Our once-thought-of-as-healthy meat and dairy-filled meals are killing our loved ones and decimating our planet. This may be difficult to accept, but it is time to face the facts. The level of factory farming’s ecological and biological destruction is now mirroring a deadly virus on the loose. We are wiping out our precious, finite resources. Put simply, this food system ain’t working, not just for America’s ever-expanding waistline and disappearing freshwater sources, but also for the world.
Since 2006, the United Nations and Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has repeatedly urged that we must curb our meat and dairy consumption by half in order to sustain the current levels of ecological and environmental damage that meat and dairy production causes. Have we paid attention to these warnings? No. Do most Americans know about these warnings? Probably not. But now that you know what crap is in our meat and dairy, is there a reason not to embrace cutting our consumption? Honestly, what is the worst that could happen, besides possibly creating a better world, solving world hunger, restoring our pristine, freshwater sources, preserving our forests, and creating cleaner air?
Having Tea with Africa, South America, and the Middle East
Africa, the Middle East, and South America probably seem far removed from your everyday life, but they play an integral part in every meal, snack, and drink. Our food system is a global interaction, and we can no longer afford to only consider our own neighborhood. Friends, our forests are disappearing. Our fish are being wiped from our oceans, and whether we believe in science or evolution, the facts show that our global temperatures are changing. We can guarantee that if we continue down this path, we will be fighting world wars over food and water rather than nukes and oil. The United Nations, Union of Concerned Scientists, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and World Bank have already issued warnings saying that is where our world is heading.
Let’s take a visual snapshot of meat production. Every pound of hamburger meat uses up 284 gallons of gasoline, sixteen pounds of grain, about 2,500 pounds of water, and fifty-five acres of rainforest. This is what it takes to make a one pounder. One hamburger utilizes oil from the Middle East, takes grain from the starving children around the world, and destroys the beautiful Amazon rainforest in Brazil. It also impacts us here at home by using 19 percent of all fossil fuels and adding $147 billion to the health-care industry to fight obesity.1
We just cannot continue this type of consumption. Our resources are truly running dry. We are already consuming over 20 percent of what the Earth can ecologically sustain, and this hasn’t even accounted for the UN’s predicted increase in meat consumption as China and India have embarked on a path to imitate the SAD, or Standard American Diet.2 We can try to defy this logic, but in the end Mother Nature will win. We cannot live on an Earth without a healthy, biologically diverse ecosystem. We have to immediately move away from sloppy, polluting factory farms and towards the food system of the future that is sustainable, efficient, and nutritious.
Factory Farming—The Most Unsustainable Machine on the Planet
Factory farming is not technological progress. That grilled chicken breast for dinner required vast amounts of land, torn-down forests, soybeans, fertilizers, drugs, water, and oil. But for the amount of resources going in, we are not getting an efficient output in terms of calories and nutrition. Add the additional waste and toxins emitted, and it is ridiculous that we actually call this method of producing food efficient and progressive.
In this Case, Size Matters
Factory farming is the biggest user and abuser of our land resources. What does land have to do with our meat and milk? Well, when we switched animals from eating grass like they were born to do to eating grain, we needed land to grow the crops. According to the UN, one-third of the total arable land in the world is used to grow crops, such as soybeans, grains, and corn for animal feed.3 Just imagine, a quarter of the Earth’s land is dedicated to feeding the animals we eat! The total amount of land used to grow feed crops and graze equals about twelve million square miles, or the size of the whole continent of Africa.4
There are a few teeny, tiny issues with dedicating land the size of Africa to growing crops for animals that we eat. The first problem is we are over-using the land and inundating it with so many chemicals from fertilizers to pesticides and insecticides that we are destroying the natural qualities of the soil that keeps the land healthy and able to produce crops. This over-exhausting soybean and grain production and extensive grazing cause soil erosion and desertification. Our soil is turning to crap!
Livestock is responsible for half of all soil erosion. The United Nations found that seventy-five billion tons of soil is lost in the United States per year, which costs about $400 million dollars per year. What is the big deal with eroded soil? When the soil becomes eroded from overuse, it can no longer grow crops. Forest soil, in particular, is already nutrient poor. This means soil from these sources only lasts a few years before farmers have to move on to new land, which results in more land having to be cleared to produce more crops, and the endless cycle continues. The constant cycle of degradation of the land and then the need for additional land is a driving force behind a massive second problem: global deforestation. We have to cut the crap, not the trees!
