Dear Cindy,
Don’t get me wrong. I always crave my grandma’s spare ribs. McDonald’s $1.39 burgers, you are soo bad but sooo good. Sizzling bacon, you are music to my ears. Rack of lamb, get at me.
However, being in a program in environment and learning about the ecological footprint and food scarcity problems associated with consuming meat has made it impossible for me to eat it without my enjoyment being eliminated by waves of guilt.
A meat-based diet increases our resource demands, degrades the environment, and pollutes the air and water. What I’ve learned that has struck me most about a meat-based diet is that the amount of land used to feed one meat eater could feed twenty vegetarians. This is because more than half of the world’s cropland is used to grow livestock feed. Of the world’s grain, 38% is fed to livestock.
In the United States alone, while 66% of cropland is used for livestock, a mere 2% is used to grow vegetables for human consumption. If everyone in the world ate like your average American, scientists approximate that the world would be able to support a maximum human population of 2.5 billion, and oil reserves would be depleted within twelve years.
There is enough food in the world to feed everyone on a basic vegetarian diet, but the more people there are eating meat, the fewer people the planet will be able to support. Currently, malnutrition and under-nutrition affect 1.3 billion people. Every five to ten days, hunger related issues are responsible for about 150 000 deaths. That’s about the same death toll as Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
The majority of the world are nowhere nearly as lucky as North Americans.
About two-thirds of people are mostly vegetarian; if everyone were vegetarian, it is estimated that oil reserves would last another 260 years. There would be more resources to go around.
Meat-based diets use the bulk of agricultural fossil fuel, water, pesticide, and fertilizer inputs. For example, for every gram of pork you want to produce, you need 146 grams of feed. Massive inputs of water are required to grow that feed. A person that switches from eating meat to being vegetarian saves 5.3 million litres of water per year.
It is simply far more efficient to eat lower on the food chain. This goes back to basic biology: energy conversions are inefficient, and about 90% of the energy at each trophic level is lost. When we feed crops to animals instead of people, some of that food is simply expelled, some is used in respiration and lost as heat, and only some of the energy even assimilated into the bloodstream is used to build protein. Of the crop energy we put into producing livestock, we end up consuming only a fraction.
The soil erosion and loss of soil fertility, desertification from overgrazing, water stress and pollution, the loss of biodiversity due to habitat loss, and the health risks associated with pesticides are only the beginning of an extensive host of environmental issues associated with meat-based industrial agriculture.
Since October, I’ve decided that being a pescetarian is the attainable middle ground between eating meat and being vegetarian. Fish represents a much more efficient conversion of grains to animal proteins. It doesn’t seem like it would accomplish that much by simply cutting out meat, but it’s the most significant way a single person can reduce their impact on the environment and their carbon footprint.
To see what you can do, check out this sweet website we had to visit for one of my environment classes. It lets you calculate your ecological foot print and shows small ways you can make improvements. It’s something you can be optimistic about, because it’s all about small changes that precipitate the larger changes you want to see.
I don’t think we need to run away and be hippies together. Not yet.
But it’s a romantic thought.
Love,
Jade
