Meat Of The Matter

Meat of the matter 7/30/2008  ENVIRONMENTAL To fight global warming, don't just drive a Prius, ditch those burgers

MT ILLUSTRATION: MARY IVERSON 

MT ILLUSTRATION: SEAN BIERI, CONCEPT BY MARY IVERSON 

BY JIM MOTAVALLI Ask most Americans about what causes global warming, and they'll point to a coal plant smokestack or a car's tailpipe. They're right, of

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course, but perhaps two other images should be granted similarly iconic status: the front and rear ends of a cow. According to a littleknown 2006 United Nations report entitled "Livestock's Long Shadow," livestock is a major player in climate change, accounting for 18 percent of all greenhouse gas emissions (measured in carbon dioxide equivalents). That's more than the entire global transportation system! Unfortunately, this important revelation has received only limited attention in the media. How could methane from cows, goats, sheep and other livestock have such a huge impact? As Chris Goodall points out in his book How to Live a Low-Carbon Life (Earthscan Publications), "Ruminant animals [chewing a cud], such as cows and sheep, produce methane as a result of the digestive process. ... Dairy cows are particularly important sources of methane because of the volume of food, both grass and processed material, that they eat." According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), the American meat industry produces more than 1.4 billion tons of waste annually — five tons for every U.S. citizen and 130 times the volume of human waste. Michael Jacobson, the longtime executive director of the Center for Science in the Public Interest, adds the fact that just one midsized feedlot churns out half a million pounds of manure each day. "The methane that cattle and their manure produce has a global warming effect equal to that of 33 million automobiles," the Center reports in its book Six Arguments for a Greener Diet. That's just one side effect of raising animals for food. It turns out that nearly every aspect of the huge international meat trade has an environmental or health consequence, with global warming at the top of the list. If you never thought that eating meat was an environmental (and by extension, political) issue, now is the time to rethink that position.

A really big enterprise To understand livestock's impact on the planet, you have to consider the size of the industry. It is the single largest humanrelated use of land. Grazing occupies an incredible 26 percent of the ice- and water-free surface of the planet Earth. The area devoted to growing crops to feed those animals amounts to 33 percent of arable land. Meat production is a major factor in deforestation as

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well, and grazing now occupies 70 percent of previously forested land in the Amazon region. In Brazil, 60 to 70 percent of rainforest destruction is caused by clearing for animal pasture, one reason why livestock accounts for 9 percent of human-caused carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions. Other sources of CO2 include the burning of diesel fuel to operate farm machinery and the fossil fuels used to keep barns warm during the winter. And food grown for animals could be feeding people. Raising livestock consumes 90 percent of the soy, 80 percent of the corn and 70 percent of the grain grown in the United States. David Pimentel, professor of entomology at Cornell, points out that "if all the grain currently fed to livestock in the U.S. was consumed directly by people, the number who could be fed is nearly 800 million." Grazing is itself environmentally destructive. The UN reports that 20 percent of the world's pastures and rangelands have been at least somewhat degraded through overgrazing, soil compaction and erosion. Methane (a global warming gas 23 times more potent than CO2) comes from many human sources, but livestock accounts for an incredible 37 percent of that total. Nitrous oxide is also a very powerful global warming gas (296 times more potent than CO2) and by far the biggest source, 64 percent, originates (as does animalbased methane) from manure "off-gassing." This process of nitrous oxide creation is aggravated by intensive factory farming methods, because manure is a more dangerous emitter when it is concentrated and stored in compacted form. Nitrogen-based fertilizers also emit nitrous oxide. Another byproduct of raising livestock is copious amounts of ammonia.

