Whole (28 page)

I began this chapter with a quote, attributed to Chief Seattle: “Whatever we do to the earth, we do to ourselves.” You may have come across it, or some variation on it, before; it’s often invoked by environmentalists to remind us that we can’t clear-cut our forests, pollute our water,
and spew toxins into our air without ultimately harming ourselves. But what’s less obvious is that the reverse is equally true: what we eat has a huge impact on our environment. Specifically, our high consumption of animal-based foods contributes to environmental problems like soil loss, groundwater contamination, deforestation, fossil fuel use, and depletion of deep aquifers.

A Cornell University colleague of mine, Dr. David Pimentel, has documented many ways that our system of livestock production wastes precious resources and destroys the environment. He estimates that animal-based food requires about five to fifty times more land and water resources than the same number of calories of plant-based food (depending on various considerations, including animal species and whether the animal is pasture fed). In a world where human hunger is endemic, this inefficient use of resources is a tragedy.

Among Dr. Pimentel’s findings:
¹

• Animal protein production requires eight times as much fossil fuel as plant protein.
  
• The livestock population of the United States consumes five times as much grain (which is not even their natural diet) as the country’s entire human population.
  
• Every kilogram of beef requires 100,000 liters of water to produce. By comparison, a kilogram of wheat requires just 900 liters, and a kilogram of potatoes just 500 liters.
  
• A United Nations-sponsored workshop
  ²
  of about 200 experts concluded that 80 percent of deforestation in the tropics is attributable to the creation of new farmland, the majority of which is used for livestock grazing and feed.
  

So we’ve got a host of interconnected problems that all stem from our addiction to an animal-protein-based diet. Simply put, our industrial system of animal production is unsustainable. We’re using up our natural resources, such as fresh water and healthy soil, faster than we can replenish them. And the side effects of our animal-protein-driven food economy include environmental toxins and the poisoning of the very air we all depend on for life.

These are serious problems; each of them deserves a book of their own. And they’re only the tip of the iceberg. If you want to learn more,
I highly recommend J. Morris Hicks’s excellent work,
Healthy Eating, Healthy World.
For the purposes of this discussion, however, I want to focus on four problems that neither policy makers nor the media generally see as being connected to diet: two of the most significant environmental crises of our time, global warming and the depletion of America’s deep underground water resources; and the cruelty and violence done to two of the most vulnerable groups on the planet, animals and impoverished humans. We’ll see how reductionist thinking keeps us stuck, and how a wholistic approach can solve these multiple problems simultaneously.

Let’s start with the most prominent ecological crisis of our time: global warming. When you look seriously at the numbers, you find that switching from a meat-based to a plant-based diet would do more to curb and reverse global warming than any other initiative.

One of the intelligent criticisms of Al Gore’s powerful and important documentary,
An Inconvenient Truth,
was that its prescriptions were woefully inadequate in light of the problem’s magnitude. Tips like replacing incandescent light bulbs with compact fluorescents, lowering your thermostat by a couple of degrees, and keeping your car tires fully inflated may make you feel virtuous, but have little to no impact on the real problem. A tip sheet available from
ClimateCrisis.net
announces that reducing the amount of garbage you produce by 10 percent can save 1,200 pounds of carbon dioxide per year. When you do the math, you realize that the other 90 percent of your garbage still produces 10,800 pounds of CO
₂
each year. Doing the same things a little less intensively is not going to turn global warming around, especially when the CO
₂
we’ve already produced is going to be trapping heat in the atmosphere for hundreds of years to come. It’s like we’re all on a bus that’s speeding toward the edge of a cliff, and the best idea we have is for everyone to stick their arms out the windows to increase wind resistance. Maybe someone should jump into the driver’s seat and hit the brakes!

In 2006, the United Nations’ Food and Agricultural Organization issued a report that highlighted the connection between animal foods and
global warming.
³
Its contents are striking because this agency is chiefly responsible for developing livestock operations around the world. Being biased, if anything, toward observing the opposite effect, this report still concluded that eating animal-based foods creates 18 percent of global warming, more than the contributions of either industry or transportation.
⁴
This information, now six years old, is still not widely known.

On the relatively few occasions that food enters discussions on global warming, this 18 percent estimate is brought up. However, a more recent report concludes that this estimate of food’s contribution to warming may be much higher. Robert Goodland, the longtime senior environmental advisor to the president of the World Bank, and Jeff Anhang, his colleague at the World Bank Group, have determined that livestock rearing contributes at least
51 percent
of total global warming.

The most famous greenhouse gas, the one that gets most of the attention from the media, activists, and policy makers, is CO
₂
. But CO
₂
is not the only greenhouse gas, and is not in fact the one most sensitive to reduction efforts. Methane (CH
₄
) offers a more promising lever with which to push back global warming. Molecule for molecule, methane is about twenty-five times more potent in trapping heat than carbon dioxide. But more important, methane, with an atmospheric half-life of seven years, disappears from the atmosphere far faster than carbon dioxide, which has a half-life of more than a century. So almost as soon as we eliminate sources of methane, its contribution to the greenhouse effect begins to wane significantly. By contrast, even after we stop releasing CO
₂
, the gas that has already been released will contribute to global warming for decades.

When the amount of methane in the atmosphere is considered over a twenty-year period, its global warming potential is said to be
seventy-two times
that of CO
₂
.
⁵
And methane is largely associated with industrial livestock production. This means that reducing meat consumption, the main driver of the livestock industry, may be the most rapid way to affect global warming. It turns out that our present programs, focused on carbon dioxide reduction, are mostly a lot of hot air—in more ways than one.