The poster child for deforestation is the Amazon Rainforest. Half of the Amazon, along with its valuable medicines and rich biodiversity, will be gone forever by 2030 if we continue at our current rate of obliteration. The speed at which we are clearing the Amazon is so rapid—6 million acres annually—that NASA photos from space can visibly show the demolition.5 The Amazon, however, is not the only area being destroyed by Brazil’s ever-growing meat production. Brazil’s Cerrado is almost completely gone. Eighty percent, or four million acres, of the once rich, biologically-diverse forest is now being used as cattle pastures and land to grow feed crops.6 Brazil is rapidly becoming the largest producer of meat products, and the United States is the leading importer of beef from Brazil. See how our meals have a global significance?
While the Amazon and Brazil are the faces of deforestation, this destruction is happening worldwide, as other countries race to imitate America’s awful example of food production. China is on the fast track to turning its country into a toxic desert. As China ups its livestock production, it is clearing away land for feed crops and grazing at an astonishing rate. Each year, land equivalent in size to the state of Rhode Island is being cleared to produce meat. With the land go the exotic, unique, and breathtaking animals that call these forests and habitats home.
We are facing the sixth-largest mass extinction in history as ten thousand species disappear each year due to factory farms. This is pandemic, virus-level annihilation. Deforestation and land-use changes from factory farming are causing up to five hundred times greater than normal extinction rates than in the past. The impact of losing our forests does not just affect the immediate animals in the vicinity.
Deforestation impacts fish in our oceans. Trees do more than just release oxygen that we need to breathe. They help mitigate climate change by absorbing carbon dioxide. When the trees are no longer around to absorb the carbon, the carbon either sinks into the ocean or is released into the air, contributing to the increase in carbon dioxide in our air. When the carbon sinks into the ocean, it changes the pH balance of the water, making the ocean more acidic. Our fish are dying because they cannot live in an acidic environment. Increased acid in our oceans bleaches the absolutely stunning barrier reefs, destroying the homes of millions of ocean creatures.
What is the big deal with losing some bugs, fish, and exotic animals you have probably never seen before? Remember basic science in school where we learned about the food chain? When you wipe out massive sections of that, it creates a ripple effect that throws off the entire balance of the global ecosystem. Every living creature is affected by every single bug, insect, frog, bird, and fish that disappears from our Earth. We are completely restructuring the entire ecological system, and the consequences are dire.
The Real Hunger Games
We have about seven billion people in the world and grow enough food to feed nine billion. Yet there are about 925 million people, or one in seven people, who are starving worldwide. There is something terribly wrong with these numbers.7 While hunger and starvation are complex, global issues, factory farming creates a major problem with distribution of our food sources. Think about this: if we reduced meat consumption by just 10 percent, a miniscule amount, we could feed one hundred million more people. Putting an end to hunger worldwide is a realistic goal, and it starts with taking our food back from the animals that are devouring the majority of our raw-food sources.
It makes absolutely zero sense that we feed 80 percent of all the grains and soybeans grown in the United States to cows, chickens, and pigs that become food. Worldwide, the meat and dairy industry uses 97 percent of all soybeans produced!8 We are only getting 3 percent of the grains and soybeans available. Since we do not grow enough grain and soybeans in the United States to feed all of our animals, we import a large portion of it from developing nations. Instead of feeding their local communities, they are shipping the grain to the United States for our buckets of chicken wings. Call us greedy, but somehow this allocation of food seems a little unfair. The irony is that when we eat meat, we are only getting 10 percent of the calories the animal consumed. This means 90 percent of what these animals eat comes out as waste!9
Agribusiness will argue and say factory farming is the way to feed the world. By producing more meat and dairy products in as short a time and as cheaply as possible, we can feed more people and make food more affordable. Sadly, this logic falls extremely short of the truth. Every two seconds a child dies from hunger.10 There are about sixty million Americans without enough food, and the number is growing, not to mention that meat and dairy are the least nutritious foods to feed our world.
Factory farming depends upon growing and slaughtering as many animals in as little time as possible to make a profit. To achieve this laser-fast turnover, the animals require a tremendous amount of food in order to get fat and ready for slaughter as quickly as possible. Instead of relying upon the animals’ natural, grass-fed diet, factory farms feed animals fattening grains and agents that nature never intended for them to eat and are very hard for their stomachs to digest. We are using up massive amounts of resources, getting fewer calories per input than if we directly ate the grains, and we are eating less nutritious products. This is a lose-lose situation.
If all the grain and soybeans that are produced for livestock were given to humans, it would feed 1,400,000 people in the United States.11 A United Nations report, The Environmental Food Crisis, estimated that if current meat production per capita was reduced in the industrialized world and restrained worldwide to the year 2000’s levels by 2050, we would free up enough tons of cereal to feed one billion people in 2050.12 If we changed the land used raising beef to growing vegetables, we could feed twenty-two times the number of people.13 Clearly, we have the food resources to solve our hunger games. As the population has topped seven billion with indications of only increasing, we must reevaluate how we are using our existing food resources.
