Environmental reasons to not eat meat / to go vegan

[Korn]

Hi,

here are some links to sites/articles about the effect meat eating has on the environment.

Wikipedia on Environmental Vegetarianism. Look here too.

Livestock use 30 percent of the land surface of the planet, generate more greenhouse gasses than transport (from Scientific American)

Livestock a major threat to environment
Remedies urgently needed
(from Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations)

So You're an Environmentalist; Why Are You Still Eating Meat?

BBC News: Hungry world 'must eat less meat'

Eco-eating

about.com: What does eating meat have to do with fossil fuels?

Penn Environmental Group: Hamburger, anyone?

How Meat-centred Eating Patterns Affect Food Security and the Environment

The Vegan Society: Animal Products and the environment


Vegsource: The Environmental Argument:

Cause of global warming: greenhouse effect
Primary cause of greenhouse effect: carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels
Fossil fuels needed to produce meat-centered diet vs. a meat-free diet: 3 times more
Percentage of U.S. topsoil lost to date: 75
Percentage of U.S. topsoil loss directly related to livestock raising: 85
Number of acres of U.S. forest cleared for cropland to produce meat-centered diet: 260 million
Amount of meat imported to U.S. annually from Central and South America: 300,000,000 pounds
Percentage of Central American children under the age of five who are undernourished: 75
Area of tropical rainforest consumed in every quarter-pound of rainforest beef: 55 square feet
Current rate of species extinction due to destruction of tropical rainforests for meat grazing and other uses: 1,000 per year

Source = "Diet For A New America" by John Robbins

“Nothing will benefit health and increase the chances for survival
of life on Earth as the evolution to a vegetarian diet.”
Albert Einstein

[rujoon]

Another research article in pdf format:
Evaluating the environmental impact of various dietary patterns combined with different food production systems

[Korn]

REASONS TO GO VEGAN
(From http://www.sugarrocket.com )

Environmental/Humanitarian
Animal agriculture is the number one pollutant of America's waterways. Animal excrement (often contaminated with toxic chemicals and hormones) runs into groundwater, rivers and topsoil, ruining potable water and land. Ammonia emissions from this excrement trigger acid rain and produce greenhouse gases. More than 1/3 of the fossil fuels used in the US are used to raise animals for food. Water, land, and plant food are grossly misused to produce drastically smaller amounts of animal-based "food" in the end.


Daily water usage in the US for...
An omnivore : 4,200 Gallons
A vegetarian: 1,200 Gallons
A vegan: 300 Gallons
Yearly land usage in the US for food...
An omnivore : 3.3 Acres
A vegetarian: 1/2 Acre
A vegan: 1/6 Acre
To make one pound of "food"...
Pound of beef = 2,500 Gallons of water
Pound of apples = 49 Gallons of water
Pound of lettuce = 23 Gallons of water
To make one pound of "food"...
Pound of meat = 7 pounds of grain or soy
Pound of grain or soy = 1 pound of grain or soy
(duh)

Those numbers sound INSANE, don't they? But the math makes sense. If you grow plant food to feed animals that you eventually intend to eat, then you must expend much more water and land, and create more food and pollution in the process. To learn the facts behind what meat (and all other animal) production does to our world and then to continue to eat meat is like giving the finger to every living thing on Earth. It's acknowledging that we have a limited number of resources (which, hopefully, we all ready knew), and that we're running through them at as much as 14 times faster (vegan to omnivore comparison), just as a matter of preference. We prefer to eat certain things, and that's really just more important that starving countries, fatally polluted waters, land that's too desiccated to produce food any longer, or the suffering of sentient animals.

