Forget the Prius, go veggie
Writing on the Huffington Post, author Kathy Freston quotes a UN report that says raising farm animals for food is the primary cause for all sorts of disasters, the least of which are air pollution and global warming. Does that mean we can stop blaming the internal combustion engine for all the world's woes? Hardly. It just means there's another whipping boy on the block, and this time it's my tri-tip bar-b-que.Freston says the gold standard for environmental image building was driving a Prius. Now it's eating bulgur and edamames.
"Producing a calorie of meat protein means burning more than ten times as much fossil fuels--and spewing more than ten times as much heat-trapping carbon dioxide--as does a calorie of plant protein," Freston blogs. "The researchers found that, when it's all added up, the average American does more to reduce global warming emissions by going vegetarian than by switching to a Prius."
Freston says the methane and nitrous oxide emissions produced by animals are more problematic than CO2. That's because there are 10 billion land animals slaughtered every year for food.
"We are eating our planet to death," she says.
[Source: Kathy Freston / Huffington Post]
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Howard Lee Harkness 11:04AM (1/19/2007)
Meat is a natural and healthy part of the human diet. Get over it. Political Correctness, in addition to making bad science and bad public policy, also leads to poorer health (through "unintended consequences".
Case in point: Use of polyunsaturated oils for frying -- which results in production of trans-fats, making the resulting fried foods much less healthy than they would be if fried in saturated animal fat.
The energy requirement of meat production is purely a function of the methods used. "Modern" agriculture, based on plentiful and cheap energy, is grossly wasteful whether it's meat or veggies you are looking at, so there is lots of room for improvement in both.
Starting with the elimination of grain from the diet of meat animals (except maybe for birds, where it should still be reduced), which would result in healthier animals (and less need for antibiotics) and healthier humans.
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jiltedcitizen 12:21PM (1/19/2007)
But meat is so good. If all the cow farts is a major greenhouse gas, why not catch them and use it for energy? Gaze them under a tent or something, digest their crap for more methane. Then use it.
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CM 7:30PM (1/19/2007)
If she thinks that methane and nitrous oxide from cows is so horrible, why isn't she calling for the extinction of cattle? And what about all the other ruminants, they belch methane, too, so we should exterminate sheep, goats, deer, antelope, elk, etc.?
Of course, it is silly. It is the bacteria, not the cows, that produce methane, and would do so even without any ruminants. Now, if we could just figure out how to exterminate methanogenic bacteria... (grin)
Oh, and Mr. Harkness? I always find it amusing when some pompous city slicker tries to tell farmers how to run their farms. Your inane suggestion to "eliminate the grains" from farm animal diets shows that you know nothing about cattle or farming, or grains.
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Howard Lee Harkness 8:50PM (1/19/2007)
"Your inane suggestion to "eliminate the grains" from farm animal diets shows that you know nothing about cattle or farming, or grains." --CM
I know enough about grains not to eat them, even second-hand. My health improved tremendously when I eliminated grain from my own diet in 1999. As for farming, it's true I don't know a whole lot about energy-intensive and fertilizer-intensive agriculture, since my family (both sides) was the last in a long line of subsistence farmers, and we never used store-bought fertilizer. We didn't even have a tractor, since a team of horses can plow enough for a subsistence farm in East Texas (about 100 acres, and nearly a third of that was pecan orchard with some figs and peaches mixed in. The back 40 was pine trees, and the paper company leased that land from my grandparents, which helped a lot with things like buying clothes and stuff.), and tractors were real pricey. And cattle, ok, we didn't raise cattle; we had pigs and chickens. Hardly ever sat down to a meal that didn't have both pork and chicken, along with at least 4 vegetables. The neighbors had some milk cows, and we traded eggs, peanuts, pecans, or okra for milk sometimes. I don't drink milk anymore, and didn't much care for it after we moved to the Big City; just doesn't taste right after it's been out of the cow for more than a day. And aunt Ada had some goats. You had to really careful around those goats... I always carried a big stick when I went there, and never turned my back to them. After the first time, anyway.
I was the first member of either side of the family to get a college degree. Although I really did attend 1st grade in a little red schoolhouse with all 8 grades (15 kids total) in one class, with one teacher. I was the only 1st-grader that year. It was when the schoolmaster got sick and quit that we moved to the Big City (population 70,000), partly so I wouldn't have to ride the bus for over an hour each way. Despite the lack of a high school diploma, my dad landed a civil service job, and eventually went on to get a GED, and much later, an associates degree in nursing.
I do know that grass-fed beef tastes better and fetches a premium price, and is better for you because the ratio of o3/o9 hasn't been skewed by grain feeding. Oh, and the rancher I buy from tells me that he doesn't use antibiotics, because grass-fed cattle rarely get sick, and he doesn't have to worry about getting them morbidly obese quickly because they fetch a better price anyway.
Grain *is* really good for making meat animals morbidly obese really quickly, and it works on people, too. I remember clearly how quickly Charlie the Rooster doubled his weight when we cooped him up and fed him nothing but corn (about 10 days). He met his end because he got mean and kept attacking my mother every time she went out to the chicken coop. Mean and stupid.
Another thing I know about grain is that none of the grains we are familiar with today even existed 6000 years ago (the furor over genetically-modified corn is particularly amusing, since, strictly speaking, there is no other kind), so they could not have been part of the human diet prior to that time. Which is one reason grain allergies and gluten sensitivities are so common, affecting a little over 50% of the population with problems that vary from mild allergies to life-threatening celiac sprue.
I find it amusing when people (like CM) make erroneous assumptions about the backgrounds of others, based solely on their own superstitions and prejudices.
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Bill Maher is an Idiot 10:42PM (1/19/2007)
I stopped reading it once I saw "Huffington."
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sp0078 1:59PM (1/22/2007)
Commentors 1,2 and 3: The signficant carbon intensity associated with meat production is not only about the flatulants. More importantly, it's about the inherant inefficiency associated with having more links in a given food chain, what biologists call "higher trophic levels." Specifically, you have to feed cows up to 10 pounds of grain, grass or soybeans in order to produce 1 pound of marketable meat. The effort required by our agriculture industry to grow, move and process all that cattle feed, and then move and process the meat, requires additional fossil fuel inputs in proportion to that mass of feed.
Going vegetarian, and removing the cattle link of the food chain from our economy's effort to feed ourselves, eliminates demand for that extra industrial activity, and thus the fossil fuel deman and carbon emissions associated with it.
#5: If you don't like Huffington, then check out the peer-reviewed, primary literature on the topic... best example is a very thorough recent study from the University of Chicago (Eshel and Martin 2006). Their analysis and findings are quite persuasive. email me if you'd like a copy of the PDF.
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