meat and the environment

[blackjack]

what are you thoughts on meat and the enivronment?

i been reading more and more to cut back on red meat...

i have been reducing my meat intake but increasing my fruit, vegetable, egg intake. i think you can be just as healthy if not healthier by reducing red meat but by increasing more live foods into your diet...

even people who write most of the articles on beyond veg remain vegetarian based.

[Culturista]

Animal eating, especially commercial animal eating, negatively impacts the environment.

[number42]

It's threads like these which make me wonder if blackjack is a vegetarian agent provocateur. ;)

A paleo lifestyle probably wouldn't be sustainable if everyone on earth ate that way, but it seems to promote optimal health. I was pretty screwed up before I started eating paleo, with IBS and muscle aches every day - and I'm not going to give it up, not for environmentalism, that's for damned sure.

Animal eating, especially commercial animal eating, negatively impacts the environment.

What about natural predator-prey relationships? Are humans not supposed to be involved in those? I don't see any reason why we'd be different from any other animal.

I could see an argument against factory farming, but meat eating in general? Our population is too large to sustain a bunch of omnivores without some means of mass production. It's not "natural," but neither is planting acres of wheat and soy, and processing and fermenting those. Perhaps more efficient, but not as complete a solution as just eating meat.

Any environmental arguments are kinda null and void immediately, at least to me, because we're going to hit nine billion people in under fifty years. The environment is only going to be able to support so many people, and if I can't save it, I eat least want to be on top, eating what's ideal for my health.

Anyway, the whole meat packing industry could be infinitely more efficient. All the waste produced by pigs in the US could be fed into digesters and made into fertilizer, but, for some reason, they don't appear to be interested in doing that, and a lot of pig waste is kept in huge football-field sized resevoirs...at least in North Carolina.

EDIT: Sorry if I came off as a bit dickish. I was experimenting with dairy yesterday and I don't think the opioid peptides are out of my system - I seem to get bitchy whenever I eat it.

[NorthPeace]

Here is what you do. You get a dacha with a lot of crops on it. Get some trees for fruit and shade. Let your pigs and chickens run around. Feed them your scraps - apple cores and such. Both are monogastric so you don't have to worry about cow farts. They are on site, so you don't have to 'manage' manure so much. There is no CO2 released by food transport because you live right there. Also you don't have to drive to work because you are too busy working to feed yourself. And you don't need a ride to the doctor because you eat healthy and get a lot of exercise.

[Tarlach]

Animal eating, especially commercial animal eating, negatively impacts the environment.Of course it does. You killed the animal to eat it. Same for eating a plant. That is negative also.

It all depends upon whether you give back as much as you take....and we don't give back the equivalent nutrients in either case.

Traditional hunter gathering probably had little negative impact on the environment as it was non destructive, food was rotated and the nutrients were returned to the land.

Today all food is destructive and vegetable crops are just as bad as livestock. Agriculture, for ease of harvesting, require massive areas of cleared land. The removal of trees causes massive salt and erosion issues (to name a few). The least impact food production would probably be small scale crop and animal rotation (along NorthPeace's line of thinking).

Does anyone have any 'real' numbers on food density/area for various foods?

1 pound of beef requires 2.6 lbs. of grain. 1 pound of chicken requires 1.75 pounds of feed. Grain is a reasonable density crop and most meat does not get any extra space. Also, grain can be grown in areas that can not produce fruit or vegetables.

I wonder if vegetables are actually that superior in food density/area? (as we are not talking about living on grains)

The things that no-one likes to mention is the quality of land and other resources required for meat and veg production.

Meat can utilize very low quality soil (grain production), whereas vegetables require quite high quality soil. Vegetables also require water to be delivered to each plant. This can require water diversion which also has many impacts.

I wonder how much of the available crop land can actually support a vegetarian diet?

[frankly]

...Traditional hunter gathering probably had little negative impact on the environment as it was non destructive...

Well, there are many who believe we hunted many of the megafauna into extinction. Giant deers, mammoths, flightless birds and the giant sloths were all hunted by our ancestors and are all extinct today... whether or not we were the prime cause, we were at least likely a contributing factor. Anyway, on a long enough timeline vegetarianism isn't any more "sustainable" than carnivorism; at some the population growth must stabilize or reverse when it exceeds available resources. Perhaps eating only vegetables at the expense of our health would allow for us to cram a few more people onto the planet, but so would eating Soylent Green biscuits... at some point we'll still need to confront the problem of over population. Meanwhile, if anyone wants to pass on the red meat, I'll eat their share, and they can have my vegetables.