One of the most confounding misconceptions about vegans is that they "only care about animals" and think of humans as second class citizens. Unlike someone who admittedly believes that certain species are more inferior than their own (omnivores, I'm looking at you), vegans share a value for all life. There's bad apples in every bunch, so of course there are vegans who don't fit this exact mold, but no vegan I have ever known (or heard of outside an urban legend or smear article), would wish harm upon another human. I saw a "Feed the Children" infomercial once and was shocked to learn that the fundraising campaign was to drill wells so these emaciated and sickly people could just have clean water to drink. The thought that the simple selection of one's food affects whether other nations starve or have enough to eat and drink is powerful. Feeding 7 pounds of vegetables into an animal to get 1 pound of meat makes no sense. The water it takes to create 1 pound of beef could provide all the water needs of someone on a vegan diet for over a week. Imagine that. One steak dinner is equivalent to over 8 days of life saving water and 7 pounds of food.

There's always someone who flippantly counters these staggering and homicidal facts with "but meat tastes good", or some such thoughtless nonsense. (When is Natural Selection going to weed these useful citizens out?) But all jokes about tofu and tree hugging aside, it comes down to a matter of one population's taste preferences being more important than another population starving and dying. Some people seem programmed not to comprehend the magnitude of this fact, but I choose to take responsibility for my actions, and you can, too. It's not a problem you can blame on the government or bad luck or an unsolvable force. I am vegan due in part to a concern for the lives of other humans around me, and the world that we live on. I refuse to let something as trivial as the food I eat destroy either.

[Korn]

20 Reasons to Go Vegan
(from http://www.btinternet.com/~bury_rd/why.htm )

12. Cattle produce methane in the process of gut fermentation. This is released into the environment when they belch and fart, thus contributing to the greenhouse effect. A typical animal emits 48 kilograms of methane per year according to the Vegan Society. And this figure does not include the methane produced in the animal's manure.

13. Half the rainforests in the world have been destroyed in order to clear ground for cattle grazing in order to produce beefburgers. Twenty-five percent of the world's land is now used to graze cattle - 1.25 billion of them altogether! These cattle eat more and produce more waste than humans. According to Robin Hur and Dr David Fields in: Are High Fat Diets Killing Our Forests? 'Every person who changes to a pure vegetarian diet saves one acre of trees!'

14. Burning down forests to produce grazing land also releases vasts amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, another potent greenhouse gas.

15. Livestock production has been shown to be the most harmful type of land use in history. Over-grazing can lead to soil erosion, desertification, loss of wildflowers and wildlife. Dr Michael Klaper in his book Vegan Nutrition Pure and Simple points out that most of the six billion tons of priceless topsoil that erodes off American farmlands yearly comes from grazing lands and that the animal-based diet is responsible for most topsoil erosion.

16. Animal manures are often spread onto the land as fertilisers. Farm slurry (containing manure and urine) and silage (a liquid produced when crops are preserved for fodder) can enter and pollute nearby streams, removing oxygen from the water and sometimes killing fish. Streams are also fouled by cows wallowing in them.

17. To feed a vegan requires 1/8 of the land needed to feed a meat eater. (Vegan Society)

18. To produce a day's food for a meat eater requires 15,000 litres of water compared with 5,000 for a vegetarian and 1,500 for a vegan. (Vegan Society) Meat production requires enormous amounts of water. For example, water is needed to grow grain for feed and also to quench the thirst of the cattle and slaughterhouse operations require millions of gallons of water per minute.

19. Every six seconds someone in the world starves to death because people in the West are eating meat. Just think how many of those lives could be saved if the grain which is now being used to feed cattle and other farm animals was fed directly to these hungry people instead?

20. Producing animal flesh for human consumption wastes a lot of energy. According to Dr Michael Klaper in Vegan Nutrition: Pure and Simple, sixty calories of petroleum energy must be ploughed into the soil in order to harvest one food calorie from animal flesh. Yet growing grains and legumes to feed directly to people will yield 20 calories of food energy for each calorie of fuel energy invested. In addition, farm animals are very inefficient converters of grain energy into edible flesh. It takes 16 pounds of corn and soy beans to produce just one pound of beef flesh! And much additional energy is also needed to keep animal carcasses refrigerated in order to prevent them from decomposing.

[Korn]

Meat Is a Global Warming Issue

The editors of World Watch concluded in the July/August 2004 edition that "the human appetite for animal flesh is a driving force behind virtually every major category of environmental damage now threatening the human future -- deforestation, erosion, fresh water scarcity, air and water pollution, climate change, biodiversity loss, social injustice, the destabilization of communities and the spread of disease." Lee Hall, the legal director for Friends of Animals, is more succinct: "Behind virtually every great environmental complaint there's milk and meat."

