Whole (29 page)

Then there’s the stench in which these animals are forced to spend their entire existence. Walk into a chicken house with thousands of birds and you can feel your eyes burn and tear up. And it’s not just animals that can’t avoid the smell; if you live near a factory farm, you know that humans are subjected to it, too. I know the smell of cow manure—I shoveled it enough! Today’s cow manure has a pungent medicinal smell that is not what it was during my youth.

It’s not just the animals that have suffered greatly in this transformation of American agriculture. Family farms, the kind I was raised on, are rapidly going out of business. As I travel through the countryside these days, I see so many once-beautiful barns now mere stick skeletons of old boards covered with weeds. The directive to “get big or get out” has bankrupted most non-factory operations. And government subsidies to the CAFOs obscure the fact that they are as unsustainable economically as they are environmentally.

If you think that it’s natural for human beings to eat animals, consider just how unnatural are the lives and deaths of the animals that make up the American food supply in the twenty-first century.

Animals and farmers are not the only victims of our animal-based diet. When small-scale agriculture is converted to industrial-scale animal production in the developing world, small land holders are forced off their subsistence plots, and have no way to afford the food being produced on their former land.

I have worked in several desperately poor areas of the world, where my eyes were opened to the connection between meat production and the economic enslavement of the poorest, most vulnerable people in those areas. I’ve been in the slums of Manila and Port-au-Prince and have seen firsthand desperately hungry children begging for food in a society where the elite eat steak produced on land stolen from the poor. I’ve seen long stretches of the best land in the Dominican Republic taken away
from local farmers and handed to American and German firms, to raise livestock destined to become cheap hamburgers back home. I’ve heard stories of how this “best land” was “obtained” for cattle raising while small land owners were forced into the mountains, where food production is difficult if not impossible.

The simple math of industrial animal-protein production speaks volumes. In a world where millions of people die of starvation and starvation-related diseases every year, we still inexplicably insist on the gross inefficiency of cycling our plant production through animals before considering it “food.” Feeding meat-producing animals rather than feeding humans directly means we lose upward of 90 percent of the calories otherwise available for our consumption. And, as “low-carb” advocates are fond of pointing out, animal-based foods have no carbohydrates, which should, in reality, comprise about 80 percent of a truly healthy diet. Factory-farmed animals on this planet consume more calories than all the humans, by a long shot. Through this lens, the issue of world hunger seems a lot less like a problem of production or distribution and more like a problem with our personal priorities.

Factory farming and large-scale livestock farming also erode the land they use, making it nearly impossible for impoverished nations to pull themselves out of poverty in the future. We see this most distressingly in Latin American countries, whose rainforests are daily logged and converted into fields to grow grain for cattle. After a few years, the soil fertility is spent, and rain and wind erodes what little topsoil remains. Industrial agriculture can eke out a few more grain harvests through heavy application of nitrogen-based fertilizers and herbicides, but after a couple of decades, all that remains is dead earth, a biological desert that will take millennia to recover. The multinational companies that wreak this havoc don’t suffer, of course. They just move their operations to the next bit of fertile land—as long as they can still find some. Local farmers are left to pay the price.

If you are interested in solving the global problem of human poverty, you have many choices. You can “like” antipoverty status updates on Facebook. You can donate money to relief organizations that you trust. You can sign online petitions. You can volunteer to raise money. You can even join an advocacy or relief group and get involved on the ground. But one of the most important actions you can take is to say “no” to
the system that expropriates subsistence-farming land and turns it into unsustainable feedlots that produce meat for us, cash for the wealthy, and misery, servitude, and starvation for the masses. You can stop consuming factory-farmed meat and dairy.

We have a problem. No, we have many, many problems. Quixotically, we lament each problem, one by one, rarely seeing their connections to the food we choose to put in our bodies. We create specialists to help us solve each problem as if it stood alone. As a consequence, we fail to see interconnections, and we fail to see the whole. On several occasions, I’ve been invited to speak to environmental groups and have been asked to explain what I see as the obvious connections between environmental and health issues.

Choosing plant-based foods over animal-based foods reduces pain in so many ways. It alleviates our bodily pain.
¹²
It minimizes the pain animals experience by reducing CAFO farming. It also reduces human suffering associated with global poverty and hunger. Given all that, it’s easy to see that investing in programs that promote, distribute, and encourage the growing of whole, plant-based foods in poor countries would be far more economical and effective than reductionist attempts to solve all these problems separately, as if they had nothing to do with one another.

The problems we face are far more connected than disconnected. Think of the way galaxies are made up of clusters of stars, held together by gravity; these social problems are clustered the same way, except the gravitational pull between them is the food we choose to eat.