[waywardsis]

Animal eating, especially commercial animal eating, negatively impacts the environment.

That's like saying "heating your home negatively impacts the environment." There's more than one way to heat your home, just as there's more than one way to raise animals (or edible crops, for that matter). Some are more sustainable than others. Blanket statements don't add anything useful to the debate.

Now you could change that to "animal farming, especially commercial animal farming, negatively impacts the environment" but it's still not correct. Not all methods of animal farming have a negative impact. Many do, especially large-scale commercial operations (same goes for veg/grain).

The farmers/mennonites I buy most of my meat from are doing a pretty good job with sustainable, low-impact farming. I think rather than just looking at what's wrong, we need to examine what works and figure out how to incorporate that on a larger scale. Difficult, in an industry motivated by profit. People's appetites aren't the root of the problem. Change needs to happen on an industry level - political/economic etc etc and so on. I believe this can happen, but saying "meat is bad" certainly doesn't move us any closer to a real examination of the issue and possible solutions to it.

What about natural predator-prey relationships? Are humans not supposed to be involved in those? I don't see any reason why we'd be different from any other animal.

Nor do I. As far as I'm concerned, I have as much right to live out my biological imperatives as, say, a lion or giraffe or chimpanzee does. And while I do so, I try to live as "harmlessly" as a lion, a giraffe or a chimpanzee does. Well, without the occasional cannibalism and gang wars of the chimps, or the rival baby-eating of the lion. ;)

[waywardsis]

at some point we'll still need to confront the problem of over population.

More food = more people

[Culturista]

http://www.emagazine.com/view/?142

^^ "Useless" link.

[number42]

http://www.emagazine.com/view/?142

^^ "Useless" link.

It's pretty useless if you don't quote some arguments from it to utilize here. How is a debate supposed to happen if we don't know which points you personally espouse?

[Culturista]

http://media.www.americanjurist.net/media/storage/paper654/news/2004/12/09/Perspectives/If.You.Recycle.Why.Are.You.Eating.Meat-826849.shtml

More specifically useless link ^^ and it's 4 years old too.

[Tarlach]

Culturista - you do seem to be adept at posting links to quite uninformative propeganda :lol:

<rant>
Misguided environmentalists will never come up with a good solution for anything as they can't take the consequences of serious decisions (or look at long term consequences). There are always two sides to a story and someone loses. You want people to live? Animals die. Either by direct death or by land clearing.
Why make all of the people be sick and unhealthy, so that the land clearing can be put on hold for a few years? It won't fix any problems in the long term. Maybe we should come up with a better idea while we can get the fat and think straight.

You really want to save the environment (as in everything non person)? Start killing people. As was correctly pointed out earlier, people are the problem and we will always swell beyond our means. Even if we all eat only wheat, we will still run out of land and kill off everything in areas of possible farmland. Cutting the human population would make a real impact, especially if it was routine or controlled.

Who is ever going to make that decision though?

Right, no-one.

What do we do? Instead we encourage people to have more children. In Australia at least, you get paid to have kids and it only encourages the inept to have more kids that those who are smart enough to understand sustainability.

If a couple have more than two kids, more resources are required to feed them over time.

Best the planet can hope for is a nice big war. It's a shame that war is not 'survival of the fittest' as it usually takes the youngest and fittest first.

Maybe the planet would be better off if aliens invaded. Planet wide guerrilla warfare would sort the wheat from the chaff. No guarantees we would win though...
</rant>

[anita45]

Best the planet can hope for is a nice big war. It's a shame that war is not 'survival of the fittest' as it usually takes the youngest and fittest first.



Or we could just have a pandemic...

[Tarlach]

Or we could just have a pandemic...
Now we're thinking ;)

Just needs a good mortality rate...

[Baerdric]

what are you thoughts on meat and the enivronment?That anyone who complains about food impacting the environment needs to be the first in line to be turned into soyalent green.

As has been pointed out, even switching to an all wheat diet is only a temporary measure. If we are going to destroy the ecosystem, what does a few decades or centuries one way or another matter?