Global warming may be the most serious global social problem threatening life on Earth. We need to fight global warming on the governmental and corporate levels, and we also need to fight global warming on the everyday and personal levels. Now we need to fight global warming -- with our forks.

[ViveVegan]

Wow. That was interesting and informative. Thanks for sharing.

[Korn]

Here are the same numbers that I quoted in message # 3 (above), converted for people not familiar with gallons, acres and pounds:


Daily water usage in the US for...
An omnivore : 4,200 Gallons (15 899 litres)
A vegetarian: 1,200 Gallons (4 542 litres)
A vegan: 300 Gallons (1 135 litres)

Yearly land usage in the US for food...
An omnivore : 3.3 Acres (13355 square meters)
A vegetarian: 1/2 Acre (2023 square meters)
A vegan: 1/6 Acre (674,5 square meters)

To make one pound of "food"...
Pound (0.45 kg) of beef = 2,500 Gallons of water (9 463 litres)
Pound (0.45 kg) of apples = 49 Gallons of water (185 litres)
Pound (0.45 kg) of lettuce = 23 Gallons of water (87 litres)

To make one kg of "food"
1 kg of meat = 7 kg of grain or soy
1 kg of grain or soy = 1 kg of grain or soy (!)

[NoTallowFuel]

Hi. Soya the vegan staple is something I seriously query these days when we talk about veganism, or veggie-ism, being better for the environment, because that's not necessarily so.

Plantations of soya are now destroying rainforests. I contacted the Vegan Society for their view on this, and they basically said the soya is mainly for cattlefeed and biofuel. However when we consider that all this soya is pooled together and divided up to go to the various products, those products also include vegan food and TVP. So when we eat soya food we can't know if it's from a deforested area, or from an established plantation (but even those have once been carved from the rainforest).

So these days I'm reducing the soya in my diet, which was my core protein source, with a view to eliminating it, as I can't handle the ethical dilemma anymore.

What do you think? Are you happy to keep eating soya? Thanks.

[EllaGuru]

The soya milk that I use gives an assurance that it has been ethically sourced and is not from the rainforests and I don't eat tofu because I don't like the texture, but I do have things which contain soya and I don't know where that comes from. I must do some emailing of companies to see what they say and I would consider not buying their products if they can't give me assurance that the soya they use is ethically sourced.

[eve]

In the current issue of VeganVoice, there's an interesting article by author John McCabe ('Sunfood Living') on how to be part of the solution for a sustainable future . The first part of the article can be seen at http://www.veganic.net/articles.htm - in the magazine it covers over four pages, and is well worth a read.

[StevieP]

Argument based on earthnet's environmental footprint calculator:

http://www.activeg.org/articles/437.html

[tsunami]

The soy grown that's destroying rain forests and such is mainly grown for animal feed, etc. Buy ethical/organic non GMO soy products and you will be fine. The organic soy is healthier for you too. Most of the bad effects of soy are from the gmo'd soy. Soy is really healthy if you get it from the right sources, just like with anything else.

[Korn]

The Case Against Meat
Evidence Shows that Our Meat-Based Diet is Bad for the Environment, Aggravates Global Hunger, Brutalizes Animals and Compromises Our Health

[yum]

Check out this funny video on youtube 'bacon vs tofu'

it talks about the affects of eating meat on the planet

http://youtube.com/watch?v=plNz1CDKI0o

[Frank]

From today's Guardian newspaper:

http://lifeandhealth.guardian.co.uk/...286172,00.html

(Full story below if the link is no longer available)


Is meat off the menu?

Yes says Raj Patel: growing food for animals is a waste of resources in an overcrowded world. No says Joanna Blythman: with much of the world unsuitable for crops, meat is essential

Sunday June 22, 2008
The Guardian


Should the world ready to become vegitarian? OFM investigates.

