TROUBL

Americans have been astonished to see food prices soaring over the past few months, rising 3.9% in May 2008 alone. Everything from eggs to hamburgers is jumping as gas breaks $4.00 a gallon, making the expense of shipping food from farm to store much higher. During this phenomenon, the interesting note is Americans are changing their summer transportation habits to save money on gas, which makes up about 4% of their average budget. And while food makes up about 15% of our spending, few are considering changing diets to save money. The way we see it, food is necessary for survival; we can give up a trip to the mall, but we can’t stop buying what keeps us alive.

But, as Weight Watcher’s ads, health professionals, and now climate scientists are pointing out, the American view on which particular foods keep us alive is a little blurry. Our relationship with food is unhealthy at best, as our obesity and heart disease rates keep showing us. With grocery prices soaring, this might be a perfect time for Americans to reevaluate just what kinds of foods they can afford, what kinds of food they need, and how changing our diets–specifically our meat intake-–can be more beneficial for our wallets and the environment, as opposed to being stingy on gas. Americans’ appetite for meat must be curbed if we want to save money, our health, and our environment.

It’s an old familiar tune: meat is fine, if it’s eaten in moderation. Meat (especially beef) has been linked to obesity, multiple types of cancer, heart disease, strokes and diabetes. Thirty-two percent of Americans these days are obese. Heart disease is the number one killer of U.S. citizens, and Type 2 Diabetes is being called an American epidemic. And yet, in the face of all these facts, we still consume huge amounts of meat as commercials insist on selling it to us in bigger, fattier pieces! Why aren’t we getting the hint? How do we justify eating all that animal flesh when we know it’s bad for us? It must be a sense of entitlement; just like Americans love gas-guzzling vehicles, we also have a history of higher-than-normal meat consumption. In fact, a recent New York Times article “The Meat Guzzler,” said US citizens consume, on average, 260 pounds of meat every year, which is “1.5 times the industrial world average, three times the East Asian average, and 40 times the average in Bangladesh.” Surely these numbers imply that we’re overindulging.

Most people who hear these numbers argue that humans are supposed to eat meat for protein, and that we in America are simply blessed to have so much of it. But, the truth is that we don’t have to eat just meat for protein. While it’s true that meat is a good source of the stuff, there are plenty of vegetables that have just as much or more protein per calorie, like spinach and lentils. Moreover, protein is important in our diets, Americans seem to think that we need much more than we do. Asians who eat three times less meat than we do aren’t dropping dead from lack of protein intake - why are we convinced that we would? According to The New York Times, “[Americans] each consume something like 110 grams of protein a day, about twice the federal government’s recommended allowance … It’s likely that most of us would do just fine on around 30 grams of protein a day.” If we can curb our runaway protein intake and get more of it from non-meat sources, we’d have a lot fewer health problems on our hands and hearts.

But, our meat habit isn’t just hurting our health and making us look like the pigs we love to eat. It’s killing our environment in a much more dramatic way than many Americans realize. In fact, as quoted on GoVeg.com, a 2006 United Nations report summarized the devastation caused by the meat industry as “one of the top two or three most significant contributors to the most serious environmental problems, at every scale from local to global.”

Many Americans are astonished to hear such a dramatic statement from the United Nations. What could be so bad about raising animals for slaughter? Humans have done it for thousands of years, after all. Americans have commercials convincing us that beef is “what’s for dinner” and that “California cows are happy cows.” When we think of meat farming, most see an idyllic picture of a small farm with a few animals living happily until the axe falls. But, in American agriculture today, only a tiny percentage of farms still operate that way. Most of the livestock in this country is born and raised in factory farms with little or no exposure to grassy pastures, or even sunlight. They are overfed, overmedicated, and killed off in operations so large that a mere two percent of livestock farms in this country now raise 40 percent of all animals in the US. These operations are “farms” only in the broadest interpretation of the word; they produce meat, but offer no grazing pasture. They are massive in scale, usually separated from human habitation by hundreds of miles, and they are destructive to more than just the animals they slaughter.

Large scale meat production, processing, and shipment are giant industries that require huge amounts of resources to support. Over 80 percent of agricultural land in America is used for meat production, either for housing the animals or growing the grain that feeds them; that’s almost half the land mass of the US. That amount of land continues to grow as the demand for meat rises in industrialized nations, with far-reaching implications. Not only American soil is being cleared of its forests and natural vegetation to feed our livestock; huge swaths of the Amazon rainforests are being demolished for the same purposes, and much of the grain grown on former rainforest land goes to feed American animals. Much of this land, never meant to support cattle or grain production, subjected to rigorous pesticide treatments, eventually becomes desert that can no longer support life.

If the destruction of natural landscapes in the name of our appetite wasn’t bad enough, the waste involved in feeding so much grain for animals is astronomical. Most of the animals we eat are fairly inefficient at converting energy into food; it can take up to 16 pounds of grain to grow one pound of meat! The world’s cattle consume enough food to meet the caloric needs of 8.7 billion people—more than the entire human population. If we were to consume less of the meat in this equation and more of the grain, we could feed the world, or at the very least, allow some of our forests to grow back and cut the amount of carbon dioxide polluting the air.

To make matters worse, the deforestation of all this land making way for grain, which is fed to livestock, leads to massive water runoff, wasting precious fresh water and causing mud slides every year. The excrement from farms, filled with unprocessed food waste and medication, contaminates fresh water supplies to such an extent that the US Environmental Protection Agency has declared that the runoff from factory farms pollutes our waterways more than all other industrial sources combined. Nearly half of all the fresh water used in the United States goes to raising animals for food, when only a fraction of that amount would be needed to grow grains alone. According to GoVeg.com, “You save more water by not eating a pound of beef than you do by not showering for an entire year.” Would we agree that giving up a hamburger or two is easier and more sensible than giving up personal hygiene?