If we managed a wider variety of animals, over a wider range of terrains, and used more of each animal, I believe we could make up the difference. One of the reasons that some animals became extinct is that they were not valuable for food. Some were lost because we didn't use managment methods, but once we knew about management methods, we could have bred Bison, dodo, etc and used them to harvest marginal lands.

I hear sperm whales are making a tremendous comeback, with proper management, we could be eating whale for lunch in just a few more years.

If you are concerned about a species, find a commercial use for it. Someone will turn it into a herd, and they will be as vulnerable to extinction as cows are.

Otherwise report to the fertilizer plant and request to be processed.

[frankly]

... we could be eating whale for lunch in just a few more years.

:yum: Whale, the other red meat.

Whale bacon is supposed to be good as well. (http://madamearcati.blogspot.com/2008/05/embezzlement-of-whale-meat-uncovered-in.html)

[Felicie]

I tried whale steak some years ago. Wasn't impressed with the taste. Maybe I just didn't know how to cook it right. I just sauteed it quickly in a frying pan with salt and pepper until it was still pink in the middle.

[number42]

http://media.www.americanjurist.net/media/storage/paper654/news/2004/12/09/Perspectives/If.You.Recycle.Why.Are.You.Eating.Meat-826849.shtml

More specifically useless link ^^ and it's 4 years old too.
Okay. Despite the silliness of arguing with a link, I'll try that.

The Swedish government recently initiated a report entitled, Water - More Nutrition Per Drop. The report, released at the U.N. Commission on Sustainable Development, found that our current "demand for water-intensive commodities like meat and dairy products ... [is] unsustainable. They involve large-scale groundwater overexploitation and widespread river depletion, which pose a major threat to biodiversity and aquatic ecosystems."
Sweeden is in an unique situation. Well, not unique, it probably is the same of the rest of the nordic countries, exempting Denmark. It's population density is low enough that it doesn't have a water infrastructure in most of the country that is capable of supporting large numbers of animals. The exception to this is the Southern/Southeastern portions of the country, but I don't expect to see Sweedish gentleman-farmers when I visit Stockholm. If it were a report originating from the American Southwest, well, I could understand that, but Sweeden? Come on. We don't have permafrost, even up here in Buffalo. ;)

The World Watch Institute reported that only eight ounces of beef needed an incredible 25,000 liters of water. The average American consumes 256 pounds of meat annually. You do the math.
Unsurpising. What the article fails to acknowledge is that water is reusable. Here, water is pumped in from Lake Erie, you drink the water, expell it, and it gets treated and then flushed back into guess-what-body-of-water.

87% of all agricultural land in the U.S. is used to raise animals for food. In other words, twenty times more land is needed to feed a meat-eater than to feed a pure vegetarian.
Simply *using* land doesn't have a huge impact on the environment. I wonder how that statistic is generated. Does it assume that "meat-eaters" eat nothing but meat? Does it use the unrealistically low USDA suggestion? What about animal products used by vegetarians, like leather, or the bone char used in the producion of sugar?

A typical pig factory farm generates as much raw waste as a city of 12,000 people.
Totally meaningless. It doesn't give me any idea of the size of "a typical pig factory farm" or how many people it feeds, or the time period in which this statistic was generated. A better argument would be that pig waste management is very inefficient - all that waste could be fed into digesters, which could produce fertilizer, which could be used to grow grain to feed the pigs. Or people.

Raising animals for food consumes more than half of all the water used in the United States.
This point already addressed above.

Finally, livestock emit 16% of the world's annual production of methane.
This is a lot lower than I had expected. Industrial processes probably account for most of the rest of it, but I don't know enough about the chemical industry to be able to respond authoritiatively.

If all of this is news to you, there is a reason for it. Money. And lots of it. The agricultural, beef and dairy industries have a staggering amount of money at stake to ensure consumers buy their products.
I have actually never seen advertisements for the kind of food I eat right now, with the exception of local groceries sending me junk mail. I don't drink orange juice anymore, and I've never seen ads for fruit or unprocessed meats. I can't imagine people would stop eating meat if the advertisements disappeared. I can't imagine you would stop eating vegetarian if the soybean farmers stopped advertising (although I've never seen advertisements for soy products either, maybe I don't watch enough TV ;)).

These industries resist changing the products they market, just as the automobile industry has resisted mass-producing hybrid cars until recently.
If you've ever run a substantial business, you know that you don't like to change when you have something that's making you a lot of money. Designing and mass-producing a line of vehicles, especially those utilizing newer technology, is a big deal. It's hardly a decision to be made lightly. A good decision in the end though.