America is the most overweight country on earth. Only three out of 10 Americans have a normal body weight. I should have guessed that one of the side effects of moving to the US would be bloating.

Since leaving London for America a decade ago, I've put on a couple of stone. It's easy enough to blame the food environment here. This is, after all, the land where Reagan pronounced tomato ketchup a fruit and, more recently, where French fries and chocolate-covered cherries were legally dubbed 'fresh produce' under a US Department of Agriculture (USDA) regulation known as the batter-coating rule.

I can't just censure America for my condition, of course. Getting older and stopping smoking have accelerated my middle-age spread. I'm more active now than I used to be, but that hasn't kept the podge at bay. And I'm convinced that part of the problem is that I eat meat. I came to America a vegetarian and I've lapsed into occasional chicken and fish (though, because of a residual Hinduism, no beef).

I'm not the only person to be blaming flesh for bad outcomes. In America, meat has been getting some bad press recently. The Humane Society of the United States earlier this year posted a widely circulated video, filmed undercover at an abattoir in California. It shows workers ramming cows with fork-lift trucks in order to persuade them to walk. There was a financial incentive for them to do it - 'downer cows', cows that are too sick to walk, are prohibited from entering the food system. By the time the story broke and the USDA announced a recall, most of the beef had already been distributed and fed to children through the school-meal programme.

Even Oprah has announced that she's going vegan, if only for a three-week 'cleanse'. Oprah has had run-ins with the meat industry before. In 1998, on hearing that American cows were being fed to other American cows in very British BSE-generating practices, she 'stopped cold' her beef consumption. A group of Texas cattlemen were aggrieved. They used one of the handful of legal restrictions to free speech rights in the US: you're not allowed to disparage agricultural products here. They claimed that Oprah had done just that. They lost in court. Twice. Yet the implication, not too far from the surface in Oprah's vegan detox diet, is that there's something fairly toxic about meat.

Meat consumption has come under attack on grounds of ethics, environment and health and has even been blamed for the global food crisis. A couple of weeks back, George Bush said: 'Worldwide, there is increasing demand. There turns out to be prosperity in the developing world, which is good... So, for example, just as an interesting thought for you, there are 350 million people in India who are classified as middle class... Their middle class is larger than our entire population. And when you start getting wealth, you start demanding better nutrition and better food, and so demand is high, and that causes the price to go up.'

More people demanding more meat means that more land is dedicated not to growing food for people, but food for animals - up to 9kg of grain for every kilo of beef. Ratcheting up meat consumption will drive up the price of feed grains, other things being equal.

Except that other things aren't equal. Evidence suggests that it's hard to impeach either India or China's meat-eating habits. According to Daryll Ray at the University of Tennessee, the US government's own figures show that China has been a net exporter of meats since 2001, subsidised to some extent by the running down of local grain stores, and an increased import of soybeans. Moreover, it has produced more grain than it has consumed for every year since 2005, and continues to export heavily. When it comes to India, Ray says the story is much the same as China's. In fact India has been a net exporter of grains and meat over nearly all of the past two decades even though it has the world's largest number of hungry people. So the problem is a little deeper than more Indians demanding things, as George Bush claims.

Blaming the world's two most populous countries, India and China, is a bit of misdirection, particularly when the facts point the other way. Although India's chicken consumption has gone from 0.2 million tonnes to 2.3 million today, beef consumption is more or less the same as it was in 1990 and, because of the cultural tilt against it, not forecast to change.

China is certainly the world's largest consumer of meat in aggregate, and that is because it is the world's most populous country. Meat consumption has increased from 24kg per person in 1980 to 54kg last year, and the chief of China operations for Tyson Foods, the world's largest meat packer, predicts that this is the last year that China will be self-sufficient in protein. Against this, soaring prices for meat in China are certainly taking the edge off demand. But until China's meat demand extends its footprint beyond its borders, country number three in terms of global population, the United States, remains a little more obviously culpable. Meat consumption here is rather less sustainable than in China or India. Americans eat an awful lot of meat - around 90kg of meat and fish per person per year.

