Just the Facts, Please
When I grew up in Germany after the war, meat, dairy, and to a lesser degree fish belonged to the staples of our everyday diet. My parents had a friend who was vegetarian, and when he came over for dinner my mother felt quite stressed – how to cook something special but without meat was definitely a challenge. Nobody knew WHY this man didn’t eat animals, and it seemed rather weird.
My early forays into a vegetarian lifestyle were rather half hearted and sketchy. The first time I stopped eating meat happened when I traveled through India and Nepal in 1970/71. Electricity hardly existed in rural areas, and next to fruit, vegetables, spices, flours, etc., meat was sold in open markets. Heaps of slimy pinkish-grey stuff right on a tarp on the ground were covered by a blanket of black flies that a dedicated fly-swatter, usually a little kid, unsuccessfully tried to keep away from the meat. No wonder I lost all desire to eat this stuff. Plus, most Indian restaurants sold vegetarian food which was so delicious that one didn’t miss meat at all. But when I returned to Europe I had no qualms eating chicken or hamburgers or whatever — I knew the meat came from the supermarket, neatly packaged and kept cold. That it also came from animals – well, that was an abstract notion that barely registered.
When I lived in Japan from 1973 to 1977, somebody introduced me to Macrobiotic foods, and again I followed a vegetarian diet – and again that flew out the window after I moved to the United States. I had no clear idea what vegetarianism meant, besides the fact that one didn’t kill animals and only consumed plants and dairy.
This changed drastically when my daughter who went to a Waldorf School read John Robbins’s Diet for a New America as part of her curriculum in the 8th grade. I read it too, and it changed my life forever. Not only did Robbins explain the health hazards posed by animal consumption – the higher risks of cancer and heart disease caused by animal fats as well as the huge amounts of pesticides, antibiotics, hormones, and other chemical toxins that are part of the meat – not only did he describe the horrendous conditions at factory farms and meat-packing plants, which links unbearable pain and suffering to every bite of meat, but he also provided some solid numbers. How much water is needed to obtain say one pound of beef versus one pound of soybeans? How much land is required? How much of the rainforest is being destroyed because of cattle ranching? Remember, the book came out before personal computers, the internet, and Google were readily available (1987), so it wasn’t nearly as easy to do research as it is today. And one number he didn’t even talk about, because it wasn’t a major issue then: How many pounds of harmful carbon emissions can be saved when somebody goes without meat for a month? A year?
Okay, so here are some numbers:
Let’s start with the most pressing category: climate-changing greenhouse gasses (carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide and other gasses that keep the planet warm enough to support life). Burning of carbon-rich fossil fuels such as coal, natural gas, and oil emits carbon dioxide (CO2), the largest contributor to global warming. Methane is caused by the decomposition of plant matter, and methane emissions produced by livestock (mainly cows and other ruminants) come to 7.1 gigatonnes per year, representing 14.5% of all global greenhouse gas emissions.1
That doesn’t sound like an awful lot; however: each methane molecule has 25 - 28 times the GWP (Global Warming Potential) of a carbon dioxide molecule, which substantially increases the effect of methane produced by cattle.
So, how do these numbers relate to the food on your plate? The latest studies state that one ¼ LB hamburger costs you 0.126 LB of methane. When you include all the greenhouse gasses released during its production – the fossil fuels burned or released to raise the crops to feed the animals and to transport the beef after the cattle have been butchered, as well as the methane directly produced by the cows themselves – , your ¼ LB hamburger comes to 4 pounds of total carbon footprint!
Besides that, your hamburger uses 460 gallons of water, 13.5 LB of feed (mostly grain and corn), and 64.5 square feet of land (to raise the feed cows eat). These numbers are based on feedlot animals; while grass-fed beef has better numbers as far as grain and corn are concerned, it requires more land that otherwise could be used to grow more crops.2
Once I realized the enormous environmental cost of meat production I totally lost any desire to eat it. It just didn’t make sense to waste all these resources when a large part of the global population went hungry or even was starving. The hunger crisis in Ethiopia in the 1980s dominated the news headlines enough for me to decide that I didn’t want to be part of this unnecessary waste.
So, let’s briefly summarize, comparing the resources needed for one pound of beef to those for one pound of organic tofu:3
Clearly, at a time of unprecedented climate emergency, of severe drought conditions in a number of western US States, of rising hunger levels affecting 9.9% of people globally, meat consumption is unsustainable. And there are many more reasons to stop eating meat which I will explore in more detail later. Here is just a quick listing: Animal waste causes water/groundwater pollution. Health risks associated with meat consumption include cardiovascular disease, colorectal cancer, and type 2 diabetes. Antibiotic use in livestock may lead to resistance which may impact human, animal, and environmental health. 30% of global forest cover, especially in the Amazon region (Rainforest) has been cleared, displacing wild animals and threatening an extinction crisis mainly caused by us humans. The tremendous suffering caused by the meat (and by the dairy) industry is another fact that should be at the top of this list.
When you let these facts sink in, shouldn’t they be more convincing than your taste buds?
https://www.fao.org/news/story/en/item/197623/icode/
https://www.businessinsider.com/one-hamburger-environment-resources-2015-2
I’m using tofu in comparison to beef because it has a complete protein (all essential amino acids), has zero cholesterol, and less fat (most of it unsaturated). 1 LB tofu contains 70g protein, 35g fat (31g unsaturated), 15g carbohydrates, and 650 calories. 1 LB ground beef (80% lean, 20%fat) contains 78g protein, 91g fat (35g saturated), 0 carbohydrates, and 1152 calories.