Vegetarians Do It Better
By Jenna Kirkman
Filed Under The Big Picture |
By now you have probably figured out the general idea of living a “sustainable” lifestyle: biking to work in your 100% organic fair trade clothing, eating local organic food and recycling absolutely everything. One thing you may not be considering is that free-range organic steak from the farmer’s market that you’ve tossed that into your reusable grocery bag. What is the true impact of our carnivorous indulgences? It may be time for us to seriously reconsider our dietary habits.
A recent study by the National Institute of Livestock and Grassland Science concluded that just one kilogram of beef creates more greenhouse gas pollution than a three hour car ride. Also, switching from a meat-based diet to a vegetarian diet can be more beneficial to the environment than trading in your SUV for a hybrid. Wow. How is this possible? Let’s look at some of the major environmental impacts caused by the meat industry…
Animals Eat, Then Excrete
The EPA estimates that in a single day, one cow produces the same amount of feces as 20-40 people. Multiply that by the over 9 million livestock killed for food each year in the United States alone and you’ve got yourself a plethora of poop and nowhere to put it.
As a result, excrement leaks into ground water, lakes and rivers, filling them with pollutants such as nitrates, hormones, antibiotics, and ammonia – all posing a serious health hazard to humans who swim in or drink the water. The pollutants also run downstream killing millions of fish and severely disrupting natural ecosystems.
Manure is not the only toxic waste that comes from animals. An outrageous 16% of methane is emitted annually from belching, flatulent livestock. That’s right- burping pigs and farting cows are directly responsible for rising temperatures on earth. In addition, 64% of the ammonia emissions responsible for acid rain come from livestock as well. Who ever thought a little hamburger could have such a massive effect?
The Silent Victims
Millions of trees are dying too. It takes an estimated 55 square feet of forest for feeding and housing livestock to make a single quarter-pound burger. Cutting down forests also directly increases the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, destroys wildlife habitat, and depletes the soil of essential nutrients.
Food Means Fuel
The (usually long) journey that transforms animals into your main course wastes unimaginable amounts of energy. According to the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, it takes 10 times more fossil fuel to produce one calorie of meat protein than it does to produce the same amount of plant protein.
Feed The World
If we combined the amount of land we use for livestock-growing feed, grazing pastures, and shelter-we could grow enough food to feed every human on the planet. This is shocking, considering an estimated 840 million people in the world are currently undernourished.
When we consider the myriad of effects that our culinary choices have on the air, water, and soil (not to mention our personal karma), vegetarian meals begin to look like the only sensible option on the menu.
Interested in experimenting with some vegetarian options? Take action!
- Download the Vegetarian Starter Guide from TryVeg.org
- Check out delicious vegetarian and vegan recipes from Whole Foods
- Read more about our diet’s effect on the planet in Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma, Jane Goodall’s Harvest for Hope: A Guide to Mindful Eating, Frances Moore Lappe’s Diet for a Small Planet, or Barbara Kingsolver’s Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life
Posted on August 1, 2008 |
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7 Responses to “Vegetarians Do It Better”
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On Rumination, Methane and the Belch.
Cows and Kangaroos both ruminate in their fore-stomach or Rumin. Kangaroos produce Ammonia as an energy source, which is absorbed by their systems; however the same process in cows produces copious amounts of waste methane gas.
The difference between the two systems is a family of specialized bacteria that inhabit and synergisticly allow the break-down of cellulose in the rumin of the kangaroo. Roos Rule
1) There is enough food in this world to feed everyone. It’s a problem of distribution moreso than lack of food.
2) The methane from Cattle waste is now being used as a source for producing electricity to make farms energy self-sufficient.
3) As for your “sustainable” lifestyle, the price of going organic/vegetarian far exceeds the price of incorporating meat or nonorganic items to ones diet. Until you can lower the price of all of this, what is the selfish incentive for becoming a vegetarian?
I use the word selfish because I don’t want a reason that’s like “it’s better for the environment/economy/animals/health”
Why is it more cost-efficient for me to go veg?
Jesus- All you have to do is compare the price of beef-$4/lb or bacon-$3.57/lb, to the price of tofu- $2/lb or rice-$1.33/lb or potatos-$0.51. You do the math.
jesus, if you look at the lifestyle of a vegetarian or vegan individual, the word selfish cannot even come to mind in my opinion. i believe that sparing the lives of animals for whatever your reason may be (health, religion, etc.) and living on a healthier, more organic lifestyle is the most selfless thing a person can do.
it’s true, some organic foods are expensive but when you’re raised to have a meat product at every meal, the switch to a meat-free lifestyle seems a quite daunting. this is the case for most people i’ve talked to about living a meat-free lifestyle.
as 1LUV mentioned, most people don’t realize that in order to have a very healthy portion of foods, you don’t need much more than rice, beans, nuts, or tofu. there are plenty of products available that cover all of these foods and lots are becoming 1) more accessible to the public (making their way into major grocery stores) and 2) more affordable.
the united states is in a self-declared obesity epidemic. what’s the point? the factory farming industry does more to pollute the environment than almost any other conceivable outlet of waste combined. i would like to believe that if there was enough food available for everyone in the world, the major powers would do more than they are to supply that food to the less fortunate. that is of course, if it is in fact, a problem with distribution, as you said.
it would be pretty selfish to me if i were to spend 10 bucks on a few burgers, fries, coke, shake, etc. at mcdonald’s if i knew that there was enough food to feed everyone, it just wasn’t getting there. more specifically - if there is enough food, why is america overeating?
now i’m not trying to stir the pot here or anything but the word “selfish” just irks me. being vegetarian is not only the most healthy choice a person can make (when done correctly) but it’s environmentally responsible, selfless, and is the easiest way that an individual can contribute to the betterment of the world around us for little to no major change in their everyday lives (aside from not eating meat).
hope that helps.
apparently he’s not The Jesus.
