“Nothing will benefit human health and increase chances of survival of life on Earth as much as the evolution to a vegetarian diet.” ~ Albert Einstein While 56 million acres of U.S. land are producing hay for livestock, only 4 million acres are producing vegetables for human consumption. —U.S. Department of Commerce, Census of Agriculture Is Meat Sustainable? Now, It’s Not Personal! But like it or not, meat-eating is becoming a problem for everyone on the planet. In Central America, 40 percent of all the rainforests have been cleared or burned down in the last 40 years, mostly for cattle pasture to feed the export market—often for U.S. beef burgers…. Meat is too expensive for the poor in these beef-exporting countries, yet in some cases cattle have ousted highly productive traditional agriculture. —John Revington in World Rainforest Report Not only is mortality from coronary heart disease lower in vegetarians than in nonvegetarians, but vegetarian diets have also been successful in arresting coronary heart disease. Scientific data suggest positive relationships between a vegetarian diet and reduced risk for…obesity, coronary artery disease, hypertension, diabetes mellitus, and some types of cancer. —American Dietetic Association He is a heavy eater of beef. Me thinks it doth harm to his wit. —William Shakespeare in Twelfth Night A report by the U.S. Department of Agriculture esti- mates that 89 percent of U.S. beef ground into patties contains traces of the deadly E. coli strain. —Reuters News Service Animal waste contains disease-causing pathogens, such as Salmonella, E. coli, Cryptosporidium, and fecal coliform, which can be 10 to 100 times more concentrated than in human waste. More than 40 diseases can be transferred to humans through manure. —Natural Resources Defense Council Let’s say we have 20,000 kcal [kilocalories] of corn. Assume that we feed it to cattle (as we do with about 70 percent of the grain produced in the U.S.)…. The cow will produce about 2,000 kcal of usable energy from that 20,000 kcal of corn (assuming 10 percent efficiency; the efficiency is actually somewhat higher than that, but 10 percent is easy to work with and illustrates the point reasonably). That 2,000 kcal of beef would support one person for a day, assuming a 2,000 kcal per day diet, which is common in the U.S. If instead people ate the 20,000 kcal of corn directly, instead of passing it through the cow, we would be able to support more people for that given unit of land being farmed; not necessarily 10 times more, because people are not as efficient as cattle at using corn energy, but considerably more than the one that could be supported if the corn were passed through the cow first! [So], we could support more people on Earth for a given area of land farmed if we ate lower on the food chain—if we ate primary producers instead of eating herbivores (corn instead of beef). Or, we could support the same number of people as at present, but with less land degradation because we wouldn’t need to have so much land in production…. —Patricia Muir, Oregon State University According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, livestock waste has polluted more than 27,000 miles of rivers and contaminated groundwater in dozens of states. —Natural Resources Defense Council The standard diet of a person in the United States requires 4,200 gallons of water per day (for animals’ drinking water, irrigation of crops, processing, washing, cooking, etc.). A person on a vegan diet requires only 300 gallons a day. —Richard H. Schwartz in Judaism and Vegetarianism A report from the International Water Management Institute, noting that 840 million of the world’s people remain undernourished, recommends finding ways to produce more food using less water. The report notes that it takes 550 liters of water to produce enough flour for one loaf of bread in developing countries…but up to 7,000 liters of water to produce 100 grams of beef. —UN Commission on Sustainable Development, “Water—More Nutrition Per Drop,” 2004 Let’s say you take a shower every day…and your showers average seven minutes…and the flow rate through your shower head is 2 gallons per minute…. You would use, at that rate, [5,110] gallons of water to shower every day for a year. When you compare that figure, [5,110] gallons of water, to the amount the Water Education Foundation calculates is used in the production of every pound of California beef (2,464 gallons),you realize something extraordinary. In California today, you may save more water by not eating a pound of beef than you would by not showering for six entire months. —John Robbins in The Food Revolution: How Your Diet Can Help Save Your Life and the World One ton of methane, the chief agricultural greenhouse gas, has the global warming potential of 23 tons of carbon dioxide. A dairy cow produces about 75 kilograms of methane a year, equivalent to over 1.5 [metric] tons of carbon dioxide. The cow, of course, is only doing what comes naturally. But people are inclined to forget, it seems, that farming is an industry. We cleared the land, sowed the pasture, bred the stock, and so on. It’s a human business, not a natural one. We’re pretty good at it, which is why atmospheric concentrations of methane increased by 150 percent over the past 250 years, while carbon dioxide concentrations increased by 30 percent. —Pete Hodgson, New Zealand Minister for Energy, Science, and Fisheries It takes the equivalent of a gallon of gasoline to produce a pound of grain-fed beef in the United States. Some of the energy was used in the feedlot, or in transportation and cold storage, but most of it went to fertilizing the feed grain used to grow the modern steer or cow…. To provide the yearly average beef consumption of an American family of four requires over 260 gallons of fossil fuel. —“Meat Equals War,” web-site of Earth Save, Humboldt, California It takes, on average, 28 calories of fossil fuel energy to produce 1 calorie of meat protein for human consumption, [whereas] it takes only 3.3 calories of fossil- fuel energy to produce 1 calorie of protein from grain for human consumption. —David Pimentel, Cornell University The transition of world agriculture from food grain to feed grain represents a new form of human evil, with consequences possibly far greater and longer lasting than any past wrongdoing inflicted by men against their fellow human beings. Today, more than 70 percent of the grain produced in the United States is fed to livestock, much of it to cattle. —Jeremy Rifkin, Los Angeles Times, 27 May 2002 Feeding grain to animals is highly inefficient, and an absurd use of resources. —Vaclav Smil, University of Manitoba Belching, flatulent livestock emit 16 percent of the world’s annual production of methane, a powerful greenhouse gas. —Brian Halweil and Danielle Nierenberg in State of the World 2004 Fight Global Warming With Your Knife and Fork —Article by Elysa Hammond in Sustainablebusiness The animals have gone, the forest is silent, and when the logging camps finally move, what is left for the indigenous people? Nothing. ~ Jane Goodall in Benefits Beyond Boundaries worldwatch.org/node/549
Posted on: Sun, 06 Jul 2014 19:26:05 +0000
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