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Your Fork and the Earth

January 23, 2007

Rick passed on a great set of links that he found on Metafilter discussing the food we eat and how it relates to our environment and global warming. Since I made the jump to a vegetarian diet back in August, the inevitable question “why?” is raised by those that knew me previously as the deep-fried-turkey-carne-asada-meat-eating guy. The thing is, I did (and have done) so much research on the topic leading up to that decision, that it's sometimes difficult to pull all of that information from the depths of my brain when I need it. The articles mentioned in the link above are all great, and I highly recommend reading through them when you have the time. Other than the link to meat.org, which is worth watching if you can stomach it (fair warning, it's gruesome), these articles are free of the in-your-face scare tactics that turn most people off when discussing this topic. As a future reference for myself, and in an effort to share this information with you and save you some time, I thought I would post some of the facts that I found to be the most interesting; they certainly changed my view of food forever. You can call this vegetarian propaganda—as one of my friends did—but the sources of this information are pretty even sided and rock solid, so I encourage you to draw your own conclusions. I have collected this information from a variety of resources, all with credible references.

• Last month, the United Nations published a report on livestock and the environment with a stunning conclusion: "The livestock sector emerges as one of the top two or three most significant contributors to the most serious environmental problems, at every scale from local to global."
• The U.N. report says almost a fifth of global warming emissions come from livestock—that's more emissions than from all of the world's transportation combined.
• Researchers at the University of Chicago found that feeding animals for meat, dairy, and egg production requires growing some ten times as much crops as we'd need if we relied on a plant based diet. On top of that, we have to transport the animals to slaughterhouses, slaughter them, refrigerate their carcasses, and distribute their flesh all across the country.
• Producing a calorie of meat protein means burning more than ten times as much fossil fuels—and spewing more than ten times as much heat-trapping carbon dioxide—as does a calorie of plant protein. Researchers found that, when it's all added up, the average American does more to reduce global warming emissions by going vegetarian than by switching to a Prius.
• Animal agriculture takes up an incredible 70% of all agricultural land, and 30% of the total land surface of the planet. Today, 70% of former Amazon rainforest is used for pastureland, and feed crops cover much of the remainder. Most fast food beef comes from South America.
• While animal agriculture accounts for 9% of our carbon dioxide emissions, it emits 37% of our methane, and a whopping 65% of our nitrous oxide, gases with 23 and 296 times the warming power of carbon dioxide, respectively.
• Statistics from the Environmental Protection Agency show that animal agriculture is the single largest cause of methane emissions in the U.S.
• How can an animal's digestion impact global warming? Consider the volume: The United States alone slaughters more than 10 billion land animals every year.
• Meat consumption has increased five-fold in the past fifty years, and is expected to double again in the next fifty.
• Animal agriculture accounts for most of the water consumed in this country, emits two-thirds of the world's acid-rain-causing ammonia, and is the world's largest source of water pollution—killing entire river and marine ecosystems, destroying coral reefs, and of course, making people sick.
• American farms produce 5 million tons of manure a day, more than a hundred times that of the human population.
• A calorie of animal protein requires more than 10 times as much fossil fuel input than does a calorie of plant protein. The average American diet requires the production of an extra ton and a half of carbon dioxide-equivalent, in the form of actual carbon dioxide as well as methane and other greenhouse gases compared to a strictly vegetarian diet.
• In 2002, energy used for food production accounted for 17 percent of all fossil fuel use in the United States. And the burning of these fossil fuels emitted three-quarters of a ton of carbon dioxide per person.
• In their (University of Chicago) study, Eshel and Martin compared the energy consumption and greenhouse-gas emissions that underlie five diets: average American, red meat, fish, poultry and vegetarian (including eggs and dairy), all equaling 3,774 calories per day. The vegetarian diet turned out to be the most energy-efficient, followed by poultry and the average American diet. Fish and red meat virtually tied as the least efficient.
• 70% of US grain production is fed to livestock.
• Because of over-consumption of fish, all 17 of the world's major fishing areas have reached or exceeded their natural limits.
• Commercial fishers have devastated the ocean’s ecosystem to the extent that large fish populations are only 10 percent of what they were in the 1950s.
• The fish on ocean-based farms are plagued by parasites and diseases, which they pass to fish living near the farms.
• Fish farms pollute coastal waters with massive amounts of fish feces and require huge numbers of wild-caught fish to feed their captives.
• One-third of the world's fish catch is fed directly to livestock.
• As much as 85% of rangeland in the western US is being degraded by overgrazing.
• 64% of US cropland produces livestock feed.
• Only 2% of US cropland produces fruits and vegetables.
• It takes 2,500 gallons of water to produce 1 edible pound of beef, compared to 23 gallons of water needed for a pound of tomatoes or potatoes.
• 1,785 water bodies were impaired by feedlot pollution in 39 states in 1993.
• 95% of human exposure to the potent carcinogen dioxin comes from consuming meat, poultry and dairy.
• Nearly half of all fish sampled by Consumers Union was contaminated with bacteria from human or animal feces.
• 50% of all the antibiotics used in the US are fed to animals, and 80% of them are used to promote growth, not to treat disease.
• Ever wonder how something as nasty as E. coli ends up on spinach and lettuce? According to the FDA, you can thank the cows. Consider this report from the FDA's website concerning lettuce: “In a preliminary report presented at the August 2005 annual meeting of the International Association for Food Protection, E. coli O157:H7 was isolated from sediment in an irrigation canal bordering a ranch that had been identified in three separate outbreaks. The ranch is bowl-shaped; it sits upon a drained lake, and is highly susceptible to localized flooding. Expanded sampling in the Santa Rita Creek and the Salinas Valley area indicate that creeks and rivers in the Salinas watershed are contaminated periodically with E. coli O157:H7.”

I found a lot of this information to be quite eye-opening and useful, and I hope you do as well. Researching this topic often leads to other facets, such as animal cruelty and health. While I have not included this information in my list, it is equally as importmant to me. It was not, however, what initially brought me to my decision to stop eating meat and avoid animal products as much as possible.

Photo by Kim Kelly

Posted by Aaron on January 23, 2007 01:27 PM| Permalink