"A global shift towards a vegan diet is vital to save the world from hunger, fuel poverty and the worst impacts of climate change."
In conjunction with World Environment Day, The United Nations Environment Programme released a new report. It reiterates what scientists, environmentalists and animal rights activists have been urging for eons - a world-wide reduction in meat consumption and a move towards vegetarianism and veganism.
THE OIL WE EAT
The UNEP Report continues to document and indict animal agriculture as one of the major contributors to environmental destruction, including climate change - a contributor that rivals energy use, transportation and population pressures.
"Impacts from agriculture are expected to increase substantially due to population growth and increasing consumption of animal products. Unlike fossil fuels, it is difficult to look for alternatives: people have to eat. A substantial reduction of impacts would only be possible with a substantial worldwide diet change, away from animal products.
Agriculture, particularly meat and dairy products, accounts for 70% of global freshwater consumption, 38% of the total land use and 19% of the world's greenhouse gas emissions."
The UNEP Report should come as no surprise - the links between meat production/consumption, resource depletion and pollution are well-established. Meat is an incredibly inefficient food source that consumes more energy and emits more greenhouse gases than all transportation combined. The energy costs to produce one pound of ground beef are roughly equivalent to one gallon of gasoline.
We are eating oil.
As in all things excessive, the United States leads the way, and does so blindly driven by corporate greed and consumer ignorance. The United states has quite the fixation with "cattle culture" -- we love our fast and "cheap" meat and consume about eight ounces a day, roughly twice the global average. And, although we represent only 5 percent of the world’s population, we slaughter more than 10 billion animals a year, more than 15 percent of the world’s total.
Americans are downing close to 200 pounds of meat, poultry and fish per capita per year(dairy and eggs are separate, and hardly insignificant), an increase of 50 pounds per person from 50 years ago. 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.
Our meat consumption is one of the greatest - yet least acknowledged - of all environmental threats. It consumes vast amounts of energy and fresh water, uses 75% of all corn and soybeans as animal feed, but beyond that, the meat industry is the major US source of industrial pollution. We are awash in manure, which is cited by the EPA as a major contribution to pollution in over 70% of the nations’ rivers, lakes and streams. Due to the brutally expedient conditions of CAFOs, this manure is laced with pesticides, hormones, anti-biotics (80% of all antibiotics produced in the US are used in the production of meat), excessive nitrogen content, decayed animals, and the residue of suffering. Increasingly, this manure finds its way into meat at the the slaughterhouse, as inhumane conditions, sick animals and the pressure for line speed leaves E.coli, salmonella and other pathogens in the final "product".
We are eating oil. We are eating manure. We are eating a destroyed environment.
Yes meat is murder as they say and yet, in the midst of last summer's BP Deephaven Horizon Oil Disaster - there were many mentions of reducing fossil dependence, of alternative energy, of driving less and conserving more-- but, save for Macca's Meatless Mondays, barely a mention of lunch..
Why is that??
Our lust for meat comes at an unbearable cost -- to the environment, to our health and to the animals. For many in metropolitan areas, these costs remain largely invisible. We are far away from sprawling feedlots or confinement barns that house up to 100,000 battery cage hens, 50,000 turkeys, 5000 hogs or 3000 dairy cows. We are far away from manure-soaked spray fields. We are far away from the transport trucks that drive doomed animals to their deaths by the dark of night. We are far away from bloody "disassembly line" slaughterhouses where under--paid and often undocumented workers toil in the one of the most dangerous jobs in America. We are far away from the faces of food that are now random parts -- breasts wings ribs thighs - or exoticized cruelty a'la veal and foie gras.
We do not have to look.
The industrialization -- and dehumanization -- of American animal farming is a relatively new, evitable and local phenomenon: no other country raises and slaughters its food animals quite as intensively or as brutally as we do. Were the walls of our meat industry to become transparent, literally or even figuratively, we would not long continue to do it this way. Tail-docking and sow crates and beak-clipping would disappear overnight, and the days of slaughtering 400 head of cattle an hour would come to an end.
For who could stand the sight?
We cannot stand the sight of the Deephaven destruction. We cannot stand the corporate greed, the callousness, the endless oil subsidies at the expense of the public and the planet. We cannot stand the spoiled marshes, the oiled birds, the bloated dolphins.
But how we can we stand the perpetual waste and corruption of fresh water? How can we stand the degradation of topsoil and the decimation of forests? How can we stand the subsidized corporate domination of food -- how can we stand Cargill, Monsanto, Smithfield, ConAgra??? How can we stand the Gulf's agriculturally-induced Dead Zone? How can we stand the organized torture of billons??
Please look.
You will see the death of the planet on your plate.
RESOURCES/ACTION
Stop eating oil.
We cannot stop the gusher in the Gulf. We cannot personally clean up the plumes or the tar - balls. We cannot, overnight, end our fossil fuel dependence, or instantly revise our infrastructure to support mass public transport and less reliance on cars.
But we can change what we eat. The biggest impact we can make for the environment is the very decision over which we have the most control. Our individual action could directly and immediately change the world.
Please heed the UNEP Report. Eat less meat. Eat local, grass-feed free-range if you must.
Go vegetarian. Go vegan..
Please try..
GoVeg
Community Supported Agriculture
Slow Food
Organic Consumers Association
Vegan Action
Humane Farming Association
Farm Sanctuary
This diary was originally published for World Environment Day, June 5 2010. Thanks to all of you who tipped recced and commented the first time around.