The Meaty Truth (20 page)

Obviously these payments are not serving their purpose, because animal sh!t continues to seep into our water sources. Manure has damaged about one-third of our waterways. So not only are we paying for the factories to improperly manage the waste, we have to pay for the cleanup. Doesn’t seem fair or even financially feasible, now does it? By subsidizing grain prices and directly subsidizing CAFOs with EQIP payments, the government is propping up an industry that costs more than it is worth.

Selling Lies

One of agribusiness’s most misleading claims is that it helps stimulate rural economies. Factory farms love to claim that they create jobs. The reality is far from the truth and actually the opposite. Factory farms destroy jobs, homes, and health all in one fell swoop.

In a time when the United States wants to improve economic growth and create jobs, factory farms are not the stimulus this country needs. Economic growth in communities near hog-factory farms is actually 55 percent slower than the rest of the country. Factory farms have the highest rate of turnover due to poor working conditions. The turnover rate is 100 percent—the highest for any industry. This is after they have booted all of the local farmers out of business who are unable to compete with big industrial business. For many people, farming has been in their families for centuries. That is their livelihood. But animal factories, which clearly aren’t farming, are destroying one of America’s quintessential figures.

After their livelihoods are destroyed, those living in rural communities have a hard time moving away. Across the country, families are imprisoned, unable to move away from the stench of manure, because their property values have greatly declined. This comes to a $26 billion reduction in property values in total.
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It isn’t hard to understand why this happened. Who would want to move next to ten thousand smelly hogs by choice?

To add insult to injury, factory farms impose huge health costs on surrounding rural communities. The health-care cost associated with ammonia pollution is $36 billion a year. This doesn’t even take into account the diminished quality of life. The stench is so bad people cannot breathe. Ammonia poisoning directly related to factory farming kills about 5,100 people per year.
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We can all agree that factory farms would win the worst neighbor award every year.

How Much For Another Earth?

We learned at a young age that when we make messes, we clean them up. Yet factory farms are allowed to create environmental disasters and let the public foot the bill. Their messes are not cheap either. In total, from manure remediation to soil erosion, pesticides, and fertilizers, as well as climate change and property devaluation, agribusiness costs us $37.2 billion in hidden external ecological costs. Think about adding that to the price tag. That chicken, beef, and pork is actually expensive.

Let’s consider the environmental price tag of the over one billion tons of animal crap from factory farming:
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• To clean up the soil throughout the whole of the United States from hog and dairy manure would cost taxpayers about $4.1 billion.
  
• Reducing water and air pollution due to manure from factory farming would annually cost about $1.6 billion. Sh!t really does smell that bad. What would happen if factory farms actually complied with the Clean Water Act? It would only cost factory farms $1.16 billion for both air and water compliance. It apparently pays less to be clean.
  
• How much to repair leaky manure lagoons? $2.4 billion a year.
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  In addition to the problems spilled onto us by sh!t, factory farming is severely destructive. For example, soil loss is one of our nation’s more prominent environmental problems. Livestock production is responsible for 55 percent of soil erosion. While this doesn’t seem like a big deal, soil erosion leads to flood damage. It also costs about $15.4 billion per year.
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  Compounding this problem is
  the overuse of fertilizers and pesticides on the soil that causes runoff, which damages our waterways and creates massive dead zones in our oceans, rivers, lakes, and streams. This costs about $7.5 billion per year.
  

When it comes to our environment, it is hard to quantify all of the external costs. The value of nature cannot always be monetized. While we can use money to remedy some of the consequences, some of the destruction is permanent and irreversible. How can you put a price on losing an entire river or species? There are priceless losses that have a ripple effect on our environment. We are fooling ourselves if we think meat and dairy are a bargain. Clearly, the industry selling points of efficient and progressive means of producing food fall flat on their face when we look beyond the grocery store price.