If this new assessment of the methane contribution is correct, the implications are momentous. I am puzzled as to why more people in the environmental community aren’t paying attention to this. Do they not want to challenge the livestock industry? Maybe we need bioengineers to
figure out how to entrap and safely process cow farts. Failing this, maybe we should stop producing and eating the machines that do the farting.
⁶

As I write this in August 2012, most of the United States is in the grip of its worst drought in over a century. Scientists can debate the connection between this catastrophe and global warming, but there’s no denying that rainwater is in short supply, crops are dying before germination, and vast amounts of groundwater will be needed if our country is to produce enough crops to feed its people. The trouble is, most of the available groundwater either already has been used up by the enormous demands of beef production (each kilogram of beef, remember, requires 100,000 liters of water to produce), or has been polluted by runoff from beef production (huge volumes of water run through feedlots to remove the vast quantities of manure).

The great Ogallala Aquifer, lying under eight Midwestern farming states (South Dakota, Nebraska, Wyoming, Colorado, Kansas, Oklahoma, New Mexico, and Texas), has been especially threatened by animal-based agriculture. Its water collected there ten to twenty million years ago,
⁷
and now contains an estimated volume equal to that of Lake Huron, the second largest of the Great Lakes. This water provides nearly all the water for residential, industrial, and agricultural use in this very large farming region, one of the richest agricultural production areas on the planet. “More than 90% of the water pumped from the Ogallala irrigates at least one fifth of all the U.S. cropland,” according to a major report of the nonprofit Kerr Center for Sustainable Agriculture in Oklahoma.
⁸

It’s crucial that groundwater consumption doesn’t exceed its replenishment by rain. But that’s not what’s happening with the Ogallala Aquifer. Water-intensive livestock farming is depleting it far faster than it can be refilled, to the point where this ancient resource has lost an estimated 9 percent of its water since the 1950s. In other words, we’re using it up faster than rain can replenish it—a recipe for environmental disaster.
⁹

Not only that, the Ogallala water is being polluted with chemicals used in growing feed for cattle production.
¹⁰
One of the more significant
of these is nitrates, which are used in the commercial fertilizer used to produce animal feed and which can be quite toxic for pregnant women and children.
¹¹
Saying no to factory-farmed meat from the Midwest can go a long way toward preserving the way of life of the thousands of farmers who provide plant-based food to millions of Americans, as well as improving the health of these millions wherever they consume this food.

Another consequence of consuming animal-based foods is animal cruelty: farming practices that, in making the production of animal-based foods more efficient, also increase those animals’ suffering.

Concern for the rights of animals has drawn many people to eat plant-based foods, although as you saw in Part I, this is not what brought me to my present position. Although I certainly embrace the proposition that unnecessary acts of violence against animals should be avoided, it was the findings of experimental animal research—hateful to many in the animal rights community—that started me on the path that ultimately led me to my present position and, eventually, to my enlightenment on this issue. For myself, I am opposed to unnecessary violence of any kind: violence against people, violence against our environment, and violence against other sentient beings. Honoring life of all kinds is the holy grail that I seek.

However, I have much greater concern today regarding violence done to animals than before. In considerable measure, I’ve been spurred to this view because I have watched the emergence of the farming practice called confined animal feeding operation (CAFO), a fancy phrase for factory farming. The main difference between factory farming and the old-time farming of my youth is philosophical. My family and I thought of animals as sensory beings, capable both of comfort and suffering, while factory farmers, by virtue of their business model, see them as virtually lifeless units of production, much like the raw materials of any factory. Early in my career in the late 1960s, I remember well when the dean of the College of Agriculture at Virginia Tech excitedly told us about his consulting work, which led to the livestock operations that eventually became the CAFOs.
It was inevitable, as the economies of scale that CAFOs enabled became necessary for the bottom line of any farmer who wanted his operation to survive. The dean painted a technologically advanced picture of automated conveyor belts delivering precise amounts of nutritionally optimized feed to animals. Of automated machinery streamlining the milking of cows. Of contraptions for more efficiently collecting hens’ eggs. All this, he claimed, meant more profit for the farmer.

Cows are mostly docile animals. They certainly feel and express emotions. In times gone by, they mostly spent much of their fifteen to twenty years in the pasture (in spring, summer, and fall) or in barns bedded with straw (in winter). In CAFOs, dairy cows live only three or four years, coinciding with their years of peak milk production. They are penned up in tight living (dying) quarters, never again to be pastured on green grass after they begin producing milk. I am constantly reminded of this practice on my jogging route in upstate New York, where I see cows that live in a giant CAFO poking their heads slightly out of their open-air building, as if they were craving the lush grass outside.

Young cows’ tails are frequently chopped off (a practice known as docking), leaving only a stub a foot or so long, so that the person milking the cows avoids getting “switched” with a filthy, often manure-encrusted, tail—something I remember all too well. A stub for a tail doesn’t do much to keep the flies off a cow’s back—that’s what tails are for—and if this irritation from flies affects a cow’s milk production, she is drenched with a pesticide spray that can get into the milk we find in our supermarkets.

Most factory-farmed cows are injected with a growth hormone to increase their milk production that also increases their udder size, sometimes to painful dimensions—a physical condition that promotes inflammation called mastitis. Antibiotics are then required to reduce the resulting infections, increasing the amounts of antibiotics, pesticides, blood, and bacteria in the milk that we buy and consume. What a unique cocktail for human consumption!

It’s a very different world these days on the farm—and it gets worse. Chickens unable to move in their cages because they’re forced to stand in one place long enough for their feet to permanently wrap around the wire mesh on the cage bottom, fixing them in place. Unnatural, abnormal lighting cycles used to make hens lay more eggs and increase the producer’s
profit. Pigs that give birth to their young in so-called farrowing crates, in which the piglets must nurse from the other side of parallel bars arranged to keep them separate from their mothers.