Veggie Tales and the Environment

I am a bandwagon fanatic. Not because I am a fan of bandwagons, but because I am one of those people who ally themselves to causes for one, two, three weeks maximum at a time. I read an article by Nicholas Kristof on human trafficking and I tell everyone I know about the brothels in Cambodia. I watch a TED Talks on the marketing strategies of pharmaceutical giants and I become an excitable advocate for scientific integrity. I find myself in a bar full of basketball fans cheering for the Celtics and I scream with the best of them. In fact, there have only been a handful of times when I encountered or learned something that fundamentally changed me and how I choose to live my life. One of these instances is when I read Eating Animals, by Jonathan Safran Foer (JSF).¹

As part of my research for this article, I asked my non-vegetarian friends to explain back to me why I choose to eat vegetarian six days a week. I was curious as to whether they understood my motivations. I received a diverse array of answers, from personal health to animal rights to even weight loss. It was amazing how few people actually grasped the real reasons underlying my decision. In the interest of full disclosure, I will tell you here: environment, environment, environment.

Here’s a quoted statistic for starters: “Animal agriculture makes a 40% greater contribution to global warming than all transportation in the world combined; it is the number one cause of climate change.”¹ This is not a disembodied number. It has been reiterated in multiple publications of multiple designations. In 2006, the Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) of the United Nations released a report titled “Livestock’s Long Shadow.”² Likewise, journals such as the Lancet and Conservation Biology have released articles that corroborate the FAO’s findings.^3,4 Even the Christian Science Monitor, a middle-of-the-road international newspaper, published an editorial questioning why the U.S. Congress hasn’t taken a pro-active approach towards the food industry in its battles against global warming.⁵

Of course, animal agriculture produces more than one kind of pollution. For one, about one-third of the surface of the Earth is dedicated to animal agriculture: namely, grazing.^1,2 There are several sub-problems associated with overgrazing. As populous countries such as China and India grow in prosperity, so grows overall meat and dairy consumption. That means undeveloped tracts of land are increasingly developed for animal agriculture, and that means rapid deforestation and desertification. For example, approximately 70% of the cleared arable land in the Amazon Basin has been re-appropriated for grazing.² The subsequent ecosystem imbalances and biodiversity losses are truly astounding.⁴

The U.S. solution: crowd hundreds of our tasty bovine friends into a shed, feed them corn out of a trough instead of grass from a field, and voila: more beef per square mile of land. Corn is cheaper than grass, and it will quickly fatten up a cow, but unfortunately corn is also less appropriate than grass for a cow’s digestive system. Such feedlot cows are “finished” on a diet of corn, soy, grains, hormones, and antibiotics. (The antibiotics are included in part to quell the proliferation of E. coli, which naturally results from too much corn and not enough grass.)⁶

Moreover, livestock rearing generates greenhouse gasses. The effect of a greenhouse gas on the atmosphere can be quantified by its GWP, global-warming potential—which is how much heat is trapped in the atmosphere compared to the mass of the gas. Nitrous oxide (N₂O), for instance, has 296 times the GWP of carbon dioxide (CO₂), while methane (CH₄) has 23 times the GWP of CO₂. About 9% of all human-induced CO₂ emissions come from livestock rearing, along with 37% of CH₄ emissions and 65% of N₂O emissions.² These are just three of over one hundred greenhouse gasses animal agriculture is responsible for. One of the prime culprits for emissions? Cow manure. With approximately 1.5 billion cows in the world…⁷ Well, let’s just say that’s a lot of poop (and chemicals and antibiotics) going down the rivers into the ocean.

Then there are the soft costs of meat consumption. In the late 1800s, animal agriculture reorganized itself to maximize efficiency. The meatpacking industry, for instance, engineered the concept of the assembly line in the mid-1800s. Instead of many privately-owned slaughterhouses where each worker had to know how to take apart every part of an animal, the slaughterhouse assembly line enabled workers to specialize in one particular step of the animal deconstruction. Then, in the mid-1900s, some of those workers were further replaced by machines, thereby again speeding up the slaughter process.¹ The result is straightforward: a handful of large slaughterhouses that crowded out their smaller siblings, such that farmers have no choice but to deliver their animals to one of the industrial slaughterhouses. Furthermore, the advent of “the reefer” – refrigerated boxcars – allowed meat to travel farther and farther from its origin (the slaughterhouse) to its final destination (the supermarket). JSF states that “the average distance our meat travels hovers around fifteen hundred miles.”¹ This figure will vary widely depending on where you live and what you eat, but the underlying point remains the same. That steak, that pork chop, that chicken wing? Probably ain’t from around here. Not to mention, traveling longer distances also means more CO₂ emissions.

And don’t forget the oceans. “Modern industrial fishing lines can be as long as 75 miles – the same distance from sea level to space.”¹ What this means for our oceans is that all the other critters that are caught along with the wild Atlantic salmon, the yellowfin tuna, are thrown back overboard. (Apparently, 80-90% of animals caught in shrimp-trawling nets are discarded dead or dying as bycatch, which explains why the majority of sea horse species are endangered.)¹

Animal agriculture is complex, to say the least. Beyond the environment, there is a whole host of other issues related to meat consumption not mentioned here: public health (when overuse of antibiotics on livestock rearing makes it all-too-easy for avian or swine flu viruses to jump species), animal welfare and rights, etc. Then there are the moral questions. “On average, Americans eat the equivalent of 21,000 entire animals in a lifetime,” JSF quotes.¹ The number is not surprising, perhaps, but it lends itself to the following question: how much (animal) life are we willing to take? I, at least, am uncomfortable with the idea of someone else doing my killing for me. If it’s not an animal I could slaughter myself, what right do I have to eat it?

And finally, there is food culture, tradition- and memory-making with family and friends. I was raised on a Chinese-Taiwanese diet, which means meat is very important to what is set on the table. My grandmother would be appalled if she thought her granddaughter had sworn off pork and leek dumplings, oyster pancakes, Peking duck. I eat vegetarian six days a week because of that very reason. If I am in a situation where an individual—a friend, a family member—has cooked something containing meat for me, I will not turn it down. But as long as I am feeding myself, I will cook and eat vegetarian.

You can recycle, turn off the lights when you leave a room, drive a hybrid, walk or take mass transport your entire life, but you can also simply cut down on meat intake. And if every American who could afford it cut down their meat intake by half, what would the world look like then? 15,000 animals per lifetime? Less?

References:

¹ Foer, Jonathan Safran. Eating Animals. New York: Little, Brown and Company. 2009. Print.

² Steinfeld, Henning. Livestock's Long Shadow: Environmental Issues and Opinions. Rome: Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, 2006. Print.

³ McMichael, Anthony J., John W. Powles, Colin D. Butler, and Ricardo Uauy. "Food, Livestock Production, Energy, Climate Change, and Health." The Lancet 370.9594 (2007): 1253-263. Print.

⁴ Fleischner, Thomas L. "Ecological Costs of Livestock Grazing in Western North America." Conservation Biology 8.3 (1994): 629-44. Print.

⁵ Knickerbocker, Brad. "Humans' Beef with Livestock: a Warmer Planet." The Christian Science Monitor. 20 Feb. 2007. Web.

⁶ Cross, Kim. "The Grass-fed vs. Grain-fed Beef Debate." CNN Health. CNN News, 29 Mar. 2011. Web.

⁷ Lean, Geoffrey. "Cow 'Emissions' More Damaging to Planet than CO₂ from Cars." The Independent. 10 Dec. 2006. Web.