The Meaty Truth (21 page)

The poster child for deforestation is the Amazon Rainforest. Half of the Amazon, along with its valuable medicines and rich biodiversity, will be gone forever by 2030 if we continue at our current rate of obliteration. The speed at which we are clearing the Amazon is so rapid—6 million acres annually—that NASA photos from space can visibly show the demolition.
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The Amazon, however, is not the only area being destroyed by Brazil’s ever-growing meat production. Brazil’s
Cerrado
is almost completely gone. Eighty percent, or four million acres, of the once rich, biologically-diverse forest is now being used as cattle pastures and land to grow feed crops.
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Brazil is rapidly becoming the largest producer of meat products, and the United States is the leading importer of beef from Brazil. See how our meals have a global significance?

While the Amazon and Brazil are the faces of deforestation, this destruction is happening worldwide, as other countries race to imitate America’s awful example of food production. China is on the fast track to turning its country into a toxic desert. As China ups its livestock production, it is clearing away land for feed crops and grazing at an astonishing rate. Each year, land equivalent in size to the state of Rhode Island is being cleared to produce meat. With the land go the exotic, unique, and breathtaking animals that call these forests and habitats home.

We are facing the sixth-largest mass extinction in history as ten thousand species disappear each year due to factory farms. This is pandemic, virus-level annihilation. Deforestation and land-use changes from factory farming are causing up to five hundred times greater than normal extinction rates than in the past. The impact of losing our forests does not just affect the immediate animals in the vicinity.

Deforestation impacts fish in our oceans. Trees do more than just release oxygen that we need to breathe. They help mitigate climate change by
absorbing carbon dioxide. When the trees are no longer around to absorb the carbon, the carbon either sinks into the ocean or is released into the air, contributing to the increase in carbon dioxide in our air. When the carbon sinks into the ocean, it changes the pH balance of the water, making the ocean more acidic. Our fish are dying because they cannot live in an acidic environment. Increased acid in our oceans bleaches the absolutely stunning barrier reefs, destroying the homes of millions of ocean creatures.

What is the big deal with losing some bugs, fish, and exotic animals you have probably never seen before? Remember basic science in school where we learned about the food chain? When you wipe out massive sections of that, it creates a ripple effect that throws off the entire balance of the global ecosystem. Every living creature is affected by every single bug, insect, frog, bird, and fish that disappears from our Earth. We are completely restructuring the entire ecological system, and the consequences are dire.

The Real Hunger Games

We have about seven billion people in the world and grow enough food to feed nine billion. Yet there are about 925 million people, or one in seven people, who are starving worldwide. There is something terribly wrong with these numbers.
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While hunger and starvation are complex, global issues, factory farming creates a major problem with distribution of our food sources. Think about this: if we reduced meat consumption by just 10 percent, a miniscule amount, we could feed one hundred million more people. Putting an end to hunger worldwide is a realistic goal, and it starts with taking our food back from the animals that are devouring the majority of our raw-food sources.

It makes absolutely zero sense that we feed 80 percent of all the grains and soybeans grown in the United States to cows, chickens, and pigs that become food. Worldwide, the meat and dairy industry uses 97 percent of all soybeans produced!
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We are only getting 3 percent of the grains and soybeans available. Since we do not grow enough grain and soybeans in the United States to feed all of our animals, we import a large portion of it from developing nations. Instead of feeding their local communities, they are shipping the grain to the United States for our buckets of chicken wings. Call us greedy, but somehow
this allocation of food seems a little unfair. The irony is that when we eat meat, we are only getting 10 percent of the calories the animal consumed. This means 90 percent of what these animals eat comes out as waste!
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Agribusiness will argue and say factory farming is the way to feed the world. By producing more meat and dairy products in as short a time and as cheaply as possible, we can feed more people and make food more affordable. Sadly, this logic falls extremely short of the truth. Every two seconds a child dies from hunger.
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There are about sixty million Americans without enough food, and the number is growing, not to mention that meat and dairy are the least nutritious foods to feed our world.

Factory farming depends upon growing and slaughtering as many animals in as little time as possible to make a profit. To achieve this laser-fast turnover, the animals require a tremendous amount of food in order to get fat and ready for slaughter as quickly as possible. Instead of relying upon the animals’ natural, grass-fed diet, factory farms feed animals fattening grains and agents that nature never intended for them to eat and are very hard for their stomachs to digest. We are using up massive amounts of resources, getting fewer calories per input than if we directly ate the grains,
and
we are eating less nutritious products. This is a lose-lose situation.

If all the grain and soybeans that are produced for livestock were given to humans, it would feed 1,400,000 people in the United States.
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A United Nations report,
The Environmental Food Crisis
, estimated that if current meat production per capita was reduced in the industrialized world and restrained worldwide to the year 2000’s levels by 2050, we would free up enough tons of cereal to feed
one billion
people in 2050.
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If we changed the land used raising beef to growing vegetables, we could feed twenty-two times the number of people.
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Clearly, we have the food resources to solve our hunger games. As the population has topped seven billion with indications of only increasing, we must reevaluate how we are using our existing food resources.

Water Wars

The world is in a water crisis. Countries are already fighting over access to clean water. While we assume water is a replenishing and abundant
resource, clean,
fresh
water is scarce. Ninety-seven percent of our planet is water, but only 3 percent is freshwater. Of this 3 percent, less than 1 percent can be used as drinking water.
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Not only are the animals hogging all the food sources, they are using and contaminating our freshwater sources. Globally, livestock uses 8 percent more water than humans. Considering animals’ high consumption of water and resources, as seen in the Ogallala Aquifer, which is now half depleted, it is fast becoming a bleak situation. We are heading toward water wars in the very near future.