Within the US, meat manufacturing is tremendously resource-intensive. Partly, this is because there's just so much meat around - nine billion animals per year according to one estimate. They require water, land and environmental services, all of which they're using unsustainably. More than half of American pastures are being over-grazed, and are losing soil at six times their sustainable rate. Water resources are also stretched to breaking point - it takes 100 times more water to produce a kilo of animal than vegetable.

And you've also got the problem of shit. Much of America's cheaper meat is produced on Concentrated Animal-Feeding Operations (CAFO), huge lots on which animals are confined, fed and slaughtered within the same vast facility. These operations produce the equivalent of five tonnes of waste for every US citizen. But the waste isn't regulated in the same way. As researchers in a 2005 Johns Hopkins University study noted, a typical CAFO has about 5,000 animals on it. That number of pigs produces as much waste as a city of 20,000 people, but without any of the plumbing.

At one of the largest lots in the US, at the Harris Cattle Ranch in Coalinga, California, 100,000 cattle are housed on a ranch roughly twice the size of Hyde Park. The waste from these animals is stored in a lagoon of shit bigger than Wembley Stadium. Although such lagoons are meant to be insulated from the rest of the environment, there are reports of effluent leaching into local water supplies. In 1999, Hurricane Floyd caused 50 lagoons to flood in North Carolina, and one lagoon burst its banks, releasing 2 million gallons of soupy red liquid.

For CAFO workers, who are some of the poorest in the country, respiratory disease rates are high. And when the waste makes it to the sea, the results are even worse. The run-off is rich in fertilisers. As a result of the run-off in the Mississippi, CAFOs cause an annual 'dead zone' in the Gulf of Mexico the size of New Jersey. And yet CAFOs remain largely untouched by government.

The effects of meat consumption reach beyond America's borders. According to the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations, nearly a fifth of all greenhouse-gas emissions come from livestock - more than from all forms of transport. Global livestock production is set to double between now and 2050, setting another hurdle on the road to sustainable emissions levels.

A University of Chicago study argued that the average meat eater in the US produces about 1.5 tonnes of CO2 more than a vegetarian per year. That's because animals are hungry and the grain they eat takes energy, usually fossil fuels, to produce. It takes 2.2 calories of fossil fuel energy to produce a single calorie of plant protein, according to researchers at Cornell University. And lots of that plant protein is required to make animal protein. For chicken, the ratio of energy in to protein out is 4:1. For pork it's 17:1. For lamb, 50:1. For beef, 54:1.

This is a lot of energy, and a lot of grain that gets diverted. The amount of grains fed to US livestock would be enough to feed 840 million people on a plant-based diet. The number of food-insecure people in the world in 2006 was, incidentally, 854 million. Of course, this isn't simply an American phenomenon - in aggregate, rich countries feed about 60 per cent of their grain to livestock.

According to the Union of Concerned Scientists, nearly 70 per cent of antibiotics used in the US are destined to be used on livestock. The meat industry is, understandably, feeling a little defensive. 'It seems the public is getting a terminal case of nutrition whiplash. A study one week contradicts the findings of a study released the previous week and has led to consumers either being downright confused and sceptical, or altogether tuned out from that kind of news reporting,' says Dave Ray from the American Meat Institute. Yet the US diet, high in meat and low in fresh fruits and vegetables, is being increasingly indicted. The Johns Hopkins study argues that it leads to higher rates of heart disease, stroke, cancer and diabetes. The cost associated with poor diet in just these diseases has been estimated at $33 billion per year.

Yet there is enough food to feed the world now and in the future. But not if larger and larger slices of it go to feed animals - a fact that the governments of India, China, and the United States seem unprepared to address.

At the moment, only about two per cent of Americans are vegans. So the question remains: why is it so hard to go cold tofu? John Cunningham, consumer research manager at the Vegetarian Research Group, has commissioned a series of surveys on meat consumption since the early 1990s, and he has noticed some trends. The number of vegetarians has been going up. Between 2.5 per cent and 10 per cent of Americans are now vegetarian, almost double from a decade before, with numbers of young people higher than the general population. 'There's been a deep change', says Cunningham. 'If you talked about being vegetarian in the 1980s, people were incredulous. Today, people say, "Wow, that's great, I wish I could do that".'