Unacceptable risks The environmental consequences of meat-based diets extend far beyond their impact on climate change. According to the UN report, producing the worldwide meat supply also consumes a large share of natural resources and contributes to a variety of pressing problems. Livestock production consumes 8 percent of the world's water (mainly to irrigate animal feed), causes 55 percent of land erosion and sediment, uses 37 percent of all pesticides, directly or

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indirectly results in 50 percent of all antibiotic use, and dumps a third of all nitrogen and phosphorous into our fresh water supplies. A study by the Pew Commission on Industrial Farm Animal Production (IFAP), released last April, called the human health and environmental risks associated with the meat industry "unacceptable." One of the commission's major recommendations was to "implement a new system to deal with farm waste to replace the inflexible and broken system that exists today, to protect Americans from the adverse environmental and human health hazards of improperly handled IFAP waste." And livestock forces other animals out. With species loss accelerating in a virtual "sixth extinction," livestock currently accounts for 20 percent of all the animal biomass on the planet. As they occupy 30 percent of the planet, they also displace that much wildlife habitat. The grazing of livestock is considered a serious threat to 306 of the 825 "eco-regions" identified by the Worldwide Fund for Nature, and to 23 of Conservation International's 35 global hotspots for biodiversity.

Upping the volume Meat production has become a major problem because of its very success as a human food. In 1950, world meat production was 44 million pounds annually; today, it has risen fivefold to 253 million tons per year. Pork production, for instance, was less than five million tons annually in 1950, but it's more than 90 million tons today. The average person on the planet ate 90.3 pounds of meat in 2003, double the figure of 50 years ago. These sharp increases are partly the result of dramatically higher meat consumption in the Third World. China alone now consumes half the world's pork, a fivefold increase since 1978. Brazil makes an excellent case history. With 160 million head of cattle, it has the second-largest herd in the world after India. In Brazil, cattle provide 29 percent of the country's methane production, and an amazing 10 percent of the world total. If that were the only issue, Brazil's large cattle herd would be a major problem. But it would be an enormous global warming aggravator even if its cattle produced no methane, because Brazilian farmers burn rainforest land to create pastures.

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This process releases carbon into the atmosphere from the heavy fires, and also destroys the rainforests' ability to act as a carbon sink and capture CO2. These fires are Brazil's largest contribution to global warming, which worries Brazilian environmentalists such as Rubens Born of the group Vitae Civilis. He says he's waiting for Brazil's national inventory of greenhouse gas emissions, which will allow him to see more precisely the scope of the problem.

Selective solutions The few commentators who have taken on the connection between meat consumption and global warming ignore the most obvious solution: not eating meat. The UN report offers a lengthy section entitled "mitigation options" with a range of other choices. To avoid cutting down rainforests that sequester carbon, the report suggests "intensification of agricultural production on some of the better lands, for example by increased fertilizer benefits." The logical conclusion to this suggestion is the total confinement factory farming methods used in the United States — which, by twisted logic, could be said to have environmental benefits because they are not land intensive (and don't cut down trees). But the environmental problems associated with factory farming are legion, and include polluted air and waterways. Other UN suggestions include conservation tillage (leaving agricultural residue on the soil surface to enrich its health) and organic farming for better soil health, improved grassland management, better nutrition for livestock to reduce methane gas production, and capturing methane in anaerobic digesters to produce "biogas." The latter method has been adopted by several Vermont dairy farms and works well. Cow manure is stored in the digesters (huge tanks) at 100 degrees Fahrenheit and deprived of oxygen. That encourages bacteria to break the manure down, releasing biogas that is 90 percent methane. This fuel is captured and burned in an engine to generate electricity. Unfortunately, the equipment is expensive — $200,000 to $1 million, depending on the size of the farm. Only 32 U.S. farms were using digesters in a recent tally, so only a tiny amount of methane production has been mitigated in this way.

