“Real knowledge is to know the extent of one’s ignorance.”
—Confucius
IT IS DIFFICULT TO DEVELOP A BETter understanding of a particular topic when there is pre-existing confusion and imprecise use of certain words regarding that topic. With food choices, improper connotations abound. With this in mind, let’s begin by correctly defining some terms and concepts.
Food: that which is consumed to support life.
Plants and animals are not “food” unless you choose to eat them. Plants are living structures with chlorophyll-containing cells, capable of taking carbon dioxide out of the air in exchange for producing oxygen. Plants have no blood, organs, brains, or nervous systems. Animals are living organisms that have saturated fat and cholesterol associated with all their cells and tissue. All animals have blood, organs, brains, and nervous systems, feelings, and emotions.
Animals are, in fact, animals—not meat. “Meat” is a term contrived and used by humans to obscure the reality of what they choose to put in their mouths. Animals (cows, pigs, sheep, fish, birds such as chickens and turkeys, etc.) are also not protein. Again, animals are animals. Protein, on the other hand, is a nutrient and can be found in many living things, including plants, and can even be found in lettuce. Fats and carbohydrates are also nutrients. Some animal parts that are eaten have more fat content than protein, and yet I never hear people say as they eat meat, “I need to get my fat today.” Not all types or forms of protein, fat, and carbohydrates are needed by the body, nor are they healthy for us. All essential protein (and amino acids), fats, and carbohydrates (“essential” meaning those that are needed to sustain life and that we cannot produce ourselves) can be derived from plants. All animals and animal products, if eaten, contain many non-essential and, in fact, unhealthy substances, such as cholesterol, saturated fats, high levels of methionine-containing (sulfur-type) proteins, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), heterocyclic amines, hormones, and some pesticides, herbicides, and heavy metals.4 Additionally, animals and animal products that are eaten contain no fiber, no appreciable vitamin value, and phytonutrients, which boost our immune response and other systems. Plants, on the other hand, contain hundreds of these very important substances. Although some researchers have known much of this information for at least the past fifty years, organizations such as the American Dietetic Association, the American Cancer Society, and others finally support these facts.
How does this relate to global depletion? In the United States, as well as in other developed countries, there is an unnecessary and unhealthy dietary dependence on animals and animal products. We collectively raise, feed, water, kill, and eat over 70 billion animals each year for food.5 That number again: 70 billion, which is ten times as many people as we have on the entire earth. In doing so, these animals use and deplete our renewable and nonrenewable resources—they use food, water, land, air, and fossil fuels or other energy sources that could or should be used for us. We have developed a complex system of producing more and more animals that use more and more of our resources, while leaving a massive amount of waste, pollution, and adverse climate change in their wake. And it repeats itself, year after year, in alarmingly increasing volume and intensity—meat and dairy production is expected to double in the next ten years, and fishing production even more so. This system also has become complicated in that it is now heavily intertwined with our culture, politics, economics, and the suppression of the reality of its effect on our planet. The following are just some of many facts and figures with regard to global depletion:
• Global warming (“climate change”) is caused by the production of methane, nitrous oxide, and carbon dioxide, not by carbon dioxide alone.
• Global warming is also caused by destroying trees and vegetation that regulate carbon dioxide and oxygen.
• Global warming is just one small component of global depletion.
• Methane is 23 times as powerful as carbon dioxide, and nitrous oxide is 310 times as powerful as carbon dioxide for their global warming potential.
• Forty percent of methane and 65 percent of nitrous oxide produced by all human activities are from livestock.
• Rainforests are the lungs of our planet, producing over 20 percent of the earth’s oxygen.6
• Rainforests take millions of tons of CO2 out of our atmosphere and store it in soil.
• Seventy percent of our rainforests have been slashed and burned in order to raise livestock.7
• Fifty-five percent of our fresh water is being given to livestock.8
• Over 70 percent of the grain in the United States is fed to livestock.9
• It takes 10 to 20 gallons water to produce one pound of vegetables, fruit, soybeans, or grain.10
• It takes over 5,000 gallons of water to produce one pound of meat.11
• One pound of vegetables, fruit, soybeans, or grain is healthier for you to eat than one pound of meat.
• During every one second of time, just in the United States alone, 89,000 pounds of excrement is produced by the chickens, turkeys, pigs, sheep, goats, and cows raised and killed for us to eat.12
• One acre of land, if used for vegetables, grain, and/or legumes, produces ten to fifteen times more protein than if devoted to meat production.13
• Over 30 percent of all usable total land mass on earth is used by livestock.14
• Over 80 percent of all arable (agricultural) land in the United States is used for or by livestock.15
• Six million children in the world will die from starvation this year.16
• 1.1 billion people in the world are considered malnourished or suffering from hunger.17
Although this information may seem rather stark, it is only because, for a number of reasons, we have been “comfortably unaware.”