Trimming the Fat
Farewell to Fossil Food
The food industrialists have by now persuaded millions of consumers to prefer food that is already prepared. They will grow, deliver, and cook your food for you and (just like your mother) beg you to eat it. That they do not yet offer to insert it, prechewed, into our mouth is only because they have found no profitable way to do so.
—Wendell Berry
Don’t dig your grave with your own knife and fork.
—English proverb
In addition to contributing to erosion, pollution, food poisoning, and the dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico, corn requires huge amounts of fossil fuel—it takes a half gallon of fossil fuel to produce a bushel of corn.
—Michael Pollan
At home I serve the kind of food I know the story behind.
—Michael Pollan
Seventeen percent of U.S. energy is spent to produce and distribute food; three-fourths of all the water used in this nation is for agriculture, and about a fourth of the country’s land is devoted to growing food for both domestic consumption and export. By paying more attention to what we eat and how our food is grown, we can use fewer resources as well as increase the quality of our lives. The choices we make at the supermarket or farmers’ market can literally change the world
If we bring a sense of connection and quality back into the food chain, we can improve our health, rebuild the world’s soils, and regain a sense of control and participation in the market. Says Paul Hawken, a guru of the
emerging new economy, “The cash register is the daily voting booth in democratic capitalism.” When we buy groceries, we cast a vote for the kind of farming, processing, and packaging we support, as well as what we believe healthy humans should eat. The best chefs in the country prefer organically grown produce because it tastes better. When conventional crops get too much nitrogen fertilizer they take up extra water, diluting the taste. (Conventionally grown produce often looks like something on a magazine cover, but eyes can’t taste and taste buds can’t see.) Growing food organically means using organic fertilizers and natural pest control; rotating crops to avoid disease, build the soil, and minimize erosion; and using great, region-specific varieties to optimize the flavor. These techniques are of great interest to consumers who want a chain of quality from field to table.
Retailers are getting the message: Organic food has been growing by 20 percent annually since the mid-1990s, and when giants like Wal-Mart and Safeway expand their organic inventories, it’s clear that organic is here to stay. In fact, except for a hundred-year dot-point in human history, we’ve always eaten organically! It’s not a fad, and considering the far higher quality, it’s also not really an extra expense—we get what we pay for with better health, more flavorful food, and a less polluted world. Besides, the supermarket costs of mainstream food don’t reflect hidden costs ultimately paid by taxpayers, including billions of dollars in federal agricultural subsidies, water contamination, loss of bees, soil erosion, and so on. If you add environmental and social costs to a conventionally grown head of lettuce, for example, its price would be twice as high.
A hundred years ago, Americans spent 43 percent of their household budget on food, but now household spending for food has dropped to 13 percent. As the exploitation of soil, water, and fossil fuels expanded, farms became food factories, fast food became an institution, and the price of food came down. But if convenience food is cheaper over-the-counter, it’s expensive in many other ways. Americans spend the least per capita for food of any country in the world, as a percentage of income, but we spend the most for health care. What’s the connection? Many people don’t realize that good food maintains health and makes us feel happy. That simple wisdom was culturally eroded when convenience food seduced the generation that is now our elders. But whole foods are making a comeback and, as the market expands, prices for organic food will come down. In any case, the percentage of total household spending for food may well go up voluntarily in the next few decades, as food’s full value becomes more widely known. At the same time, unnecessary spending for things like media entertainment, clothing, and household knickknacks will go down.1
As both oil and water become more expensive, we’ll return to information-rich, resource-efficient agriculture. There have been many innovations in recent times that will make small farming much more pleasant than it was in the past, and the market is quickly expanding to support the small, local, organic farmer. Although five million family farmers were lost between 1935 and 2000, and most of those remaining are fifty-five years old or older, a new generation of organic growers is emerging like a field of seedlings. For example, the number of farmers in the largest organic cooperative in the country, Organic Valley Family of Farms, doubled over the last three years. Its sales rose 17 percent to $245 million in 2005 and is expected to climb to $285 million in 2006. Cities like Bellingham, Washington, that value local food, have programs to train new farmers in organic growing.
