If We Don't Cut Back On Eating Meat, We're Screwed
In DepthAmericans love meat, and for good reason: meat is delicious. So very, very delicious. Just one problem: our national and increasingly global meat addiction is going to destroy us as a species if we don’t find a way to rein it in.
Tom Philpott over at Mother Jones has an excellent piece up about why we’re all going to have to cut back on our meat consumption. The chief culprit here is the feedlot system by which we currently operate, otherwise known as the factory farming system:
Is the feedlot system itself sustainable? That is, can we keep stuffing animals—not just cows but also chickens and pigs—into confinements and feeding them gargantuan amounts of corn and soybeans? And can other countries mimic that path, as China is currently?
The answer, plainly, is no, according to the eminent ecologist Vaclav Smil in a 2014 paper. Smil notes that global meat production has risen from less than 55 million tons in 1950 to more than 300 million tons in 2010—a nearly six-fold increase in 60 years. “But this has been a rather costly achievement because mass-scale meat production is one of the most environmentally burdensome activities,” he writes, and then proceeds to list off the problems: it requires a large-scale shift from diversified farmland and rainforests to “monocultures of animal feed,” which triggered massive soil erosion, carbon emissions, and coastal “dead zones” fed by fertilizer runoff. Also, concentrating animals tightly together produces “huge volumes of waste,” more than can be recycled into nearby farmland, creating noxious air and water pollution. Moreover, it’s “inherently inefficient” to feed edible grains to farm animals, when we could just eat the grain, Smil adds.
In addition, the necessary scaling up of meat production and consumption—from 300 million tons in 2010 to a predicted 500 million by 2050—shows a system headed towards a massive implosion. In short, the continuation of the feedlot system will ultimately lead inexorably to ecological disaster. As someone who desperately loves eating meat wrapped in meat marinated in various iterations of meat, I’m not thrilled by this news. Not acknowledging that the problem is real at this point, however, is patently insane—and dangerous.