Healthy soil and sustainable growing

["TradingPostPaul" <tradingpost@riseup.net>]

Rethinking the Meat-Guzzler
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/27/weekinreview/27bittman.html?_r=2&ref=h
ealth&oref=slogin&oref=slogin
Gary Kazanjian for The New York Times

A SEA change in the consumption of a resource that Americans take for
granted may be in store — something cheap, plentiful, widely enjoyed and
a part of daily life. And it isn’t oil.

It’s meat.

The two commodities share a great deal: Like oil, meat is subsidized by the
federal government. Like oil, meat is subject to accelerating demand as
nations become wealthier, and this, in turn, sends prices higher. Finally
— like oil — meat is something people are encouraged to consume less
of, as the toll exacted by industrial production increases, and becomes
increasingly visible.

Global demand for meat has multiplied in recent years, encouraged by
growing affluence and nourished by the proliferation of huge, confined
animal feeding operations. These assembly-line meat factories consume
enormous amounts of energy, pollute water supplies, generate significant
greenhouse gases and require ever-increasing amounts of corn, soy and other
grains, a dependency that has led to the destruction of vast swaths of the
world’s tropical rain forests.

Just this week, the president of Brazil announced emergency measures to
halt the burning and cutting of the country’s rain forests for crop and
grazing land. In the last five months alone, the government says, 1,250
square miles were lost.

The world’s total meat supply was 71 million tons in 1961. In 2007, it
was estimated to be 284 million tons. Per capita consumption has more than
doubled over that period. (In the developing world, it rose twice as fast,
doubling in the last 20 years.) World meat consumption is expected to
double again by 2050, which one expert, Henning Steinfeld of the United
Nations, says is resulting in a “relentless growth in livestock
production.”

Americans eat about the same amount of meat as we have for some time, about
eight ounces a day, roughly twice the global average. At about 5 percent of
the world’s population, we “process” (that is, grow and kill) nearly
10 billion animals a year, more than 15 percent of the world’s total.

Growing meat (it’s hard to use the word “raising” when applied to
animals in factory farms) uses so many resources that it’s a challenge to
enumerate them all. But consider: an estimated 30 percent of the earth’s
ice-free land is directly or indirectly involved in livestock production,
according to the United Nation’s Food and Agriculture Organization, which
also estimates that livestock production generates nearly a fifth of the
world’s greenhouse gases — more than transportation.

To put the energy-using demand of meat production into easy-to-understand
terms, Gidon Eshel, a geophysicist at the Bard Center, and Pamela A.
Martin, an assistant professor of geophysics at the University of Chicago,
calculated that if Americans were to reduce meat consumption by just 20
percent it would be as if we all switched from a standard sedan — a
Camry, say — to the ultra-efficient Prius. Similarly, a study last year
by the National Institute of Livestock and Grassland Science in Japan
estimated that 2.2 pounds of beef is responsible for the equivalent amount
of carbon dioxide emitted by the average European car every 155 miles, and
burns enough energy to light a 100-watt bulb for nearly 20 days.

Grain, meat and even energy are roped together in a way that could have
dire results. More meat means a corresponding increase in demand for feed,
especially corn and soy, which some experts say will contribute to higher
prices.

This will be inconvenient for citizens of wealthier nations, but it could
have tragic consequences for those of poorer ones, especially if higher
prices for feed divert production away from food crops. The demand for
ethanol is already pushing up prices, and explains, in part, the 40 percent
rise last year in the food price index calculated by the United Nations’
Food and Agricultural Organization.

Though some 800 million people on the planet now suffer from hunger or
malnutrition, the majority of corn and soy grown in the world feeds cattle,
pigs and chickens. This despite the inherent inefficiencies: about two to
five times more grain is required to produce the same amount of calories
through livestock as through direct grain consumption, according to
Rosamond Naylor, an associate professor of economics at Stanford
University. It is as much as 10 times more in the case of grain-fed beef in
the United States.

The environmental impact of growing so much grain for animal feed is
profound. Agriculture in the United States — much of which now serves the
demand for meat — contributes to nearly three-quarters of all
water-quality problems in the nation’s rivers and streams, according to
the Environmental Protection Agency.

Because the stomachs of cattle are meant to digest grass, not grain, cattle
raised industrially thrive only in the sense that they gain weight quickly.
This diet made it possible to remove cattle from their natural environment
and encourage the efficiency of mass confinement and slaughter. But it
causes enough health problems that administration of antibiotics is
routine, so much so that it can result in antibiotic-resistant bacteria
that threaten the usefulness of medicines that treat people.

Those grain-fed animals, in turn, are contributing to health problems among
the world’s wealthier citizens — heart disease, some types of cancer,
diabetes. The argument that meat provides useful protein makes sense, if
the quantities are small. But the “you gotta eat meat” claim collapses
at American levels. Even if the amount of meat we eat weren’t harmful,
it’s way more than enough.

Americans are downing close to 200 pounds of meat, poultry and fish per
capita per year (dairy and eggs are separate, and hardly insignificant), an
increase of 50 pounds per person from 50 years ago. We each consume
something like 110 grams of protein a day, about twice the federal
government’s recommended allowance; of that, about 75 grams come from
animal protein. (The recommended level is itself considered by many dietary
experts to be higher than it needs to be.) It’s likely that most of us
would do just fine on around 30 grams of protein a day, virtually all of it
from plant sources .