According to the book
Hungry Planet, Americans (on average) eat 275 pounds of meat per person per year. That's more than England or Australia or Germany - heck, it's more than any other country those authors profile.
Even though I've given up eating beef, I'm not against eating meat per se. To badly paraphrase an old Greek temple inscription: I believe all things are best in moderation. That's why I was delighted that while visiting the UK I picked up a book that supports my position and begins to answer the question I pose in the title of this post. It's called So Shall We Reap, by Colin Tudge. I don't think it's out in the US, so let me go to a key passage and try to paraphrase some of Tudge's other arguments while explaining why I think this is so important.
Here's Tudge on p. 144:
The fundamental problem for farmers is that people cannot eat unlimited amounts. rich people do eat more than poor people, but if anyone who is not riding in the Tour deFrance eats more than about twice as much as they need to stay alive, then they start to get seriously fat or suffer in other ways.
Perhaps I'm stupid, but I never thought of this point before. Of course, many Americans are "seriously fat," but even they have limits to how much they can eat. If you are a large farmer, or more likely a giant agribusiness, how are you going to expand the market for your product?
Meat is the answer. People could easily be fed on a relatively modest output if if they were content to eat traditional, cereal-based diets (as most people, left to themselves, clearly are). But this is bad news for the farmer. The way out of this economic cul-de-sac is to give half the cereal to livestock.
Tudge contends that there is more than enough food to feed everybody in the world, but by eating so much meat we are making it harder to feed the starving in the world. In short, our steaks help keep the world's hungry hungry.
This also gets into another point made most eloquently in Michael Pollan's now-classic, must-read 2002 New York Times Magazine article, "Power Steer." Cattle aren't supposed to eat corn. [And if you've never read Pollan's article you have to click the link above. You'll thank me later.] That's why industrial feedlots have to pump cattle full of drugs. They're not producing cheap, fatty meat for us; they're doing it for themselves.
What makes this even worse is that we don't eat nearly as much of the animal as we could:
Modern supermarkets, which in countries like Britain sell most of the nation's meat, are piled high with cutlets, steaks and fillets - the prime parts of the animal. It is still possible to buy liver, and sometimes kidney, but any request for tripe would be met with a blank stare.
[Tripe, by the way, is the cattle's stomach.]
Say what you will about the pig being unclean, but as they used to say in the Chicago Stockyards, you can use everything but the squeal. Beef as most American producers raise it today is an extraordinary waste of natural resources. Indeed, as Michael Pollan points out in his new book (which I liked a lot, but it isn't nearly as good as Tudge's), it takes a lot of fossil fuel to make the fertilizer to grow the corn to feed the cattle that Americans take for granted.
So why do Americans eat so much meat? It's cheap and it's there. Consumers bear responsibility for demanding cheap fatty meat, but so do producers. As I've written before (paraphrasing Pollan), meat is supposed to be expensive. Selling it cheap has environmental consequences that need to be properly understood by everyone. A good steak every once in a while isn't such a bad thing, but as Tudge suggests cheap meat for everybody all the time is an absolute unmitigated disaster.
Think of meat moderation as driving a Prius instead of a Hummer. [In terms of fossil fuels, this isn't even a simile.] Your body and your planet will thank you when you cut down.
JR