Reaping Real Rewards

We don’t need to be math geniuses to see that the numbers just don’t add up. Meat and dairy masquerade as value meals but in reality are financial (and health) disasters. As Professor Eschel so aptly stated:

Perhaps the best hope for change lies in consumers’ becoming aware of the true costs of industrial meat production. When you look at environmental problems in the US nearly all of them have their source in food production and in particular meat production. And factory farming is ‘optimal’ only as long as degrading waterways is free. If dumping this stuff becomes costly—even if it simply carries a non-zero price tag—the entire structure of food production will change dramatically.
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What would happen if meat and dairy internalized their costs? For one, most factory farms would not survive. Their profit margins are actually so small that they would be forced to revamp their business. While agribusiness howls that this would be pushing America back about fifty years, we don’t think that sounds like such a terrible alternative. Back then,
American citizens never had the chronic health problems we do today, and they ate less meat. We don’t need factory farms, and we shouldn’t be supporting them. Imagine how much real improvement we could make in the government if we freed up the billions of dollars supporting them?

The benefits of shifting our nation’s dollars away from agribusiness and toward supporting healthy ventures are astounding and range from financial to health and environmental. For example, by reducing American consumption of meat by 44 percent, we could directly benefit from:
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• 172,000 fewer deaths from cancer, diabetes, and heart disease each year. Diet really is that powerful!
  
• $26 billion in savings to Medicare and Medicaid programs. Our taxpayer dollars are currently paying for preventable disease, friends. Let’s use that money more wisely.
  
• 3.4 trillion pounds of reduced carbon dioxide emissions each year. We might actually be able to make a real impact on global warming. Taking shorter showers just won’t cut it.
  
• $184 billion decline in animal food’s external costs imposed on society. Yes, meat really is that expensive.
  

Consider this: two-thirds of our government spending on food goes toward animal-based products that the USDA and doctors around the world are saying we should eat less of. Not to mention that their production destroys our environment on a local, national, and international scale. Comparatively, our government spends less than 2 percent supporting fruits and vegetables that are known to reverse and protect against heart disease, cancer, autoimmune diseases, osteoporosis, and diabetes, to name a few.

In order to achieve significant changes, the policy of handouts to meat, dairy, and processed-junk food has got to end. Unfortunately, the passage of the 2013 Farm Bill that gives $7 billion in crop subsidies does not bode well for our future.
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It’s time the cost of the industry be reflected in the price. Just like any business, meat and dairy need to internalize their costs, change their prices, and let consumers drive demand. Maybe if we step back, we can see more clearly that the focus should not be on how to
sustain our current level of destruction, but on consuming less for a better-quality product. Adding up these costs, it is clear that factory farms are not an answer to feeding the nation but a costly and, we might add, smelly burden.

Know your Sh!t Solutions:

1) Understand that your ninety-nine-cent bucket of wings costs a lot more than it is worth. Ask yourself how much you value your health before buying the cheapest meat and dairy possible. Remember, you are so worth it!

2) When you grocery shop, triple the price of the meat and dairy products that are in your hand. That three-dollar gallon of milk is nine dollars, friends! That’s the real price. Still want it? You are paying for it with your tax dollars.

3) Substitute meat and dairy with lentils, whole grains, nuts, veggies, and fruits. So delicious and less expensive. It isn’t just factory-farmed meat that is unhealthy; all meat and dairy is unhealthy. Think it is too expensive to eat fruits and vegetables? Check out the book
Eating Vegan on $4.00 a Day
by Ellen Jaffe Jones to get you started.

CHAPTER 9

This Sh!t Ain’t Working

O
ur once-thought-of-as-healthy meat and dairy-filled meals are killing our loved ones and decimating our planet. This may be difficult to accept, but it is time to face the facts. The level of factory farming’s ecological and biological destruction is now mirroring a deadly virus on the loose. We are wiping out our precious, finite resources. Put simply, this food system ain’t working, not just for America’s ever-expanding waistline and disappearing freshwater sources, but also for the world.