The American food system as a whole is distressingly inefficient at each link of the chain. It needs greater consumer scrutiny, and not just in search of the cheapest price. Our individual share of food’s impact includes huge amounts of oil, soil, land, and water to grow the crops; and more pools of resources to transport, process, preserve, and prepare the food. Just the farm and processing sectors of the chain cost roughly the equivalent of ten barrels of oil annually, for each of us. Fortunately, there are many ways that slight changes in lifestyle will help bring the food system out of crisis and back into balance.
Breaking the oil-dependency of industrial agriculture won’t be easy, but we’ll ultimately kick the habit because agribusiness is so inefficient and so unhealthy—from hazardous chemicals in water and human tissue through soil erosion and depletion. Most pesticides are petroleum based, and so is the nitrogen component of fertilizers—as well as the mining and processing of the other primary components, potassium and phosphorous. Chemical fertilizers alone comprise one-fifth of the energy used in agriculture. Although these industrial nutrients have helped feed (and also enable) a swelling world population, we are now seeing diminishing returns. It appears we’ve been coasting on natural fertility in the soil that nature built up over the eons. Like fossil fuels and “fossil water” (underground water stored in aquifers), soil was built up over the millennia by the incremental addition of organic material like prairie thatch, and the grinding down of rock. When we try to replace the nutrients that crops have removed with synthetic fertilizers that contain only some of these nutrients, we’re mining the soil rather than building it.
Transportation of food comprises another 14 percent of the energy used in U.S. agriculture. Public enemy number one is shipping produce by airfreight. Not only is its energy cost per mile outlandish, but total miles traveled by an average morsel of food now averages about 2,000. Traditionally, we’ve shipped food long distances by ocean freighter or refrigerated semi truck, but our expectations for flawlessly fresh produce keep jumbo jets in the air, especially during North America’s winter months—filled with New Zealand apples and kiwis. What’s wrong with citrus fruit in the winter, that at least comes from the same country it’s eaten in? (Even that has far more value when it’s fresh, as Dr. Michael Colgan discovered when he tested oranges that had been picked the same day as the analysis; their vitamin C content was 180 mg. He then tested oranges from the same grower that had been in storage for a week at a local supermarket. They looked and tasted the same, but their vitamin C content had dropped to zero).2
As Joan Gussow observes in The Organic Life, “The water content of luxury foods (for example, 88 percent of a peach is water) means we’re burning a lot of petroleum to ship cold water around … . Tomatoes are even more watery than peaches. Keeping all that water cool as it moves north from Florida or east from California is helping warm the planet.”3
If you already have an efficient refrigerator, canvas shopping bags, and a grocery close enough to walk to, the next step in shopping green is to pay attention to “food miles,” the distance the items travel to get to your table. Researchers at Iowa State University are investigating the feasibility of mandatory labels that indicate where the food was grown. They’ve also calculated the energy costs of various produce items. A pineapple shipped from Costa Rica consumes a third of a gallon of gasoline to get to an Iowa supermarket, while a pineapple from Hawaii consumes 2.8 gallons. The reason the Costa Rican fruit’s food miles are less consumptive is that half its journey is by sea, but the Hawaiian pineapple can only get there by air.
Food mileage is also a factor when the fishing industry travels long distances to harvest marketable fish. For example, sardines and anchovies thrive in coastal areas and can be harvested with minimal energy expenditure; large predatory species such as swordfish however, require energy-intensive, high-tech fishing trips.
The best way to get good food mileage, of course, is to look for and buy food grown or caught in your own region. Sometimes that’s not so simple; because of deals made on the phone and computer, a produce buyer in Colorado may arrange to buy lettuce from Maine even though local growers could supply it much fresher without jet lag. Markets also encourage a single-crop, soil-depleting mentality that’s unhealthy for the farm as well as the consumer. Idaho produces a third of all U.S. potatoes, for example—mostly for French fries. By USDA calculations, if Idaho residents were to consume all potatoes grown in their state, they’d have to eat 63 pounds a day. Pass the ketchup, please!4
Ten Ways to Eat Greener
1. Eat a variety of foods. Eating a wide variety of foods is the best way to meet all your nutritional requirements. The huge number of choices in supermarkets does not reflect biological diversity. Three species—rice, corn, and wheat—supply nearly 60 percent of the calories and protein people derive from plants. Of 200 crops eaten by humans, only 30 account for 90 percent of the world’s calorie intake.