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A Canadian study by Karin Wittinberg and Dinah Boadi of the University of Manitoba lists 20 separate ways to reduce greenhouse gas production from livestock. These include grinding and pelletizing food for confined animals to make it more fully digestible (a 20 to 40 percent reduction), grazing steers on high-quality alfalfa grass pastures (50 percent reduction), adding canola oil to feedlot rations (30 percent reduction), and separating animals by age group and phasing in food related to their growth stages (50 percent reduction). These are laudable solutions and should be implemented, but, absent legislation, they're unlikely to be put in place. It takes seven pounds of corn to add a pound of weight to a cow, and that's why 200 million acres of land in the U.S. are devoted to raising grains, oilseeds, pasture and hay for livestock. That land requires 181 billion pounds of pesticides, 22 billion pounds of fertilizer and 17 trillion gallons of irrigation water (not to mention billions of gallons of global warming-aggravating fossil fuel for farm equipment). Another way of looking at this, supplied by M.E. Ensminger, the former chair of the Animal Sciences Department at Washington State University, is that "2,000 pounds of grain must be supplied to livestock in order to produce enough meat and other livestock products to support a person for a year, whereas 400 pounds of grain eaten directly will support a person for a year." Because vegetarians enjoy lower levels of blood cholesterol and suffer less frequently from obesity and hypertension, their life expectancies are several years greater. But the benefits of the vegetarian option are rarely on the agenda, even when the environmental effects of the meat industry are under discussion.

A very big change In the United States, Most people grow up eating meat and seeing others doing the same. The message that "meat is good and necessary for health" is routinely reinforced through advertising and the cultural signals we're sent at school, work and church. Vegetarianism is regularly depicted as a fringe choice for "health faddists." The government reinforces this message with meat featured prominently in its food pyramids.

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Jim Mason, co-author of The Ethics of What We Eat: Why Our Food Choices Matter (Rodale Books), offers another possible reason we've kept vegetarianism off the mainstream agenda. "People who eat meat and animal products are in denial about anything and everything having to do with animal farming," he says. "They know that it must be bad, but they don't want to look at any part of it. So all of it stays hidden and abuses flourish — whether of animals, workers or the environment." Even such an enlightened source as the 2005 Worldwatch report "Happier Meals: Rethinking the Global Meat Industry" is careful not to advocate for a vegetarian diet, including it in a range of options that also includes eating less meat, switching to pasture-raised "humane" meat, and opting for a few nonmeat entrées per week. Vegetarianism is the "elephant in the room," but even in a very food-conscious age it is not easily made the centerpiece of an activist agenda. Danielle Nierenberg, author of the Worldwatch study, works for both that organization and for the Humane Society of the United States (HSUS). She's a vegan, and very aware of the climate impacts of meat-based diets. But, she says, "Food choices are a very personal decision for most people, and we are only now convincing them that this is a tool at their disposal if they care about the environment." Nierenberg says that some of the Worldwatch report was published in Environmental Health Perspectives, and there was concern that it wouldn't see print if it overemphasized vegetarian diets. "People have a very visceral reaction when told they shouldn't be eating the core meats they grew up with," she says. "They get upset." David Pimentel agrees that Americans are acculturated to eating meat. "The nutritionists say we're eating way too much meat for our health," he says. "The public knows this but it doesn't change their dietary habits. What will alter their behavior is higher prices for meat and milk, which are inevitable because of higher fuel prices and [with the diversion of corn crops to making ethanol] the rising cost of corn." Although he admits it's an unpopular position, Pimentel says he'd like to see gas reach $10 a gallon, because it will encourage energy conservation and increase prices for environmentally destructive meat, milk and eggs. "Right now, we have some of the lowest food prices in the world," he says. "In the U.S. we pay 15 percent of our