The proportion of each of these problems that can be resolved by consuming whole, plant-based foods varies, of course. But for this discussion, those proportions don’t matter as much as the fact that we can affect all of these problems in a positive way by doing the very same thing: eating better. There is no dietary or lifestyle strategy that is more comprehensive and effective in reducing and eliminating these problems than the routine consumption of whole, plant-based foods.

The single most important explanation for our failure to solve these problems, as with our failure to solve our health crisis, is our
paradigm-driven inability and unwillingness to look for their larger context. The more I contemplate the meaning of paradigms and our failure to recognize them, the more I become aware of their subtle but powerful control over our thinking. The more I contemplate the role of reductionism within these paradigms, the more I become aware of the way reductionism makes it even more difficult to visualize paradigms and their boundaries. The reductionist mental prison is the main thing keeping us from doing grand things for ourselves, each other, and the rest of sentient life on earth. We need to learn how to look for the natural networks that connect many seemingly disconnected events and activities. Only through doing so can we finally find the answers that elude us—whether that’s the answer to global warming, the solution to world hunger, or the effective and compassionate healing of our society’s most fearful health problems.

A
s we saw in Part II, the reductionist paradigm functions as a mental prison, preventing the best and brightest minds in science, government, and industry from solving some of our biggest problems. More than that, reductionism actually causes and exacerbates many of those problems. In short, reductionist science is not producing health.

When we look closely at the prison of the reductionist paradigm, we notice that there’s no lock on the cell door. We’re free to stroll out of our mental prison and into a wholistic worldview any time we want. Throughout history, paradigms have arisen, exerted their influence, and then faded, to be replaced by other paradigms that more effectively captured reality and more successfully promoted the common welfare. We have the evidence that our current reductionist paradigm is incorrect (largely supplied, ironically, by reductionist science). So why aren’t we walking out that door? The answer is that health information is controlled, and has been for a long time, by interests that are not in alignment with the common good—industries that care much more about their profit than our health. And those industries feel deeply threatened by the possibility of mass adoption of a plant-based diet.

In the next few chapters, we’ll look at the groups and other forces exerting that control. We’ll examine the obvious ones, such as the pharmaceutical, medical, and food industries, whose motives are transparently profit-seeking. But we’ll also turn our attention to those under the sway of that subtle power, who dance to the piper’s tune. We’ll see that my own field of academic research is highly compromised, incentivized to chase reductionist research past any social use or relevance to health. We’ll observe a scientifically illiterate media dutifully reporting the party line
on the limited or nonexistent effect of nutrition on health. We’ll witness a government in the thrall of industry-bought and pedigreed lobbyists. And finally, we’ll examine the seamy underbelly of disease-focused fundraising institutions like the American Cancer Society (ACS) and professional organizations like the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics (AND).

The riskiest thing we can do is just maintain the status quo.

—
BOB IGER

F
or the last few decades of my research career, I naïvely believed that just sharing the facts about the benefits of the WFPB diet would be enough to sway my colleagues, policy makers, journalists, and businesspeople. I had implicit faith in the evolutionary principle; I thought that once people knew the truth (and more important, experienced it for themselves), change would come naturally.

Looking back, my naïveté was immense. In that respect, I had no more ability to discern the plain truth than my reductionist colleagues. Despite example after example of human greed and fear of losing power, I still thought sharing the facts would be enough. That someday the weight of evidence would be so compelling, so overwhelming, that even the AND and the ACS (two organizations whose names, in my mind, mean essentially the same thing!) would bow to the truth and recognize
plant-based nutrition as the cornerstone of a healthy life, a healthy society, and a healthy planet. Scientists would come together with a unified voice to advocate for a sane diet and social policies that would enable all people to partake of it. Journalists would spread the very good news and devote their talents to telling inspiring stories of change. Government officials would hastily abandon ill-conceived subsidies for deadly foods and create nutritional guidelines and programs that could reduce health-care costs by 70 to 90 percent in a few years. And industry leaders, as visionary entrepreneurs, would embrace plant-based nutrition as the foundation of their cafeterias and health insurance plans in order to maintain a competitive advantage in attracting, retaining, and profiting from the labor of healthy and happy employees.

Despite the overwhelming evidence that supports a plant-based diet, none of these things has happened. Plant-based nutrition is still marginalized and maligned as an approach to reducing disease rates, obesity, and skyrocketing health-care costs. Journalists still tout gene therapy as the road to redemption and ignore the benefits of eating more plants and less meat and processed food. Lobbyists representing dairy, meat, sugar, and other processed foodstuffs all but write government regulations and control the bulk of nutrition-related messaging. Our school lunch programs highlight the government’s lack of commitment to instilling healthy eating habits in our population. And some companies have responded to the crisis of health-care costs by cutting insurance coverage and outsourcing jobs rather than addressing its root cause.