This issue of eating meat is gaining more momentum, as people start realizing the toll that meat-eating is putting on the environment. Raising farm animals contributes more greenhouse gases to the environment than all transportation (cars, trains, airplanes and anything else) combined.
This excerpt is from an article on Common Dreams, entitled “Nuggets and Hummers and Fish Sticks, Oh My! Why Vegetarianism Is the Best Way to Help the Environment”: [1]
The vast majority of the calories consumed by a chicken, a pig, a cow, or another animal goes into keeping that animal alive, and once you add to that the calories required to create the parts of the animal that we don’t eat (e.g., bones, feathers, and blood), you find that it takes more than 10 times as many calories of feed given to an animal to get one calorie back in the form of edible fat or muscle. In other words, it’s exponentially more efficient to eat grains, soy, or oats directly rather than feed them to farmed animals so that humans can eat those animals. It’s like tossing more than 10 plates of spaghetti into the trash for every one plate you eat.
And that’s just the pure “calories in, calories out” equation. When you factor in everything else, the situation gets much worse [2]. Think about the extra stages of production that are required to get dead chickens, pigs, or other animals from the farm to the table:
- Grow more than 10 times as much corn, grain, and soy (with all the required tilling, irrigation, crop dusters, and so on), as would be required if we ate the plants directly.
- Transport — in gas-guzzling, pollution-spewing 18-wheelers — all that grain and soy to feed manufacturers.
- Operate the feed mill (again, using massive amounts of resources).
- Truck the feed to the factory farms.
- Operate the factory farms.
- Truck the animals many miles to slaughterhouses.
- Operate the slaughterhouses.
- Truck the meat to processing plants.
- Operate the meat processing plants.
- Truck the meat to grocery stores (in refrigerated trucks).
- Keep the meat in refrigerators or freezers at the stores.
With every stage comes massive amounts of extra energy usage — and with that comes heavy pollution and massive amounts of greenhouse gases, of course. Obviously, vegan foods require some of these stages, too, but vegan foods cut out the factory farms, the slaughterhouses, and multiple stages of heavily polluting tractor-trailer trucks, as well as all the resources (and pollution) involved in each of those stages. And as was already noted, vegan foods require less than one-tenth as many calories from crops, since they are turned directly into food rather than funneled through animals first.
A friend of mine impressed me long ago with his claim that morality begins with what we are willing to put into our mouths. When we are willing put meat into our mouths we are affecting far more than our own bodies–we are affecting large swaths of the rest of the world. I’m not only referring to land animals. This article makes it clear that eating fish comes with a similar set of environmental concerns.
I still eat meat, though I’ve minimized my meat-eating over the years. Articles like make me wonder whether even eating a little bit of meat is too much.
Every time we sit down to eat, we can choose to eat a product that is, according to U.N. scientists, “one of the … most significant contributors to the most serious environmental problems, at every scale from local to global,” or we can choose vegan — and preferably organic — foods. It’s bad for the environment to eat animals.
One more thing – – the health benefits of giving up meat are spectacular. [3] In short, if you’re not motivated to give up meat for “the environment,” there’s good reason to give it up for your own health and safety.
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