Water Wars
The world is in a water crisis. Countries are already fighting over access to clean water. While we assume water is a replenishing and abundant resource, clean, fresh water is scarce. Ninety-seven percent of our planet is water, but only 3 percent is freshwater. Of this 3 percent, less than 1 percent can be used as drinking water.14 Not only are the animals hogging all the food sources, they are using and contaminating our freshwater sources. Globally, livestock uses 8 percent more water than humans. Considering animals’ high consumption of water and resources, as seen in the Ogallala Aquifer, which is now half depleted, it is fast becoming a bleak situation. We are heading toward water wars in the very near future.
Nearly half of all the water used in the United States goes toward raising animals for food. The animals destined for your plate consume about 2.3 billion gallons of water per day, or about eight hundred billion gallons per year.15 While these are big numbers, they do not include the rivers, streams, and aquifers that factory farms frequently contaminate with animal feces. Those numbers just account for all of the water usage it takes to get that steak on your plate: from watering the crops that are used to feed the animals to watering the animals. Of the fifty-six million acres of land that farmers irrigate for crops, twenty-three million of those acres are used for livestock feed. It takes about twenty-eight trillion gallons of water to irrigate those acres every year.
Let’s make an easy comparison. It takes about 2,500 gallons of water, depending on the country, to make one pound of hamburger meat. It only takes twenty-five gallons of water to produce one pound of wheat. The math is not hard here. It takes about one hundred times more water to produce meat than healthy, nutritious grains. Needless to say, this substantial difference is problematic when millions of people are already living in water-stressed areas.
As the population is expected to reach nine billion by 2050, our water supply will become an ever-more precious and scarce resource.16 Currently 1.1 billion people in the world do not have access to clean water, and another 2.5 billion do not have access to proper sanitation. In the United States, we recently had one of the worst droughts in history. Our grass shriveled to dark brown. Our crops died. Food prices spiked. Quite a foreboding preview of the future that we would like to avoid. There is a logical answer here to prevent water wars from happening.
While America, and largely the rest of the world, focuses on gas-guzzling SUVs, we are overlooking some of the biggest culprits of oil consumption: the cows, chickens, pigs, and lambs. A grain-fed beef steer will require 284 gallons of oil in its short fourteen-month lifetime before being slaughtered.17 It takes eleven times more fuel to make one calorie of animal protein than one calorie of plant protein. With gas prices today eating into our paychecks, we would never dump gallons of gasoline on the floor for sport. But that is what we are doing when we eat meat and dairy products.
Our meat and dairy factory farm system is literally fueled by oil. We are not just talking about transportation and trucking food products to our grocery stores. When grain replaced grass, farmers turned to twentieth-century industrial technologies such as synthetic fertilizers, toxic pesticides and herbicides, and hybrid and genetically modified crop varieties to boost harvests.18 This use of corn and grain as animal feed requires the heavy use of chemical fertilizers. Chemical fertilizers are made from oil.19 By switching food animals away from their natural, grass diet to grains, we essentially switched livestock from solar-powered beings to grain-fed, fossil-fueled machines. All of this toxic crap gets into your cells when you eat meat and dairy.
Today, meat and dairy production uses 19 percent of the fossil fuels in the United States. About half of the energy used to create the glorified American hamburger comes from the production of the feed. Thirty-three percent of our land is maintained with fertilizers. In itself, fertilizer production is energy intensive, as it takes energy to bind the nitrogen-gas particles in the atmosphere. A sad incongruence is that with the amount of energy used to create fertilizers, about half of the fertilizer is lost through volatilization, leaching, and runoff from oversaturation.20 These runoffs are killing billions of fish and contaminating our water supplies. As the United States imports the majority of its fertilizers, fertilizer incurs a huge transportation cost.21 The scale of this problem is massive.
Adding insult to injury, using massive amounts of fertilizer not only consumes oil, but also produces harmful gases that pollute our air. One study found that “fertilizer production for feed crops alone contributes some 41 million tons of carbon dioxide (CO2) annually—the equivalent of that produced by nearly 7 million cars.”22 This is why researchers Gidon Eschel and Pamela Martin at the University of Chicago found that a meat-eater who drives a Prius uses more fossil fuels than a vegan who drives a gas-guzzling SUV. Looks like it’s time to “green” your diet, not your car.