Eliminating meat from your diet is even easier. Just don't buy it. There are plenty of tasty and healthier alternatives.
How about for those of us on a diet mostly consisting of meat because we have pain and inflamation due to grains? Should I sacrifice my health for the environment? I could go raw vegan, but I don't especially want my jaw to atrophy.

Maybe I could just eat fruit and legumes (fermented and otherwise). My IBS was the worst during my flirtation with vegetarianism. I would spend one half of my life stuffing myself with fibrous material, and spending the other half expelling it. Nah. I kinda like to do other things.

So, in the end, that link was pretty useless. Why don't you give us *your* argument, rather than fishing around google for one?

[blackjack]

you can eat eggs, dairy, insects, fruits, nuts, seeds, veggies, tubers; and be dam healthy. actually alot of primitive cultures eat this same diet, and only eat meat 1-2x a week or none at all.

im not promoting a veggie diet, but i just dont think its practical to be downing pounds of meat a day thinking your doing good for you or the environment.

[number42]

im not promoting a veggie diet, but i just dont think its practical to be downing pounds of meat a day thinking your doing good for you or the environment.
I don't think my way of eating is good for the environment, and I didn't say that I thought so. I do, however, do better on "pounds on meat a day" than I do with a plant-intensive diet. I'm not advocating an all-meat diet either, but I can tell what works for me, and plants generally don't.

[blackjack]

Paleo people had a huge impact on the environment, thats why we started agriculture b/c we were wiping out all the game. we needed to shift, even though we put a decline in our health we made tremendous gain for mankind. now we are possibly faced with the same issues on animals just causing to many problems, so we may need to take a decline in our health to step forward as a society, this is just my opinion. it changes daily =]

[Baerdric]

We don't really know why we started agriculture.

I believe large scale agriculture probably was more in an attempt to feed our herds. Then something happened to the herds and we had to learn to eat the grains ourself. Once that started we were hooked. Increased fecundity, increased cultivation, further displacement of natural prey.

I suspect it's what killed the Mayans. After several generations of a predominantly grain diet, they ended up with T2 diabetes and tooth decay in children, just like we are, but they couldn't find a way out of it. Their cities were surrounded by miles of fields. A drought or or plague finished them off. The remnant scattered.

[Beachbum2]

A blanket statement such as 'meat production damages the environment' needs some supporting facts.

Where I live in Queensland cows and sheep are raised on pasture and in woodland where arable crops could never be grown, their droppings fertilise the paddocks - since the introduction of dung beetles to Australia - and they are grass fed so very suitable for a paleo diet. There is an increasing trend to eating kangaroo which is wild meat and not, as yet, farmed.

However in other areas there is a move to construct cattle feed lots where the younger animals are taken off pasture and 'finished' on grain. This of course is not environmentally sound.

So, like veg and grain farming, there's an upside and a downside. Free range pigs are now being produced and are definitely a gourmet item in restaurants at the moment.

[MeatGood]

I agree with Tarlach and Baerdric and anyone else that says the real issue with the environment is people. The introduction of agriculture had mixed blessings. It allowed population to grow quickly and ultimately lead to many of the things we enjoy today. The cost was high though. Many people point to the problems of grains, sugar and dairy and focus on the related health issue, but honestly agriculture has had major environmental impact that most do not realize. Sure, clear cutting and the creation of farmland and the poisons introduced by fertilizers are bad, but the over population it has allowed is the worse.

So really, when we talk of environmental impacts, lets look at the worse, first, which is overpopulation.

Just my 2 cents.

[Baerdric]

Of course, our choices are to draw back or push through. I would choose push through. Use our temporary surplus of available energy and population to expand beyond our planet and colonize space. Not other planets (although I'm not against that), but space itself. Use space for our industry, mining asteroids and only dropping back finished products and energy. Grow food in space if possible (it seems so), work and live daily life in local orbits and leave Earth for leisure and a genetic safeguard. Spend your weekends on a garden-like Earth if you earn (and deliver) enough energy to make it back to space.

The best thing for our environment is to use it to leave it. Unfortunately I don't have faith that we will choose this option, and by default we will be faced with the alternative. When the cheap energy runs out, two thirds of us must die.