We're number two! We're number two!
Yes, Americans lose pride of place in the "who eats the most meat per capita" sweepstakes to Luxembourg, that adorable little nation nestled in the midst of Belgium, France, and Germany.
Every Luxembourger eats about 30 pounds of meat more per year than the average American - which is kind of amazing, given that we average a whopping 270 pounds each!
The more I think about that, the harder it is to wrap my head around it, and not because I am some sort of sanctimonious, in-your-face vegan/PETA person. It's just... that is a LOT of meat.
After all, there are only 365 days in a year. Which means the average American is eating almost three-quarters of a pound of meat per day!
Wow.
Head below the tangerine tumbleweed for more musings on meat.
In 2007, The New Scientist Magazine published a study led by Akifumi Ogino of the National Institute of Livestock and Grassland Science in Tsukuba, Japan. It reported that producing a kilogram of beef (that's about 2.2 pounds)
...produces more greenhouse gas emissions and other pollution than driving a car for 3 hours while leaving all the lights at home...
Our average American, then, eats 5.19 pounds of meat a week, the impact of which is equivalent to to driving for more than 6 hours, with all the lights blazing in their home. Per person. Every week.
Run that out for a full year, and you get to a stunning emissions impact of 312 hours of driving a car per average American person per year. Just from eating meat.
Wow. Again.
This excellent piece from the Guardian last December starts strong and surprising:
Curbing the world’s huge and increasing appetite for meat is essential to avoid devastating climate change, according to a new report. But governments and green campaigners are doing nothing to tackle the issue due to fears of a consumer backlash, warns the analysis from the think tank Chatham House.
I'm not sure we have the luxury of cowering in the face of consumer wrath. Saskia Sassen, in her book "Expulsions: Brutality and Complexity in the Global Economy” (excerpted
here on Salon.com) argues that what governments are doing currently is simply not enough to halt the trajectory of climate change.
And she isn't alone in sounding the alarm that we are NOT on track halt or even slow climate change if we continue doing what we are doing.
I think we need to understand - and quickly - that we aren't going to be able to rely on government action and market forces acting on corporations to slash emissions enough to make a difference. We - each one of us, acting individually - needs to make changes. Summed over millions of people changing in concert, it may make a difference.
People's diets are incredibly personal to them. I learned that the hard way when I was vegan. While I kept my trap shut about my diet as much as possible, it was sometime unavoidable to mention the fact that I didn't eat meat or dairy, and the resulting interactions were rarely pleasant.
Reactions ranged from incomprehension (“Dairy doesn’t count, right?”) to divinely moronic (“But chicken isn’t meat!”) to horror (“You don’t eat ANY meat?!”) to a strangely bellicose stance, as if I’d said not simply “No thanks,” but “No thanks – AND YOU CAN”T HAVE ANY EITHER!” This belligerence was often married to a fiercely proprietary attitude (“I couldn’t LIVE without MY BACON!” or “No one’s taking away MY STEAK!”) that put me back on my heels a tad.
I never proselytized. I never urged anyone else to try it out. I just sometimes got pinned in social situations and had to admit that I was vegan. And having been through that, I realize that the phrase "consumer backlash" might be a tad tame.
What you eat each day is one of the most personal decisions you make. You are nourishing your one and only body with foods that link you to your cultural traditions, your family history, your memories, and the sensuous realm of your senses. Your tastes are unique, individual, and particular. There is something deep and ineffable about food choices. They are an essential expression of self, and of agency. Being told to change - or even being on the receiving end of a suggestion that you might change what you eat - is, to many people, a hugely impertinent affront.
But I'm making that suggestion. I am being impertinent, and suggesting that we eat less meat.
To quote Mikko Alanne again:
If everyone in the United States ate a vegetarian diet for seven days, they would save around 700 megatons of greenhouse gas emissions. That would be the same as removing all the cars off the roads in the US.
So I am very sorry to be impertinent, but it would be worth it. Wouldn't it?