If you’re reading this now, you probably enjoy easy access to cheap and easy calories. It’s not difficult to turn a blind eye to the dozens of steps required to put that steak or those chicken tenders on your plate, or the energy and land we used producing them.
Here’s some perspective: Americans eat 270 pounds of meat per person per year. The French eat just 35 pounds of meat per year.
There’s no comfortable explanation for this. In fact, when people speak about “Western decadence,” this unjust imbalance between the appetites of rich countries versus the quality of life in poorer ones is probably one of the things on their mind. We — we rich countries — have a choice now between making it easier for the rest of the world to climb out of poverty and into better nutritional habits. Or we can continue on course and let rich countries literally starve the poorer ones, and eventually ourselves, to death.
I recently made the shift to a vegan diet for both health and eco-conscious personal reasons. However, I continue to maintain that we don’t need to stop eating meat altogether as a society. Rather, we need to do animal agriculture right on a national and world-wide scale, and as of now, we just aren’t.
We all have to come to our own conclusions about the morality of turning sentient beings into food and clothing products. But there’s a collective morality — not to mention increasingly urgent practicalities — that we spend even less time thinking about when it comes to eating meat.
Why Isn’t the Current Approach to Meat Production Sustainable?
Livestock consumes half of the world’s grain supply. To keep our cattle fed, we transport grain and foraging foods from otherwise stable, irrigated farmland — and feed it to several species of animal who process these foods, and the energy they contain, inefficiently. Cows convert grass fairly well to energy, but all of the other feed we provide for them is a poor match. And we have to feed them a lot of it, too, or else they won’t produce burgers juicy enough or a steak tender enough.
Pigs present another problem. Pigs can convert all kinds of crop residue and food waste into energy, thereby providing humans with a relatively more forgivable environmental footprint when it comes to pork. Unfortunately, we don’t feed pigs this way much anymore. Under the watchful eye of the corporate feed industry and trendy supermarkets, the rules governing pig feed have changed substantially. There’s more grain — potential food for humans — in pig feed today than ever before.
And farmers are dumping or literally incinerating millions of tons of residue and food waste instead of using it to feed their pigs. This feed, provided it receives minimal processing for safety’s sake, isn’t profitable. It’s no wonder corporations are having farmers dump or burn it. It’s been estimated that annual food waste in the UK alone could be used to produce as many as 800,000 tons of pork. Instead, we’re feeding our swine soybean-based products that lay waste to the Amazon and other treasured areas.
Farming chickens and fish pose challenges, too. New techniques and technologies are helping us ethically and naturally breed certain types of fish from wild-caught generations while safely “weaning” them off unsustainable feed products. Chickens surpassed beef as the number-one most popular animal-based food a few years back. Unfortunately, raising chickens is as wasteful and unsustainable as raising cattle or pigs.
Are We Arguing About Eating Meat — Or About Farming Ethically?
Another way to look at this problem is in terms of land used per unit of food-energy produced from that land. When we look at the situation in these terms, things get even more complex. But also a little hopeful.
According to researchers, we need to return to feeding our pigs using crop residues and food waste and we need to feed cattle using grasses and straws from fallow areas and non-irrigated rangeland. Food sources that we humans don’t compete for, in other words. If we stopped giving food to livestock that human beings could use ourselves, and made no other changes, we could still collectively produce half the world’s current meat supply.
Not surprisingly, it’s the richer countries of the world holding us back. Countries that have already industrialized themselves, and which have calories and resources to burn, are the ones stuffing livestock animals with human-compatible foods in order to make them fatter and produce more milk. If we halted the use of grain in animal agriculture tomorrow, we could produce enough food for an additional 1.3 billion humans on earth.
This would be a huge step in the right direction, but it’s still potentially not enough. Over the next four decades, the human population on earth will rise by another 2.3 billion souls. There is no other way to put it: rich countries have to stop throwing their weight around, literally, and bring their meat consumption in line with the rest of the civilized world.
We Could Stand to Eat Less Meat
As climate change becomes an ever-worsening threat to our survival, some of these changes pale in comparison with the consequences of doing nothing.
We haven’t even gotten into the nitty-gritty details of the carbon and methane footprints associated with housing, feeding, transporting, slaughtering, processing, packaging, transporting again, preserving, and ultimately selling all of this meat. Not to mention, on a human level, the rampant, ongoing problem with companies continuing to let contaminated meat products slip onto the market. Meat, poultry and eggs are the foods most heavily associated with dangerous bacterial contaminants like salmonella, E. Coli and Staphylococcus aureus, and there’s been far too many slip-ups to let it go unnoticed. More can be done.
There is, suffice it to say, way more to this story than we’re getting right now. In 50 years’ time, the truth about animal agriculture will feel like the truth about cigarettes and burning coal. The people who could have done better knew better all along.
As we work to bring our institutions, corporations, agriculture laws, and governments in line to address climate change and sustainability, there are personal choices we can make to take some of the pressure off. You might not eat 270 pounds of meat per year, but you’re probably well over the 33 to 36 pounds now recommended by nutritionists and environmental scientists. We don’t even have to stop eating meat entirely. We just have to adjust our appetites. Doing so means everybody — even those incoming generations yet to be born — can know the pleasure of eating meat alongside vegetables. If everybody on earth held themselves to this strict 36-pound quota, we could reduce the share of our farmland we use to feed animals from 33 percent down to 10 percent.
Eating meat is a luxury, make no mistake. Not a necessity. And if we do it right, it’s a luxury more people can enjoy as the developing world climbs out of poverty and begins wondering how they can live as Americans and other relatively stable and affluent countries do.
Kate is a health and political journalist. You can subscribe to her blog, So Well, So Woman, to read more of her work and receive a free subscriber gift! https://sowellsowoman.com/about/subscribe/