Can't Beat It
Meat.
If you have to deal with me in real life, you've no doubt been forced to endure my Evil Meat rant. It's standard-fare stuff:
-On ten acres of land, you can feed sixty people if you grow soybeans, two if you raise cattle. As Diet For a Small Planet author Frances Moore Lappé writes, imagine sitting down to an eight-ounce steak. “Then imagine the room filled with 45 to 50 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.”
-The creation of grazing land and cattle grazing account for 18% of greenhouse gases in the world
-Over a third of raw materials and fossil fuels used in the U.S. are used in animal production
-People who eat diets high in red meat are thirty percent more likely to develop colon cancer, thirty percent more likely to die of heart disease, and 2/3 more likely to develop Alzheimer's. There's a natural cap to how much red meat we're supposed to be eating.
Etc, etc... I can go on for hours, or as long as it takes you to ask for the check. Then I'll send you home with something smug by Michael Pollan.
So you should all be celebrating Simon Fairlie's new book Meat. Because it's pretty well shut me - and some high-profile vegans - up. It's brilliant stuff. Most people argue that maybe meat in moderation is good, or that if we change the system, it won't be as bad. But Fairlie is the first person to really deal with it systematically.
For example:
-Cattle are terribly inefficient at processing grain, but very good at eating grass. Pigs are quite efficient at processing waste; grain unfit for humans, meat and bonemeal leftovers, human food waste...
-If we stopped feeding them grain and started feeding them what they process best, the conversion ratio of calories is less than 2:1 (as opposed to 10:1 now).
-If we stopped feeding them grain, the available food supply would be enough to feed 1.3 billion people
-We've been wrong about the amount of water wasted on cattle by around three orders of magnitude
-The "18% of global emissions" statistic is totally bogus... it's much closer to 10%. And that's with our current system, which Fairlie agrees is fucked up.
-Studies on health effects of red meat have compared diets high in red meat to all other diets. Nothing long-term has been done on vegan versus moderate consumption.
It goes on and on. In brief, our current system is fucked up and we need to significantly reduce our intake of meat anyways, but it doesn't have to be some absolute evil. It's not news to most people, but it's nice to have the facts.
If you have to deal with me in real life, you've no doubt been forced to endure my Evil Meat rant. It's standard-fare stuff:
-On ten acres of land, you can feed sixty people if you grow soybeans, two if you raise cattle. As Diet For a Small Planet author Frances Moore Lappé writes, imagine sitting down to an eight-ounce steak. “Then imagine the room filled with 45 to 50 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.”
-The creation of grazing land and cattle grazing account for 18% of greenhouse gases in the world
-Over a third of raw materials and fossil fuels used in the U.S. are used in animal production
-People who eat diets high in red meat are thirty percent more likely to develop colon cancer, thirty percent more likely to die of heart disease, and 2/3 more likely to develop Alzheimer's. There's a natural cap to how much red meat we're supposed to be eating.
Etc, etc... I can go on for hours, or as long as it takes you to ask for the check. Then I'll send you home with something smug by Michael Pollan.
So you should all be celebrating Simon Fairlie's new book Meat. Because it's pretty well shut me - and some high-profile vegans - up. It's brilliant stuff. Most people argue that maybe meat in moderation is good, or that if we change the system, it won't be as bad. But Fairlie is the first person to really deal with it systematically.
For example:
-Cattle are terribly inefficient at processing grain, but very good at eating grass. Pigs are quite efficient at processing waste; grain unfit for humans, meat and bonemeal leftovers, human food waste...
-If we stopped feeding them grain and started feeding them what they process best, the conversion ratio of calories is less than 2:1 (as opposed to 10:1 now).
-If we stopped feeding them grain, the available food supply would be enough to feed 1.3 billion people
-We've been wrong about the amount of water wasted on cattle by around three orders of magnitude
-The "18% of global emissions" statistic is totally bogus... it's much closer to 10%. And that's with our current system, which Fairlie agrees is fucked up.
-Studies on health effects of red meat have compared diets high in red meat to all other diets. Nothing long-term has been done on vegan versus moderate consumption.
It goes on and on. In brief, our current system is fucked up and we need to significantly reduce our intake of meat anyways, but it doesn't have to be some absolute evil. It's not news to most people, but it's nice to have the facts.