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budgets for food, compared to 30 percent in Europe and 60 percent in Indonesia." Jacobson agrees. "People are pretty wedded to what they eat," he says. "The government should be sponsoring major mass media campaigns to convince people to eat more fruit, vegetables and whole grains." He argues that cutting meat consumption should be a public health priority. "From an environmental point of view, the less beef people eat the better," he says, citing not only the release of methane from livestock but also increased risk of colon cancer and heart disease. Jacobson adds that grass-fed, free-range beef (which has less overall fat) is a healthier alternative, but grazing takes longer to bring the animals to market weight "and they're emitting methane all that time." He posits that the Centers for Disease Control or the Environmental Protection Agency should be convincing Americans to eat lower on the food chain. "There are the environmental and animal welfare problems caused by 'modern' agriculture," he says. "The animals' retribution is that we die of heart disease and cancer." Is there an environmental argument to be made for livestock? Gidon Eshel, coauthor of the report "Diet, Energy and Global Warming" and a professor at Bard College, says that livestock "has an important role to play in nutrient recycling. Minerals are taken up by growing plants, and when those plants are eaten by grazers, some of it ends up in their tissues and some is returned to the soil in their waste products. But what's good in small quantities becomes toxic and devastating in large amounts. So it is only beneficial if we were raising livestock in much smaller numbers than we are today." Eshel calls for enforcement of the frequently ignored federal Clean Water and Clean Air Acts, which contain provisions to protect against harmful discharges of both animal wastes and the fertilizers used to grow animal feed.

Eating more meat A record 284 million tons of meat were produced worldwide in 2007. In most developing countries, meat consumption per capita is expected to double from the 1980s to 2020. Meat is an economically important product in most parts of the world in 2008,

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and it has powerful lobbies and enormous vested interests. There's just one problem: It's hurting the planet, and wasting huge resources that could easily feed a hungry world. Offer these facts to many meat-eaters, and they'll respond that they can't be healthy without meat. "Where would I get my protein?" is a common concern. But the latest medical research shows that the human body does not need meat to be healthy. Indeed, meat is high in cholesterol and saturated fat, and a balanced vegetarian diet provides all the protein needed for glowing health. Were humans "meant" to eat meat, just because our ancestors did? Nonsense, says Dr. Milton Mills, a leading vegetarian voice: "The human gastrointestinal tract features the anatomical modifications consistent with an herbivorous diet." With the recognition of meat's impact on the planet (and the realization that we don't need it to stay healthy), is it possible that the human diet will undergo a fundamental change? The fact that the cornerstone of the American diet aids and abets climate change is an "inconvenient truth" that many of us don't want to face, says Joseph Connelly, publisher the San Francisco-based VegNews Magazine. He takes a dig at Al Gore for not mentioning meat-based diets in his film and only dealing with them glancingly in his book, An Inconvenient Truth (Rodale Books). A 2003 Harris Poll said that between 4 and 10 percent of the American people identify themselves as vegetarians. So far, Connelly says that number seems to be holding steady. "From a sustainability point of view, what's really needed is for people to understand the connections between factory farming, meat-eating and environmental impacts," he says. "That's the first step." Lisa Mickleborough, an editor at VegNews, is probably right when she says that animal concerns are a powerful force for turning meat-eating into a moral issue. To be an animal rights leader is almost by definition to be a vegan. But few environmental leaders have gone that far. "As an environmental issue, it's pretty compelling," she says. "The figures on methane production speak for themselves. But when it comes to doing what's right for the environment, most people don't take big steps — they just do the best they can."

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Jim Motavalli is the editorial director of New Mass Media and a frequent contributor to *The New York Times* auto section. Send comments to him via [email protected].

Comments On 7/30/2008 11:01:36 PM, ww said: Now, it comes to be, that we must all try very hard, on how to reduce...regulate...and maintain the balance of the populous of "Carbon Man" as we know it, to be in balance with all of the Natural World...that of...self sustaining, regulating environment, conservation and respect for our resourses. We must live within our means and not that of opulence. On 7/31/2008 11:04:32 AM, Andy said: "According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), the American meat industry produces more than 60 million tons of waste annually — five tons for every U.S. citizen and 130 times the volume of human waste." Correct me if I'm wrong, but aren't there roughly 300 million U.S. citizens today? If that's true, and if the American meat industry produces 60 million tons of waste annually, wouldn't that mean one ton of waste for every five U.S. citizens? On 7/31/2008 11:22:48 AM, mimaja said: I believe it. The amount of resources used to produce meat are much higher than you'd think walking down the meat aisle. Here are some online "factoids" * Water utilized to produce 1 pound of meat amounts to 2,500 gallons. In comparison, the water utilized to produce 1 pound of wheat amounts to 25 gallons. * The cost of a common hamburger would be $35 and the cost of one pound of beefsteak would be $89 if water was not subsidized by taxpayers. On 7/31/2008 7:42:49 PM, Jacobh said: I just came off of a year and a half of vegitarianisim and I have just one question. Why is it that none of these pro-vegitarian articles mention the human need for B-12? There are no non-animal sources for this esential nutrient. Quite honestly, I don't see how a diet that requires labritory manufactured suplements can be considered natural. Sure, you could just eat eggs and cheese, but isn't the dairy industry also contributing to methane