More people are finding a way to get there, but me, I'm still stuck. Why do I find it so hard to nudge out the meat from my diet? Well, there's a persistent trend in the data. Vegetarian women outnumber men by two to one. Cunningham notes that there's a connection between meat and masculinity, particularly around beef. 'No one had their manhood questioned for not eating a chicken sandwich,' he says, 'but if you don't eat a hamburger, well...'

Bob Torres, author of Making a Killing, a study of the philosophy and political economy of veganism, has seen this too. In his job as a professor, he has worked with young men from sports teams. 'Many don't get very far giving up meat - they get all kinds of shit from their team mates, who say things like their athletic performance is going to decline, they're pussies, they're not man enough. And when they find out I'm vegan, some people ask me whether I did it because my wife made me.'

There are other reasons why it's so hard to give up meat. It's certainly harder for working-class Americans to eat sustainably when they are working and living in 'food deserts', those parts of the country where fresh fruit and vegetables are hard to come by, and where processed meats are readily found on convenience-store shelves. But I don't have these excuses. It's entirely possible for me to make the right decision.

And the evidence for me rather tilts against meat consumption. I care about climate change, animal suffering and the condition of people in developing countries. Addressing meat's problems will require a range of policies, from ending the subsidy to meat prices from workers' low wages, to pricing the full cost of meat's pollution into its price, to addressing unsustainable practices in agriculture. But in caring about all this, eating meat is a big strike against my conscience. For this, I can't blame America, China or India. I can only blame myself. It's becoming increasingly clear to me that I'll need to become more human, even if, in America, it means I'm less of a man.

· Raj Patel is the author of Stuffed and Starved (Portobello Books), www.stuffedandstarved.org

[matt35mm]

RECORD CORN PRICES MEAN MORE EXPENSIVE MEAT, DAIRY

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080622/...ng_food_prices

I don't really know what this'll mean, except that the meat, dairy and egg industries are gonna be facing tough times ahead. Although right now they're coping by slaughtering more animals in order to not have to pay to continue to feed them, but after that wave of slaughter, it could mean that less will be bred, which I'm all for.

We shall see, eh?

[powder]

Joanna Blythman seems to fail to appreciate that if there is limited room for crops, that is all the more reason we shouldn't be feeding about 40-50% of them to animals...

[eve]

This article in today's UK Guardian (7/09/08)
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environmen...d.foodanddrink

[aussievego]

REASONS TO GO VEGAN
(From http://www.sugarrocket.com )

The other thing to consider in the pound of meat v 7 pounds of vegetables is that the resulting pound of meat is utterly useless nutrition wise (in spite of what meat industry funded 'research' has told us for the last 50 or so years). So in reality it is even worse than a mere inefficient use of resources, it wastes resources to produce something that not only provides zero nutrition, but is actually harmful to our health. The level of insanity is absuolutely mind boggling.

[Adam Apple]

Great work...love the links

[earthsista]

This article in today's UK Guardian (7/09/08)
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environmen...d.foodanddrink

Thanks very much for the link Eve!

[DavidT]

From today's Guardian newspaper:

http://lifeandhealth.guardian.co.uk/...286172,00.html

Frank, that is an excellent article. Thank you for bringing it to our attention.

Thanks Korn (and all the other contributors) for your hard work. Definitely a thread to bookmark!

[greenflyingcars]

Those are some very good reasons. Thanks they have very useful info on them!

[Vivien]

I was having an environmental/vegan discussion with someone today who said that if the whole world went vegan (not likely lol) then we would have to do more deforestation etc, not less, because we would need to grow so many crops to feed people. Whereas I had thought that if the world became vegan then the crops grown now to feed the cattle would instead be given to people- and that lots of crops = not as much meat. I wondered if anyone had any info on this? THanks x

[sigen92]

Wow, there's hours of reading-material here! I'd better start reading or I'll be up all night! (Not that I mind though )