Ironically, factory farming’s reliance on fossil fuels goes against the very tenets of its foundation to create a more independent America. Aside from placing America’s food security in a vulnerable position by relying on other countries, such as the Middle East and South America, our world’s natural reserves of fossil fuels are drying up. We simply cannot continue guzzling oil for our food indefinitely.
Factory Farming Stinks
Global climate change has the potential to kill 150,000 Americans over the next decade. Air pollution from climate change will become a “bigger global killer than dirty water,” killing an estimated 3.6 million people a year by 2050, according to the most recent Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) report. Climate change is one of the most significant environmental issues of our time, and our meat and dairy diets contribute more to our changing climate than all transportation worldwide. In fact, you can drive to the moon and back 114,000 times, and you still will have released less carbon dioxide gases than the US factory-farmed chicken industry releases annually!23
We need to make it clear that climate change is not all about carbon dioxide. In fact, it is the least dangerous of the greenhouse gases. Methane is twenty-five times more potent than carbon dioxide and remains in the air anywhere between nine to fifteen years.24 Nitrous oxides have three hundred times the potential of carbon dioxide to warm the Earth.25 What produces methane, ammonia, and nitrous oxides? Factory farming!
The majority of factory farming’s most-potent greenhouse-gas emissions—i.e. ammonia and methane—come from the billion tons of animal manure and flatulence or, bluntly, cow farts. Thousands of open-air cesspools dotting the American landscape release toxic methane gases that add to climate change. The more than 160 gases released by these lagoons are so toxic that an entire Michigan family drowned in a pig-sh!t lagoon trying to save each other from the toxic fumes. Talk about a crappy way to go.
It seems silly, crude, and downright crazy to say cow farts add to climate change, but it is the truth! Grains make cows super gassy. Instead of logically dealing with this problem, a company is developing a gas pill for cows to take with their meals. Some researchers are also genetically modifying cows in their laboratory to design one that can handle all that gas. But let’s be real, do we really need to go that far to cut the gas? There are obviously smarter and less ridiculous solutions.
Worldwide, cows produce about eighty-six million tons of methane a year.26 Since cows make up 30 percent of meat consumption in the United States, and the average American consumes six hundred pounds of dairy per year, the amount of methane released from cows passing gas is significant enough to add substantially to climate change. In fact, methane released from cows is so powerful that in Germany, gassy cows caused a methane buildup so high it caused the warehouse to explode. Who would have thought that possible?27
Meat consumption had tripled between 1971 and 2010 to about six hundred billion pounds and is expected to double by 2050 to about 1.2 trillion pounds of meat per year. We are already experiencing a significant change in weather patterns. The polar vortex of 2014 and heat wave of 2013 are just the beginning. These massive switches will place even more pressure on our food, water, and land resources.28
So, what can you do to help reduce the threat of climate change? Studies by the Environmental Working Group show that eating one less burger a week is the equivalent of taking your car off the road for 320 miles.29 That is just one burger a week. If a four-person family skipped their steak dinner one day a week, it would be as if they didn’t drive for about three months. You really can make that big of a difference! While these statistics focus on meat, the answer is not to eat more dairy. Dairy comes from cow’s milk. Milk protein and fat were only designed for newborn babies anyway. Creating a better world can start with yummy soy, almond, or coconut milk at breakfast.
Worldwide, the livestock sector produces 586 million tons of milk and 285 million tons of meat.30 Factory farming and the livestock sector arguably have the largest human-induced destructive impact on our planet.
We are losing species, killing our oceans, degrading our land, tearing down our forests, polluting the water, sacrificing finite resources, and changing the entire climate just so we can have sausages and eggs for breakfast and cheeseburgers at lunch. Somehow this does not seem to be a good trade-off. What we eat directly determines how long our resources will last, the quality of the water systems, the number of hungry people, and the overall state of our environmental and public health systems. At this moment, the future awaiting us is not looking too bright with higher health costs, more antibiotic-resistant bacteria, animal-factory virus mutations, eroded farm land, dirty water, and a degraded land robbed of its nutrients. We have the recipe for a food system that will keep us happy and healthy and our environment pristine and green.
Know your Sh!t Solutions:
1) Cut down on your meat and dairy consumption. Forgoing one burger or chicken dinner a week will impact the environment and make your heart healthier. Even better, eliminate meat and dairy altogether. Read Rethink Food: 100+ Doctors Can’t Be Wrong and have more than one hundred doctors explain why a vegan diet is the very best for your health!
2) Think globally! What you eat for breakfast, lunch, and dinner affects our water, air, land, and hunger worldwide.
3) Give a healthy vegan meal to a hungry person in need. Check out our resources for more information and delicious plant-based recipes!