Diet for an UNhealthy Planet
By Monica @ 3:45 PM   
One often hears in environmentalist circles that meat eating will destroy the planet, that the earth doesn’t have enough carrying capacity to provide meat for everyone, and that a “diet for a healthy planet” includes only plant products or at most, limited animal products. Indeed, this is a strong basis for many people to adopt veganism. But is it true?
Not only are these statements annoying for those of us who eat animal products, they’re scientifically baseless. This little post will give you some intellectual ammunition to deal with these assertions.
Until roughly 50-60 years ago, animals were the basis of a healthy farm with fertile soils. While I don’t agree with some of these political solutions proposed to our current agricultural problems, here is a portion of an excellent article that explains in greater detail why the meat myths in the first paragraph are untrue.
Let’s look at some other facts as well. The tiny country of New Zealand provides enough grass fed lamb to feed itself and much of the rest of the western world that eats lamb. 70% of its land is devoted to farming. Lamb from Australia and New Zealand runs around $5-6 per pound. (By the way, New Zealand is free of farming subsidies and the farmers there are much better off for it!) As far as the United States goes, you can get a whole side of grass fed beef for about $5.00 per pound, in bulk directly from the producer, with a range of everything from hamburger to prime steaks. That’s a very good price considering grocery store prices. Even grass-fed meat in the grocery store is affordable. I can get grass fed buffalo roasts in Costco for $5 per pound.
Isn't it funny how this grassfed system is economically sustainable all on its own with no subsidies when massive amounts of money are poured into the feedlot system yearly? This money is in the form of grain subsidies, government loans for farmers using grain as collateral, and pollution control money for feedlots under the USDA's EQIP program. Marvelous, isn't it? Provide research money to increase commodity crop production, subsidy money for grain feed, government loans because farmers produced too much of this feed, spurred by the subsidies and the government research, and finally, provide government money to clean up the pollution that these cheap, concentrated grain feeding systems cause (known as Confined Animal Feeding Operations, or CAFOs).
Most of the criticisms of eating meat are criticisms of the modern feedlot system, not meat eating as it was for thousands of years of human evolutionary history. Some of these arguments are valid objections to the US's feedlot system, which is certainly an absurd waste of taxpayer dollars. But these facts are not a case against meat eating. Even food journalist Michael Pollan is disappointingly deluded on this point and somehow thinks meat would become more expensive if it were all grassfed. What is the basis for this assertion? Grassfed meat is affordable when it is bought directly from the producer. I suspect Pollan's conclusion is not rationally but emotionally based, because he thinks it is a health and environmental problem that some of us are eating so much as 8 oz. steak per day. He wants meat to be more expensive, so he then asserts it would become so. From where I stand, I see no basis for this statement. The fact that most cattle and hogs in the United States are grainfed in feedlots is not evidence that that system is efficient or economically viable on its own. It is a system spurred by massive government intervention.
Consider that all kinds of marginal grassland could be used to feed livestock, in the United States and elsewhere. There is a great deal of land in this country not suited to growing traditional crops, but it would be wonderful as rangeland and would yield its fruit as fatted animals. We can thus dismiss the environmentalist myths that meat would become more expensive under a grass-fed or free market system.
But what about those other Malthusians (biotechnology companies) claiming that without their special technology, there will not be enough food to go around, and only they can solve world hunger problems? It's absurd. There is an enormous amount of land in the United States that could yet be converted to food production. Millions of backyards in America could theoretically be used to grow a vegetable garden and feed the inhabitants for an entire year.
Now, surely not everyone wants their lawn turned into a garden, but the fact remains that this has been done twice in the nation's history with so-called "Victory Gardens" planted in millions of American backyards in both World Wars to increase food production. According to Michael Pollan, 40% of America's produce by the end of WW II was produced by home gardens.
It would actually be profitable to rent one's yard to someone who wants to garden it, and a good profit could be made off of such gardening. This would decrease prices for store produce due to decreased demand, thus spurring even greater production efficiency for larger growing operations.
From my own personal experience I know that a 7500 sq. ft. garden can probably yield around $2000 in produce in one summer. If we had a rational immigration policy that did not prevent Mexicans from working here, such free market options could become a greater reality. I'm just thinking off the top of my head here, but imagine a system in which a Mexican family were hired as part of a community cooperative agreement to garden and sell produce from a set number of backyards, with the landowners getting some portion of the profit from the produce. (But then, if we had never had farm subsidies, so many Mexican farmers wouldn't have been pushed out of their jobs and across the American border in the first place.)
It is a complete myth -- whether propagated by environmentalists or CEO's -- that we somehow don’t have enough land to produce enough food for everyone on the planet, and that we must either decrease meat consumption or massively increase grain production through more research. I'm not against biotechnology (breeding hybrids of all kinds of plants has been wildly successful), but the myths propagated by both of these groups are absurd. If the commodity crop subsidies were eliminated, at least two things would happen. Farming in the United States would mostly return to pastured livestock which eat a more diverse diet, and subsidized grains would not be dumped on the US or world market. As a result, poorer foreign nations would also see a return to more natural systems of farming and reduce their reliance on the west. Some biotechnological research would probably divert away from grain production to other crops.
The proposed EPA taxes on animal farming are designed to move Americans toward a grain-based diet that is supposedly healthier for the planet. This type of diet is not healthier for humans or the planet. It is ecologically and economically unsustainable, not to mention unhealthy. The government should not force people toward a grain-based diet that promotes chronic dental disease, obesity, heart disease, diabetes, cancer, and Alzheimer's disease, particularly when advocting a universal healthcare system that would require more taxpayer money and more advocacy of more grain-based nutritional nonsense that will make Americans even sicker. A grain-based monocultural agricultural system not only promotes chronic illness, it creates soil erosion and depletion of nutrients, which results in a large hypoxic "dead zone" in the Gulf of Mexico, making commercial fishing there impossible. This system could not survive under a laissez-faire capitalist system with a proper application of property rights. It is UNsustainable and UNhealthy.
Labels: Conventional Wisdom, Meat Myths, Modern Ignorance
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