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production? Also, consider that our closest relatives, the apes get their B-12 by eating bugs and dirt. Yuck! I think that I'll stick to my current diet thank you. On 8/1/2008 3:17:52 PM, Ajax said: Jacobh - B12 is produced by bacteria. The microorganisms live in soil, and when livestock eat grain or grass, they consume soil residue which contains the bacteria-produced B12 vitamin. That's how B12 gets into animal products. Us vegans and vegetarians getting our B12 from fortified foods such as soymilk and cereal isn't much different then omnivores getting theirs from animal products, and our method happens to be a good deal healthier. The vegan/vegetarian diet doesn't require "laboratory manufactured supplements". I know plenty of vegans and vegetarians who choose to forgo the convenience of supplements (and that's ALL supplements are) in favor of a more natural diet. Such a diet would require something like a garden in which plants are grown in soil that has a healthy bacteria population, since plants purchased from grocery stores are practically sterilized in order to appease the mysophobic masses. Don't try to act like your diet is natural in any way, shape, or form. You may look down on vegetarianism for its B12 "laboratory manufactured" links, but it's not like you're running around in a forest with a spear hunting down your prey for meat, nor crawling into trees and stealing bird eggs. Hardly anyone's diet is natural anymore. We've forgone that in favor of convenience. The argument that a non-natural diet is a bad diet is illogical. Your juvenile response to the thought of eating insects only shows me that you're not at all concerned with what's most natural. You're simply a slave to your taste buds, willing to ignore all of the evidence that supports vegetarianism and veganism as healthy, planet-friendly diets just so you can enjoy a hamburger. I hope your flawed reasoning enables you to continue your current lifestyle with a clear conscience. On 8/2/2008 9:37:25 AM, renaud said: I'd also like to comment that I've been a vegan for many years with excellent health and ditto the comments above about the origin and sources of B-12. Not only is a vegan diet healthier (as numerous studies have indicated including this article) but it's just a compassionate way of living for the environment and the animals. And yes, raising cows for dairy products most definiitely contributes to global warming and methane production so eating a diet of eggs and dairly products isn't the answer. On 8/4/2008 3:26:27 PM, Sandy said:

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Great job on this post. It was very insightful. I was so surprised to read about the UN report and the effects of meat production on the environment. I work for a public health campaign called Meatless Monday. We encourage people to give up meat one day a week to lower their risk of preventable diseases. We know that lowering meat consumption is not only good for your health, but also for the environment. Eating less meat is a great way for people to make a positive change. Take a look at www.meatlessmonday.com for some recipe ideas. We also have an article up about meat and the environment with some great resources for more information at http://www.meatlessmonday.com/dyk_environment On 8/8/2008 5:32:04 AM, telecomtom said: p.s. The prerequisite for universal health care is universal health, and for universal health we need a diet consisting entirely of plant-based foods, no meat, no dairy, no processed foods. The days of the middleman in the American diet are numbered: no more cows, chickens, turkeys, pigs and food-processing factories in the middle. There should be nothing between us and the plants that feed us except for food-delivery vehicles, stores, sinks to wash the food, knives to cut it and plates, spoons and forks to get it to our hungry mouths and stomachs. It's a simple and very affordable system.

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