Why Eating Meat is Not Personal

From the Atlanta Journal and Constitution. And the author does not even take into account the opportunity costs of the land used for livestock production, where forests could be flourishing, sequestering carbon and allowing other species to thrive.


Here's my (personal) beef with meat

By James E. McWilliams

I gave a talk in South Texas recently on the environmental virtues of a vegetarian diet. As you might imagine, the reception was chilly. In fact, the only applause came during the Q&A period when a member of the audience said that my lecture made him want to go out and eat even more meat. "Plus," he added, "what I eat is my business - it's personal."

I've been writing about food and agriculture for more than a decade. Until that evening, however, I'd never actively thought about this most basic culinary question: Is eating personal?

We know more than we've ever known about the innards of the global food system. We understand that food can both nourish and kill. We know that its production can both destroy and enhance our environment. We know that farming touches every aspect of our lives - the air we breathe, the water we drink and the soil we need.


This realization changes everything for those who avoid meat. As a vegetarian I've always felt the perverse need to apologize for my dietary choice. It inconveniences people. It smacks of self-righteousness. It makes us pariahs at dinner parties.

But the more I learn about the negative impact of meat production, the more I feel that it's the consumers of meat who should be making apologies.

Here's why: The livestock industry, as a result of its reliance on corn and soy-based feed, accounts for over half the synthetic fertilizer used in the United States, contributing more than any other sector to marine dead zones.

It consumes 70 percent of the water in the American West - water so heavily subsidized that if irrigation supports were removed, ground beef would cost $35 a pound.

Livestock accounts for at least 21 percent of greenhouse-gas emissions globally - more than all forms of transportation combined. Domestic animals - most of them healthy - consume about 70 percent of all the antibiotics produced.



Meat that's raised according to "alternative" standards (about 1 percent of meat in the United States) might be a better choice but not nearly as much so as its privileged consumers would have us believe. "Free-range chickens" theoretically have access to the outdoors.

But many "free-range" chickens never see the light of day because they cannot make it through the crowded shed to the aperture leading to a patch of cement.

"Grass-fed" beef produces four times the methane - a greenhouse gas 21 times as powerful as carbon dioxide - of grain-fed cows, and many grass-fed cows are raised on heavily fertilized and irrigated grass. Pastured pigs are still typically mutilated, fed commercial feed and prevented from rooting - their most basic instinct besides sex.



Then comes the slaughterhouse, an operation that's left with millions of pounds of carcasses - deadstock - that are incinerated or dumped in landfills. (Rendering plants have taken a nose dive since mad cow disease.)


Probably not. It's more likely that you'd frame the matter as a dire political issue in need of a dire political response.

Vegetarianism is not only the most powerful political response we can make to industrialized food. It's a necessary prerequisite to reforming it. To quit eating meat is to dismantle the global food apparatus at its foundation.

Agribusiness has been vilified of late by muckraking journalists, activist filmmakers and sustainable-food advocates. We know that SOMETHING has to be done to save our food from corporate interests.

But I wonder - are we ready to do what must be done? Sure, we've been inundated with ideas: Eat local, vote with your fork, buy organic, support fair trade, etc. But these proposals all lack something that every successful environmental movement has always placed at its core: genuine sacrifice.



Sailesh Rao