Nearly half of all the water used in the United States goes toward raising animals for food. The animals destined for your plate consume about 2.3 billion gallons of water per day, or about eight hundred billion gallons per year.
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While these are big numbers, they do not include the rivers, streams, and aquifers that factory farms frequently contaminate with animal feces. Those numbers just account for all of the water usage it takes to get that steak on your plate: from watering the crops that are used to feed the animals to watering the animals. Of the fifty-six million acres of land that farmers irrigate for crops, twenty-three million of those acres are used for livestock feed. It takes about twenty-eight
trillion
gallons of water to irrigate those acres every year.

Let’s make an easy comparison. It takes about 2,500 gallons of water, depending on the country, to make one pound of hamburger meat. It only takes twenty-five gallons of water to produce one pound of wheat. The math is not hard here. It takes about one hundred times more water to produce meat than healthy, nutritious grains. Needless to say, this substantial difference is problematic when millions of people are already living in water-stressed areas.

As the population is expected to reach nine billion by 2050, our water supply will become an ever-more precious and scarce resource.
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Currently 1.1 billion people in the world do not have access to clean water, and another 2.5 billion do not have access to proper sanitation. In the United States, we recently had one of the worst droughts in history. Our grass shriveled to dark brown. Our crops died. Food prices spiked. Quite a foreboding preview of the future that we would like to avoid. There is a logical answer here to prevent water wars from happening.

Fuel in Our Food

While America, and largely the rest of the world, focuses on gas-guzzling SUVs, we are overlooking some of the biggest culprits of oil consumption: the cows, chickens, pigs, and lambs. A grain-fed beef steer will require 284 gallons of oil in its short fourteen-month lifetime before being slaughtered.
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It takes eleven times more fuel to make one calorie of animal protein than one calorie of plant protein. With gas prices today eating into our paychecks, we would never dump gallons of gasoline on the floor for sport. But that is what we are doing when we eat meat and dairy products.

Our meat and dairy factory farm system is literally fueled by oil. We are not just talking about transportation and trucking food products to our grocery stores. When grain replaced grass, farmers turned to twentieth-century industrial technologies such as synthetic fertilizers, toxic pesticides and herbicides, and hybrid and genetically modified crop varieties to boost harvests.
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This use of corn and grain as animal feed requires the heavy use of chemical fertilizers. Chemical fertilizers are made from oil.
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By switching food animals away from their natural, grass diet to grains, we essentially switched livestock from solar-powered beings to grain-fed, fossil-fueled machines. All of this toxic crap gets into your cells when you eat meat and dairy.

Today, meat and dairy production uses 19 percent of the fossil fuels in the United States. About half of the energy used to create the glorified American hamburger comes from the production of the feed. Thirty-three percent of our land is maintained with fertilizers. In itself, fertilizer production is energy intensive, as it takes energy to bind the nitrogen-gas particles in the atmosphere. A sad incongruence is that with the amount of energy used to create fertilizers, about half of the fertilizer is lost through volatilization, leaching, and runoff from oversaturation.
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These runoffs are killing billions of fish and contaminating our water supplies. As the United States imports the majority of its fertilizers, fertilizer incurs a huge transportation cost.
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The scale of this problem is massive.

Adding insult to injury, using massive amounts of fertilizer not only consumes oil, but also produces harmful gases that pollute our air. One study found that “fertilizer production for feed crops alone contributes
some 41 million tons of carbon dioxide (CO
₂
) annually—the equivalent of that produced by nearly 7 million cars.”
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This is why researchers Gidon Eschel and Pamela Martin at the University of Chicago found that a meat-eater who drives a Prius uses more fossil fuels than a vegan who drives a gas-guzzling SUV. Looks like it’s time to “green” your diet,
not your car.

Ironically, factory farming’s reliance on fossil fuels goes against the very tenets of its foundation to create a more independent America. Aside from placing America’s food security in a vulnerable position by relying on other countries, such as the Middle East and South America, our world’s natural reserves of fossil fuels are drying up. We simply cannot continue guzzling oil for our food indefinitely.

Factory Farming Stinks

Global climate change has the potential to kill 150,000 Americans over the next decade. Air pollution from climate change will become a “bigger global killer than dirty water,” killing an estimated 3.6 million people a year by 2050, according to the most recent Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) report. Climate change is one of the most significant environmental issues of our time, and our meat and dairy diets contribute more to our changing climate than all transportation worldwide. In fact, you can drive to the moon and back 114,000 times, and you still will have released less carbon dioxide gases than the US factory-farmed chicken industry releases annually!
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We need to make it clear that climate change is
not
all about carbon dioxide. In fact, it is the least dangerous of the greenhouse gases. Methane is twenty-five times more potent than carbon dioxide and remains in the air anywhere between nine to fifteen years.
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Nitrous oxides have three hundred times the potential of carbon dioxide to warm the Earth.
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What produces methane, ammonia, and nitrous oxides? Factory farming!

The majority of factory farming’s most-potent greenhouse-gas emissions—i.e. ammonia and methane—come from the billion tons of animal manure and flatulence or, bluntly, cow farts. Thousands of open-air cesspools dotting the American landscape release toxic methane gases that add
to climate change. The more than 160 gases released by these lagoons are so toxic that an entire Michigan family drowned in a pig-sh!t lagoon trying to save each other from the toxic fumes. Talk about a crappy way to go.

It seems silly, crude, and downright crazy to say cow farts add to climate change, but it is the truth! Grains make cows super gassy. Instead of logically dealing with this problem, a company is developing a gas pill for cows to take with their meals. Some researchers are also genetically modifying cows in their laboratory to design one that can handle all that gas. But let’s be real, do we really need to go that far to cut the gas? There are obviously smarter and less ridiculous solutions.