2. Buy locally produced food. The average mouthful of food travels 2,000 miles from the farm to our plates. Locally grown food is fresher and closer to ripeness, has used less energy for transport and is less likely to have been treated with postharvest pesticides. Buying local products also supports regional farmers and preserves farmland. If you get your fruits and vegetables at a farmers’ market or from a Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) farm, you can ask the farmer whether the food has been genetically engineered or treated with pesticides.
3. Buy produce in season. Out-of-season produce is costly because transport uses so much energy. It’s also more likely to have been imported, often from a country with less stringent pesticide regulations than the United States. Instead, in winter, prepare seasonal crops, such as potatoes, onions, sweet potatoes, and beets. Put away or freeze spring and summer produce, such as berries or snap peas, from local producers. All these foods retain their nutritional content in storage; using them cuts energy costs.
4. Buy organically produced food. Besides whatever food you eat the most, buy the following produce grown organically, to minimize exposure to pesticides, especially for babies: peaches, apples, pears, winter squash, green beans, grapes, strawberries, raspberries, spinach, potatoes.
5. Eat fresh, whole foods with adequate starch and fiber. Whole foods—fruits, vegetables, grains, legumes (beans), nuts, and seeds—are the healthiest we can eat. The National Cancer Institute recommends we each “strive for five” servings of fresh fruits and vegetables a day to protect against cancer, heart disease, and common digestive ailments. Also, most fresh produce, legumes, and whole grains, with the exception of corn and soy, are still genetically natural.
6. Eat fewer and smaller portions of animal products. Meat and dairy products are major sources of fat in the U.S. diet, contributing to higher risk of heart disease, cancer, and diabetes. Animal products, including farmed fish, may contain hormones, antibiotics, and toxic chemicals, such as dioxin, DDT, and other
pesticides, which concentrate in animal fat. Fish caught in contaminated waters may contain high levels of PCBs or mercury. Cattle, chickens, pigs, and sheep consume more than 70 percent of the grains produced in the United States.
7. Choose minimally processed and packaged foods. A typical highly processed “food product” may contain little natural food and be high in fat, salt, or sugar. It’s likely to contain genetically engineered soy- and corn-based additives, such as corn syrup and soy lecithin, which are present in 60 percent of all processed foods.
8. Prepare your own meals at home. Cooking from scratch can involve a little more labor and time, but you can be sure you’ll save money and resources, because you’re not paying someone else to prepare, package, transport, and advertise your meals. Home cooking is healthier and more nutritious because you start with fresh ingredients. And it can be its own reward, providing a truly creative outlet and rejuvenating the family meal.
9. Start a garden and compost pile. Growing at least a little of your own food gives you control over the quality of what you eat. There’s nothing like eating your dinner or a snack right in the garden, ingesting vitality from produce that’s still alive. A compost pile means that nothing is ever wasted.
10. Avoid these fatty foods. Whole-milk dairy products (ice cream, cheese); processed meats such as bacon, sausage, liverwurst; and tropical oils, such as palm kernel and coconut oils. They contain saturated fat, which clogs arteries and increases levels of the bad cholesterol, LDL. Fast-food fries and baked goods like packaged cookies and cakes may contain both trans fats (partially hydrogenated oils) and saturated fats.
Sources: Children’s Health Environmental Coalition, http://www.checnet.org/healthehouse/education/quicklist-detail.asp?Main_ID=238; Consumers Union, Environmental Working Group; Msn.com Health & Fitness; also, parts of these steps are adapted from: Joan Dye Gussow, professor emeritus of nutrition and education, Columbia University Teachers College, and Katherine L. Clancy, director of the Wallace Center for Agriculture & Environmental Policy, “Dietary Guidelines for Sustainability,” Journal of Nutrition Education 18, no.1 (1986).