Thoughts:
1) methane is being used by very very few cattle farms to create energy. 90+% is going into the atmosphere. Further, methane is 30 times more detrimental that CO2 is for global warming. All for your “taste” we’re accelerating the climate crisis far beyond the SUVs on this planet. Selfish at all?
2) for every one serving of beef you eat, 45-50 people who are going to bed hungry could have eaten. Consider that the next time you sit down to a meal. Feeding grains and cereals to cows instead of to humans is an absurd waste. I wonder if those 840 million starving people on the planet would consider Americans selfish when they realize that just the grain we feed to our cows here could feed them all…every single one of them.
3) with one acre of land you can produce about 20,000 pounds of potatoes and 160-200 pounds of meat. Did somebody say selfish?
First, we don’t believe in altruism or selflessness. It’s a myth and an illusion. It’s the foundation of communism. If you do something for someone else, you do it for your own selfish reasons. You can claim that you did it from a place of selflessness, but I beg to differ.
Live a virtuous and selfish life. They aren’t mutually exclusive. That’s the best thing for everyone. Steve Jobs’ selfishness has benefited millions of people. Trust me, he didn’t invent the iPod or iPhone out of some altruistic gift to humanity. See Ayn Rand and objectivism for context. So don’t try to convince me that you’re doing ME a favor by not eating meat.
If we actually had to pay the full COST of meat, then we’d all eat a lot less of it. If meat wasn’t subsidized by the government in 100 different ways…if it was a truly free market…a 99-cent burger would cost five to 10 times as much. If the FDA did its job and regulated the meat industry to protect us from mad cow, toxins, etc., meat would cost a lot more. If we paid a carbon tax or methane equivalent, that would add significantly to the cost. It’s all economics. Price in the externalized costs while eliminating taxpayer subsidies, and you’ll see meat consumption plummet. It will be a rare luxury, and then it will also be sustainable.
But you will not make a convincing case that we ought not to eat meat based on purely moral grounds. Being a vegan or vegetarian is healthy. It is also virtuous. But you can’t legislate virtue. Patience is a virtue, but you can’t make impatience a crime.
But there is a precedent for protecting animals based on moral grounds. It’s called the Endangered Species Act. But why do we protect endangered species? Is it because we grant the animals moral standing or is it because if they go extinct, WE won’t be able to enjoy their beauty? Or will their extinction disrupt ecological systems that WE depend on? This is pure selfish motivation. Sure, we environmentalists often abuse ESA, but all’s fair in love and war.
The entire environmental movement is selfishly motivated. We’re not saving the planet. It will be fine when we’re gone. The planet does not have moral standing. We’re saving ourselves. We need a healthy environment to live in and for future generations of humans. The earth will vanish in about 4 billion years, and we’ll be long gone before that. The earth has an expiration date, and there’s nothing we can do to change that. But for as long as we’re here, we have a moral obligation to ourselves and future humans to maintain the integrity of the environment.
How is that integrity? It’s a disaster. So we have a lot of work to do.
Taking this approach is one way to recruit conservatives to the environmental cause. They, like me, don’t buy the “save the environment for its own sake” argument. But they will buy save ourselves, and they do appreciate economic arguments. It’s time that greenies and liberals woke up and abandoned their antiquated, self-defeating, and communistic approach.
I’m working on a post along these lines for MaxGladwell.com, so thanks for the opportunity to rehearse.
Max, I agree on several front, namely: the environmental movement is about saving humanity, not the planet. It will likely be far better off without us, and more particularly, after we died off (still only a hypothetical here…) it would grow back stronger, more luscious and diverse.
The government does legislate virtue, as with obscenity crimes (keep your dirty stuff to yourself), fighting words (keep your violence-inducing language internal or for your video games) and more specific to this discussion, what we cannot say about the meat industry (don’t post that you are hormone free, because that hurts the meat companies that pay our politicians)…obviously all of these are walking all over any fine line that may exist between virtue and public safety, but the reality is the same: all laws are founded on regulating what is or isn’t virtuous. Thou shall not kill is the clearest of these and everything filters down from there.
I know that you like the economic argument, and it’s a good one: the real price of meat would be prohibitive if it weren’t for all the incentives/subsidies etc. But there is a clear moral argument here. You love your dog or cat, but then you slaughter (or more pathetically, have some poor sap do it) a cow that is 98% genetically similar. If you know anyone who has had a real dairy farm, they will assure you that the cows have just as much personality as any dog. So, if we can fight for our dogs as if family and charge others with severe crimes for harming them (Michael Vick anyone?), then we should extend the same to all animals that come from a womb, have a face and walk on two or four legs.