The New York Times Magazine has struck again with a rather good piece on the whole concept of humane treatment of animals and the moral quandries of animal consumption.
I have a couple of issues with points Pollan makes in this essay. He seems to imply that the notion of meat eating as being something deeper, instinctual if you will. In my opinion he is contradicting himself because prior to saying this he said that human beings have evolved beyond instinct, beyond our animal past. Furthermore I have personally have known people who stopped eating meat after eating it for 20+ years and they never said anything about feeling a deep need for it. I'll ask and make sure and report back. People have an acquired taste for eating meat, fostered from childbirth through adulthood due to cultural norms. People can be weaned off that taste and the psychological requirement for that type of food as being the only way to satisfy hunger.
Pollan also discusses that an animal scientist in Oregon thinks that more animals will be killed due to farming. Are there any more than one study that concur on this result? One man does not an authority make. Also he writes as if killing animals while farming is the only alternative and we have no other way. If after factory farming and mass death of animals for food has been stopped, I have no doubt that animal rights activists will take it upon themselves to ascertain that farming also takes on more humane approaches during harvest time so as to not slaughter animal life that makes a home in the fields where we grow our food.
Pollan then delves into the issue of the majority of the world's land not being arable. This is true but, in general eating animals is a very inefficient way of using the land. As of now we have the distribution capability to move vast quantities of food over vast distances efficiently. Animal consumption works on a small scale as in individual farms, but animal farming to feed a burgeoning world population is suicide. In the same book Peter Singer cites (pg. 166) very specific resource requirements to raise one lb. of steak from steers raised on feedlots, and they go as follows: five pounds of grain, 2,500 gallons of water, energy equal to about one gallon of gasoline and about 35 lbs. of eroded top soil. Basically it boils down to what we can do per acre of land to get food and raising plants is the way to go. Especially plants like soybeans, legumes of all sorts, nuts and seeds and other greens. If you think of acquiring energy as a process (sun -> plants -> animals -> people), its inefficient to get energy from animals based on the fundamental laws of thermodynamics, we lose efficiency with each extra step. This is shown by the scary fact (page 165) that it requires 21 pounds of protein feed to return 1 pound of beef protein. This is a 4.762% ROI. Singer offers even more statistics on pg 167, but it comes down that using land to grow crops is about 5 times more efficient on terms of caloric energy than raising beef or other forms of meat.
Compounding the already presented evidence animals for slaughter in the US produce 2 billion pounds of heavily ammoniated waste, this is 10 times more than the entire human population of the US. Just think about that, animals produce waste which is far far more concentrated than human waste in terms of ammonia and other chemicals and disposing of an amount 10 times greater than what people produce. Yea buddy. On top of this all grazing cattle and other animals require land which competes with forest land. Forests are cut down to turn into grazing land. Once the forest is gone, rain washes away the top soil the forest was holding down making that land where the animals grazed worthless after 1-2 seasons, making the return of any forest highly improbably. Think about this when you hear how many acres of rain forests are destroyed each year.
Based on where man stands technologically and evolutionarily it is no longer necessary at all to consume animals other than purely for a gastronomic pleasure. Even then it just boils down to people doing what we want to because we like to live in the lap of luxury come hell or high water. Probably high water, because cows and pigs and sheep and chickens like to fart. Fart has a lot of methane, methane is a greenhouse gas.
I just wish Pollan had made a more fortified argument. Forget animal suffering and cruelty and all that, purely from an environmental perspective, cutting down on an animal diet or switching to veganism would change the ecological picture so dramatically. I wonder how that article would be influenced if Pollan had actually stopped to consider the environment aspect of the whole bit.
Linkses and quoteses:
Bush says, "I hate national parks."
World according to America.
Give it back you anonymous bastards.
I need to go shopping.
"A person without real curiosity has no hope of functioning very well, it seems to me ... ... The trick is to know what facts are relevant, and often to dig them out from disciplines far removed from your own, and to imagine how all these disparate pieces fit together." - Ann Zwinger, Plateau Journal 2000.
Posted by Mr. Keyur at November 11, 2002 01:09 PM