A full two-thirds of the energy spent on food is not for growing and transportation but processing, packaging, marketing, maintaining freshness in the store, and kitchen preparation. Consumers influence each of these sectors by the choices we make. Many people are consciously buying less-processed food to reduce their consumption of excess sugar, salt, and fat (which occur at much higher levels in canned, frozen, and packaged foods). This sends a message to the food processing industry to change their way of doing business. It also delivers greater health to the consumer. For example, the processing of fresh produce into frozen dinners like lasagne eliminates from one-tenth to nine-tenths of its mineral content but, when we insist on fresh fruits and vegetables, we vote with our dollars. Market-savvy retailers such as Whole Foods step in to meet our needs more precisely by providing a higher percentage of unprocessed, locally grown food than a typical supermarket.
Those on the lookout for resource-reducing opportunities will find a mother lode in packaging, and save money at the same time, since about 9 percent of a product’s cost is in the packaging.5 By buying in bulk, buying in larger packages, and shopping for products with little or no packaging, we can literally begin to unpackage the world. One person’s small contribution can eliminate a lot of the country’s wasted fuel, if the rest of us do it, too. For example, if every New York City resident used just one less grocery bag a year, it would save $250,000 in disposal costs and 28,000 barrels of oil.6 And if each American did the same (how hard can that be?!) it would save close to a million barrels of oil, or at current prices, about $70 million a year.
What if the entire grocery industry—or the federal government—decided to enable those savings by making plastic bags so expensive that people would decide to bring their own cloth or nylon bags? That may sound far-fetched, but a similar strategy is already working great in Ireland, where a fifteen-cents-per-bag tax has led to a 95 percent reduction in what some Irish call the “national flag.” Australia, Taiwan, Singapore, Great Britain, and San Francisco are following Ireland’s lead, and Bangladesh has already completely banned polyethylene bags.7
Beverage containers are another example of how affluenza and weak policy create incredible amounts of waste. Americans consume the most packaged drinks of any country in the world, and after the beverages are guzzled (and only the belches and containers remain), we go through over 650 plastic, aluminum, and glass containers per person, annually. Less than half of these containers are recycled, a lost opportunity for the national
economy. About 350 of our annual share of containers are aluminum cans—compared with only 14 containers per person in France.8 Despite the fact that recycling an aluminum can save three-fourths of the energy it takes to make a new can, we throw away more than half of them—wasting the energy equivalent of powering a million homes!9
Although curbside recycling programs in America have tripled in the last decade, many of the beverages we drink are away from home, and there are not enough recycling receptacles on streets and in stores. On the positive side, according to the National Recycling Coalition, in 2000, recycling resulted in an annual energy savings equal to the amount of energy used in six million homes, and by 2005, recycling was estimated to have saved the amount of energy used in nine million homes. We still have a lot of opportunity for improvement.
According to the Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit Container Recycling Institute (CRI), a full 3 percent of the world’s electricity goes into manufacturing aluminum cans, but the U.S. market continues to treat them like dirt. CRI’s research director Jenny Gitlitz comments, “The irony is that while Americans are trashing almost three quarters of a million tons of cans a year, the major aluminum companies are forging ahead with plans to build new aluminum smelters—and hydroelectric dams for power in environmentally sensitive areas including Brazil, Malaysia, and Iceland.” Gitlitz explained that a dam being built for Alcoa’s new smelter in Iceland will submerge 22 square miles of tundra, including habitat for reindeer and the pink-footed goose; up to sixty waterfalls; and what has been called the “Icelandic Grand Canyon.”10
Americans spent about $10 billion for bottled water in 2005, and making the one-use bottles for that market requires more than 1.5 million barrels of oil annually, enough to fuel some 100,000 U.S. cars for a year.
