Comfortably Unaware, first and foremost, is a book about sustainability—of our planet, our resources, and ourselves. At the same time, though, it is a book about food choice and responsibility, which are intertwined inextricably with the concept of achieving true sustainability (although “true” or “full” sustainability may be a difficult, if not improbable, state to achieve).
Global depletion is a term I have used over the years to describe the loss of our primary resources on earth, as well as loss of our own health due to our choice of a certain type of food. Therefore, global depletion essentially is about sustainability, but I feel we need to hear it from a different direction and with a more accurate view, through an unfiltered lens. Most of us have heard about the atrocities of factory farms, the issues with high-fructose corn syrup, and the industrialization or processing of foods with their contribution to obesity—all important topics. But these are simply small fragments of the picture. We need to move beyond that to understand the entire picture by connecting the dots and including our effect on all aspects of global depletion—topics such as loss of biodiversity, world hunger, sustainability of our own health, water scarcity, agricultural land-use inefficiencies and loss of our rainforests, pollution, and the state of our oceans and fish, as well as the effects on climate change. The largest contributing factor to all areas of global depletion is the raising and eating of more than 70 billion animals each year and the extracting of 1–2 trillion fish from our oceans annually. It’s simply not sustainable.
Because of what can be viewed only as misuse or abuse of the word “sustainable,” I am introducing and advocating use of the term “relative” sustainability. How “sustainable” is it to raise and eat ANY animal products in a RELATIVE sense, as compared to plant-based foods? How can we best use our resources? What foods will have the very least effect on our planet? Which foods best promote our own human health and wellness, and which are the most compassionate? Do we really need to slaughter another living thing in order for us to eat? Or, sadly, is it because we want to? In terms of sustainability, this is the way we must begin viewing things, in a relative sense, from this day forward.
Even as we deplete our natural resources, we add 230,000 new human mouths to feed each day. Water will become scarcer—predicted to be a 40 percent global shortage in just 18 years (over one billion people are already without adequate drinking water; two billion are without running water for cleaning and hygiene)—nearly one billion people are considered hungry, and six million children will starve to death this year. Nevertheless, of the 2.5 billion tons of grain harvested in 2011, half was fed to animals in the meat and dairy industries; 77 percent of all coarse grain went to livestock. Many of our planet’s issues—dwindling resources, food security concerns, increased climate change, hunger and poverty, loss of biodiversity, pollution, declining human health and escalating health care costs, and the ravaging of oceanic ecosystems—can be eliminated or at least significantly minimized by a simple, collective change to a healthier, more peaceful plant-based food choice and thereby a more efficient, more compassionate food-production systems.
Almost everything we do, every decision we make every day, is based on our culture—what we’ve learned; what someone has told us is acceptable or necessary. After realizing by the end of the nineteenth century that bloodletting wasn’t so healthy for us after all, we miraculously stopped, even though we had been doing it for more than 3,000 years. We are accepting culturally driven practices today, especially with food choices involving all animal products, that are much more unhealthy for our planet and for us than bloodletting—and by all counts, we don’t have 3,000 years to get it right.