Since 2006, the United Nations and Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has repeatedly urged that we must curb our meat and dairy consumption by
half
in order to sustain the current levels of ecological and environmental damage that meat and dairy production causes. Have we paid attention to these warnings? No. Do most Americans know about these warnings? Probably not. But now that you know what crap is in our meat and dairy, is there a reason not to embrace cutting our consumption? Honestly, what is the worst that could happen, besides possibly creating a better world, solving world hunger, restoring
our pristine, freshwater sources, preserving our forests, and creating cleaner air?

Having Tea with Africa, South America, and the Middle East

Africa, the Middle East, and South America probably seem far removed from your everyday life, but they play an integral part in every meal, snack, and drink. Our food system is a global interaction, and we can no longer afford to only consider our own neighborhood. Friends, our forests are disappearing. Our fish are being wiped from our oceans, and whether we believe in science or evolution, the facts show that our global temperatures are changing. We can guarantee that if we continue down this path, we will be fighting world wars over food and water rather than nukes and oil. The United Nations, Union of Concerned Scientists, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and World Bank have already issued warnings saying that is where our world is heading.

Let’s take a visual snapshot of meat production. Every pound of hamburger meat uses up 284 gallons of gasoline, sixteen pounds of grain, about 2,500 pounds of water, and fifty-five acres of rainforest. This is what it takes to make a one pounder. One hamburger utilizes oil from the Middle East, takes grain from the starving children around the world, and destroys the beautiful Amazon rainforest in Brazil. It also impacts us here at home by using 19 percent of all fossil fuels and adding $147 billion to the health-care industry to fight obesity.
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We just cannot continue this type of consumption. Our resources are truly running dry. We are already consuming over 20 percent of what the Earth can ecologically sustain, and this hasn’t even accounted for the UN’s predicted increase in meat consumption as China and India have embarked on a path to imitate the SAD, or Standard American Diet.
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We can try to defy this logic, but in the end Mother Nature will win. We cannot live on an Earth without a healthy, biologically diverse ecosystem. We have to immediately move away from sloppy,
polluting factory farms and towards the food system of the future that is sustainable, efficient, and nutritious.

Factory Farming—The Most Unsustainable Machine on the Planet

Factory farming is not technological progress. That grilled chicken breast for dinner required vast amounts of land, torn-down forests, soybeans, fertilizers, drugs, water, and oil. But for the amount of resources going in, we are not getting an efficient output in terms of calories and nutrition. Add the additional waste and toxins emitted, and it is ridiculous that we actually call this method of producing food efficient and progressive.

In this Case, Size Matters

Factory farming is the biggest user and abuser of our land resources. What does land have to do with our meat and milk? Well, when we switched animals from eating grass like they were born to do to eating grain, we needed land to grow the crops. According to the UN, one-third of the total arable land in the world is used to grow crops, such as soybeans, grains, and corn for animal feed.
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Just imagine, a quarter of the Earth’s land is dedicated to feeding the animals we eat! The total amount of land used to grow feed crops and graze equals about twelve million square miles, or the size of the whole continent of Africa.
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There are a few teeny, tiny issues with dedicating land the size of Africa to growing crops for animals that we eat. The first problem is we are over-using the land and inundating it with so many chemicals from fertilizers to pesticides and insecticides that we are destroying the natural qualities of the soil that keeps the land healthy and able to produce crops. This over-exhausting soybean and grain production and extensive grazing cause soil erosion and desertification. Our soil is turning to crap!

Livestock is responsible for half of all soil erosion. The United Nations found that seventy-five billion tons of soil is lost in the United States per year, which costs about $400 million dollars per year. What is the big deal with eroded soil? When the soil becomes eroded from overuse, it can no
longer grow crops. Forest soil, in particular, is already nutrient poor. This means soil from these sources only lasts a few years before farmers have to move on to new land, which results in more land having to be cleared to produce more crops, and the endless cycle continues. The constant cycle of degradation of the land and then the need for additional land is a driving force behind a massive second problem: global deforestation.
We have to cut the crap, not the trees!