The solutions are obvious, yet they sound foreign to convenience-addicted, market-bound Americans like us: Put a mandatory and very compelling bounty on containers to make sure they get recycled (we don’t throw away quarters, do we?), or in the case of glass and PET plastic containers, make sure they’re reused and recycled. Ten states have bottle bills that put a deposit on bottles, but apparently the bounty is still too low, because the percentage of bottles being returned is slipping, along with the recycling of plastic and aluminum containers. Why are we letting all this value get away? As recently as 1960, 95 percent of all packaged soft drinks and 53 percent of all packaged beer was sold in refillable glass bottles, which were returned for reuse twenty or more times. In our frenzied times, it seems we can’t be bothered; our version of the free market doesn’t seem to be able to value something as small as a container. I strongly believe that for the
common good (including industry), the U.S. government needs to intervene to recapture the wasted value, as many other governments already have. Here again, Europe is leading the way: In more than thirty EU countries, packaging manufacturers must recycle (“take back”) their products. In Germany, where Take Back regulations debuted in 1991, packaging has become lighter and the volume has decreased. The reuse of refillable glass and plastic containers now exceeds 70 percent in that country.
When we think about a resource-intensive commodity such as packaging, we begin to realize how interconnected resources are with expectations. In a very real sense, packaging assumes that we will ship products long distances and store them on shelves for potentially long periods of time. After all, the main reasons for packaging are to protect the product during shipment and reduce the chances it will be damaged or stolen before being purchased. Plastic bottles make sense to a distributor because they are lighter and cost less to ship. But they aren’t as reusable as glass bottles, and they contain substances (phthalates) that have been implicated in the disruption of human endocrine systems. If consumers demand local products, the whole game changes.
A final aspect of our diet that’s wasteful is what we literally throw out: A typical household trashes 10 to 15 percent of the food purchased. If just a fraction of that waste were avoided, we’d save hundreds of millions of dollars in landfill costs alone, and avoid the unnecessary resource costs of growing more.
The diet-related choice with the greatest leverage for reducing resource use is to eat less meat. As compared with a low-meat diet, a 200-pound-a-year meat diet (about the American average) consumes many times as much land, energy, and water. When humans relied on hunting for a large part of their diet, meat was a rich source of range-fed protein. Grazing animals convert grass into food—something humans aren’t able to do—a very efficient use of solar energy. But in the current industrial way of raising beef, for example, after beginning their lives on grassland, the animals are shipped to dense feedlots and fattened up with grain and soybeans, which create the tender “marbled” beef we’re used to. This is where the inefficiencies begin to stack up. It takes 5 to 8 pounds of grain to produce a pound of beef and, as a result, 65 percent or more of the grain eaten in the U.S. feeds livestock, not people. According to the nonprofit British
organization Vegfam, a 10-acre farm can support sixty people growing soybeans, twenty-four people growing wheat, ten people growing corn but only two people by producing cattle.11
A very determined cow escapes from Mickey’s Packing Plant in Great Falls, Montana. After a six-hour chase in which she dodged vehicles, ran in front of a train, swam the icy Missouri River, wooed TV and print media across the country, and took three tranquilizer darts, “Molly” won her place in the pasture. © Robin Loznak/Great Falls Tribune
In the classic Diet for a Small Planet, Frances Moore Lappé writes, “Imagine sitting down to an eight-ounce steak. Then imagine the room filled with forty-five to fifty people with empty bowls in front of them. For the ‘feed cost’ of your steak, each of their bowls could be filled with a full cup of cooked cereal grains.” Jean Mayer, a Harvard nutritionist, estimates that if each American reduced the amount of meat he or she eats by just 10 percent, sixty million people could survive, eating the grain directly.12
In addition to the hidden energy costs in meat production, half the water consumed in the United States is used by the meat industry to grow feed. Much of that comes from groundwater that’s being pumped faster than it can recharge. In the High Plains region where I live, state governments have ordered some ranchers to stop pumping from the Ogallala Aquifer, which experts project will be depleted within sixty years.
Where does all the energy in grain go that’s not converted to meat? It
gets “expelled” as the greenhouse gas methane, and excreted at the rate of some 87,000 pounds per second of manure, according to the organization People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA). This makes every U.S. household’s share of manure twenty tons annually—whether we want it or not. Such volumes of manure could be great natural fertilizer if the livestock were all home, home on the range. However, in concentrated factory-farm conditions, the wastes become potent pollutants. For example, in 1995, twenty-five million gallons of hog waste spilled from an 8-acre lagoon into a river in North Carolina, killing ten million fish.
