Meat has been under fire for a while now; a 2006 United Nations report announced that cattle-rearing produces more greenhouse gases than transportation. Last fall, the chairman of the UN climate change panel introduced the idea of Meatless Mondays to encourage all of us to consume less meat. Since then, the consumption of has not declined, but it has gotten a very bad reputation.
But is meat really to blame?
People have been eating meat for hundreds of years. It’s part of a fabulous system we call the food chain. In the last three or four decades, two fundamental things have changed to make a centuries-old system suddenly very bad for us. First, there are more of us. It’s not that eating meat is inherently bad for the world. Nine billion people doing pretty much anything is bad for the world. But short of disease, natural disasters and Earth's other attempts to keep us in check, we’re stuck with the human population.
What we can change is the real problem in this debate, which is how we produce that meat.
With the rise of factory farming, the system that worked consisted of manageable numbers of cattle grazing on pasture, fertilizing said pasture and feeding local carnivores. That system has been marginalized to make room for the massive, inhumane factory farm system. To feed their enormous herds, factory farms truck in feed like corn or soy. This causes environmental damage in two ways. First, land is deforested to make room for feed crops, including major carbon sinks like South American rainforest. According to the UN report, 33 percent of the world’s crop-growing land bears livestock feed.
Even American factory farms that feed American corn have carbon on their hands, due to the second devastating problem with livestock feed: the switch away from pasture. On small family farms, grass-fed cows have a place to poop; they drop their cow pies in the pasture, where it revitalizes the soil, regenerates the pasture and releases next to nothing in greenhouse gases. On a factory farm where herds eat corn out of troughs, the manure ends up in giant “lagoons” of liquefied waste that produces greenhouse gases and bears a strong resemblance to the Bog of Eternal Stench.
There are the facts; now on to the dilemma. Should we eat meat, or shouldn’t we?
I hope I’ve made a pretty compelling case that eating factory farmed meat is unnatural and consequently bad for the environment (not to mention so inhumane it would take a whole article just to address it). But before vegetarians do any victory dancing, carnivores can continue to eat meat in moderation, as long as it’s farmed the right way.
Meat, as a food, isn’t the problem. The bottom line is that we need to change the factory farming system, or we’re in big climate trouble. And how do we change something in a capitalist system? Through demand. As the world's population has exploded and countries have developed, the pulse on the global market has been, “We want more meat.” The factory farm system has evolved to fill that need in an extremely problematic way, so now the new message on the market needs to be “We want less meat, and we want it sustainably and humanely farmed.” To make an impact on America’s farming practices, wielding the power of the consumer will create change faster than any law or regulatory board. Listen up, omnivores: you can save meat (and the planet) by buying it.
If you don’t eat meat for humane or dietary reasons, by all means, don’t start. (While you’re at it, make sure your tofu doesn’t come from those South American soy farms where the rainforest once stood.) But if you want to keep your carnivorous ways, be a discerning, empowered consumer: buy less meat, buy local meat and demand that it's farmed responsibly.
Source: BecauseAction.com
