the globe in this article. The facts are astonishing, mind-blowing, and will create real shock and awe in your mind if you synthesize them. And in light of the current global food crisis, the idea of reducing our collective meat intake makes even more sense. Please read the article in its entirety – I promiseyou won’t regret it, unless you like to be ignorant that is. Further, Bittman is not a vegetarian, so don’t think he’s predisposed to one side of the argument. His point is that those who choose to eat meat should eat much less to help both the environment and their health. Here are a few teasers from the piece:

• . . . an estimated 30 percent of the earth’s ice-free land is directly or indirectly involved in livestock production, according to the United Nation’s Food and Agriculture Organization, which also estimates that livestock production generates nearly a fifth of the world’s greenhouse gases — more than transportation.
• . . . a study last year by the National Institute of Livestock and Grassland Science in Japan estimated that 2.2 pounds of beef is responsible for the equivalent amount of carbon dioxide emitted by the average European car every 155 miles, and burns enough energy to light a 100-watt bulb for nearly 20 days.
• Though some 800 million people on the planet now suffer from hunger or malnutrition, the majority of corn and soy grown in the world feeds cattle, pigs and chickens. This despite the inherent inefficiencies: about two to five times more grain is required to produce the same amount of calories through livestock as through direct grain consumption, according to Rosamond Naylor, an associate professor of economics at Stanford University. It is as much as 10 times more in the case of grain-fed beef in the United States.
• We each consume something like 110 grams of protein a day, about twice the federal government’s recommended allowance; of that, about 75 grams come from animal protein. (The recommended level is itself considered by many dietary experts to be higher than it needs to be.) It’s likely that most of us would do just fine on around 30 grams of protein a day, virtually all of it from plant sources.

I don’t want to repeat the entire article so that’s all I’ll give you. Seriously, go read it. It takes only a few minutes. I’m not telling you to become a vegetarian, though the change would be good for both you and your neighbors. I’m telling you to audit your meat intake and reduce the amount you eat while increasing the quality of it. That change alone, among all of us, will help redirect food sources to the people who need it most while significantly reducing pollution caused by the meat industry. You have to be a real jerk to order a double cheeseburger meal while people all around the globe struggle to find food daily. Throwing money at the problem is a bandage, not a long-term solution.