A very graphic example of how U.S. meat production is unnatural is the E. coli scare over contaminated spinach that hit the nation in 2006. In a New York Times guest editorial, food expert Nina Planck explains, “California’s spinach industry is now the financial victim of an outbreak it probably did not cause.” The contamination didn’t occur on the farms, she maintains, but in the industrial feedlots, where beef and dairy cattle are fed grains that they aren’t equipped to properly digest. “This particularly virulent strain, E. coli O157:H7, is not found in the intestinal tracts of cattle raised on their natural diet of grass, hay and other fibrous forage. It thrives in the unnaturally acidic stomachs of beef and dairy cattle fed on grain. It’s the infected manure from these grain-fed cattle that contaminates groundwater and spreads the bacteria to crops like spinach growing on neighboring farms.” The problem cascades onto our dinner plates, because human stomachs don’t produce enough acidity to kill the bacteria.13
Yet despite production deficiencies like these, the world’s appetite for meat continues to grow, at the rate of 2 percent each year. To keep up with demand, we now “take care of” fifteen to twenty billion livestock animals!14 Since the industrial revolution began, the world’s farmland has expanded from 6 percent of the Earth’s surface to nearly a third, and much of that land supports the short lives of cows, hogs, sheep, chickens, and other livestock. In developing countries, eating meat is seen as a sign of wealth and prosperity, but it’s also a sign of affluenza. Especially carnivorous are China, which now consumes half the world’s pork, and Brazil, the second largest consumer of beef after the United States.15
Partly as a result of the meteoric rise of fast food, meat has become more of an institution than it ever was. “Meat and potatoes” became “Burgers ’n’ fries.” Writes Eric Schlosser in the book Fast Food Nation, “Americans now spend more money on fast food than they do on higher education. They spend more on fast food than on movies, books, magazines, newspapers, videos and recorded music—combined.”
A few years ago, Hardee’s unveiled its Monster Thickburger—two 
pound slabs of Angus beef, four strips of bacon, three slices of cheese, and mayonnaise on a buttered sesame seed bun. All that for only 1,400 calories. With fries (520 calories) and soda (400 calories), the meal meets or exceeds the suggested caloric intake for Godzilla—or at least an American male. (For a rough calculation of how many calories to consume, multiply your weight times sixteen. Of course, this will vary with your level of activity.)
pound slabs of Angus beef, four strips of bacon, three slices of cheese, and mayonnaise on a buttered sesame seed bun. All that for only 1,400 calories. With fries (520 calories) and soda (400 calories), the meal meets or exceeds the suggested caloric intake for Godzilla—or at least an American male. (For a rough calculation of how many calories to consume, multiply your weight times sixteen. Of course, this will vary with your level of activity.)With two out of three Americans overweight, and heart attacks the major cause of death in the United States, Hardee’s executives suspected they’d get calls from the “health nuts,” and they were right. Michael Jacobson, director of Center for Science in the Public Interest, quickly pronounced the Monster Thickburger “food porn.” Said Jacobson, “Hardee’s seems not only oblivious to America’s obesity epidemic, but also to the trend toward healthier fast food.” Hardee’s chief executive Andrew Puzder was unfazed, telling reporters, “I hope our competitors keep promoting those healthy products, and we will keep promoting our big, juicy delicious burgers.” Said Jacobson, “A good rule of thumb is that if a burger needs a comma in its calorie count, it’s virtually impossible to fit into a healthy diet.” Puzder quickly distanced himself from customers he never would have had anyway, saying, “The Monster Thickburger is not a burger for tree-huggers.”16
Some people can’t imagine life without thick burgers, but a growing number of people can’t imagine life with them. For them, the so-called Mediterranean diet is far more appealing. The man who first popularized the connection between heart disease and saturated fat, Professor Ancel Keys, also lived more than hundred years. His personal diet, based on complex carbohydrates, fruits, and vegetables, may have been one of the reasons. He conducted a decadelong research project in the 1960s that studied the diet, lifestyle, and incidence of coronary heart disease among thirteen thousand randomly selected middle-aged men from seven countries: the United States, Japan, Italy, Greece, the Netherlands, Finland, and Yugoslavia. A clear pattern emerged from the study’s data: in the Mediterranean and Asian countries where vegetables, grains, fruits, beans, and fish were dietary mainstays, heart disease was rare. But in the United States and Finland, where red meat, cheese, and other foods high in saturated fat were eaten, heart disease was all too common.17
Many studies since then have corroborated Keys’s findings, leading to strong support among health experts for the Mediterranean diet, a flavorful
composite of the traditional foods of Spain, southern France, Italy, Greece, Crete, and parts of the Middle East. Common to the diets of these regions are high consumption of complex carbohydrates (not refined), foods high in fiber, fish, nuts, wide use of olive oil, and moderate consumption of red wine—making them low in saturated fat but high in cholesterol-reducing unsaturated fats. Says nutrition expert Andrew Weil, “Researchers from the University of Athens recently published a study showing that people who ate a Mediterranean-style diet had a 33 percent reduction in the risk of death from heart disease. Their cancer death rate was 24 percent lower than the death rate for those who ate more Western-style diets.”18
In another study from the Netherlands, published in the September 2004 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association, those who maintained a Mediterranean diet had a 23 percent lower death rate than those on their regular diets. Says Weil, “Those who followed the diet and also consumed moderate amounts of alcohol, got regular exercise, and didn’t smoke, reduced their risk of death from any cause by 65 percent over the 10-year duration of the study.”19
Dr. Dean Ornish agrees that diets similar to the Mediterranean diet have the right stuff, conferring anticancer, anti-heart disease, and antiaging properties. “I’d love to be able to tell people that bacon and eggs are health foods, but they’re not,” he says. “A diet rich in animal protein increases your risk of osteoporosis, kidney disease, heart disease, and the most common forms of cancer.” Ornish also cites a study in the American Journal of Medicine, concluding that a meat-heavy diet can cause halitosis—not life threatening, but potentially hazardous to your social life. Since the human body gets rid of toxic substances partly through breathing, Ornish asserts that on a heavy meat diet (like the Atkins diet he loves to hate), “you may start to lose weight and attract people, but when they get too close, they might have a problem with the way you smell.”20
For Ornish, the bottom line is the return to vitality he’s seen in his own patients when they changed to diets lower in saturated fat and sugar and did moderate exercise. “We found that even among people with severe heart disease, 99 percent were able to stop or reverse the progression of their disease … People who couldn’t walk across the street before the light changed without getting chest pains, they couldn’t have sex, they couldn’t take a shower, shave … within a few weeks were essentially pain-free.”21
If meat is so heavily implicated in various diseases, and if it takes such a heavy toll on the environment, isn’t it time to question whether we want to be eating it ten or fifteen times a week?
Morgan Spurlock, producer and star of the documentary Super Size Me, was on the Monster Thickburger (or actually Big Mac) diet for ninety
straight meals, an adventure that had alarming side effects. In one of the documentary’s most candid moments, he says, “I was starting to become impotent through this diet and couldn’t perform. How many people who are taking the little blue pill, if they started to change what they are eating most of the time, could change the way their sex life is?”22 (The Erectile Dysfunction Institute supports Spurlock’s conclusion, reporting that up to 90 percent of all cases of impotence are physical, not psychological. “Viagra may get you through the night,” says the GoVeg.com Web site, “but a vegetarian diet can get you through your life.”)
“For me,” says Spurlock, “the most horrifying thing of the whole project is the impact the fast food culture has on the schools, and parents have no idea. They give their kids three dollars and say, ‘Okay, see you later. Go off to school and have a good lunch.’ And the lunchrooms are filled with pizza and burgers and soda and candy and chips. It’s like you’re in the middle of the 7-11 having lunch … If anything comes out of this movie, I really hope it has an impact on the school lunch programs, because they need to change …” “Here’s a question for you,” says Spurlock. “Why doesn’t the clown eat the food, in the advertisements? If it’s that good for you, why isn’t Ronald McDonald eating it?”23