by Barbara Allen

“Americans now spend more money on fast food—$110 billion a year—than they do on higher education. They spend more on fast food than on movies, books, magazines, newspapers, videos and recorded music—combined.” from Fast Food Nation by Eric Schlosser. Many believe the growing problem with obesity in America is due to this diet of fast food. The fast food diet is primarily a meat diet. So what is that burger costing us really?

Here are a few statistics:

More than a third of all raw materials and fossil fuels consumed in the U.S. are used in animal production. Beef production alone uses more water than is consumed in growing the nation’s entire fruit and vegetable crop.

John Robbins wrote in his book The Food Revolution, “you’d save more water by not eating a pound of California beef than you would by not showering for an entire year.”

It takes 60 lbs. of water to grow a pound of wheat. It takes between 2,500 and 6,000 lbs. of water to grow a pound of meat.

Producing a single hamburger patty uses enough fuel to drive 20 miles and causes the loss of five times its weight in topsoil.

If a 10-acre farm grew soybeans it could feed 60 people, if it grew wheat it could feed 24 people, growing corn would feed 10 people. If it raised cattle it would feed two!

Frances Moore Lappé, author of Diet For a Small Planet, suggests we imagine sitting down to an eight-ounce steak. “Then imagine the room filled with 45 to 50 people with empty bowls in front of them. For the ‘feed cost’ of your steak, each of their bowls could be filled with a full cup of cooked cereal grains.”

If meat production was reduced by just 10 percent in the US it would free enough grain to feed 60 million people, estimates Harvard nutritionist Jean Mayer.

It takes 4.8 pounds of grain to produce 1 pound of meat.

Canadian Steve Hall writes:

“Nigeria's per-capita meat consumption is approximately 6.4 kilograms a year and China's is about 23 kg, but, Canada's is 65 kg a year and the United States' is about 95 kg.” That means that we in America eat 15 times the meat that a Nigerian eats and 4 times as much as the average citizen of China. Is all that meat consumption necessary? Thirty years ago American’s ate only one third the beef and pork we eat today, this in spite of the many studies that have shown us it may be bad for our health.

Human health

There is a good deal of evidence that our high consumption of meat is the cause of our high incidence of heart disease, hypertension, and colon and other cancers. Countries with low meat consumption have correspondingly low rates of these diseases. Perhaps just coincidence but there is strong evidence of a correlation. Another strong health consideration with meat consumption is something I’ve already written about and that is the use of antibiotics and hormones in raising livestock and the possibility of developing antibiotic resistant strains of bacteria. Several poultry growers have agreed to stop the unnecessary use of antibiotics but beef, pork, turkey and chicken from many sources remain a problem.

Cost to the environment:

You wouldn’t think that the “production of meat” would create much pollution but the manure and urine waste, plus the pesticides and fertilizers used to grow feed, are among the largest sources of water pollution in North America. “Factory farms” pollute our waterways more than all other industrial sources combined.

Jim Motavalli in The Case Against Meat says “ The much-publicized 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill in Alaska dumped 12 million gallons of oil into Prince William Sound, but the relatively unknown 1995 New River hog waste spill in North Carolina poured 25 million gallons of excrement and urine into the water, killing an estimated 10 to 14 million fish and closing 364,000 acres of coastal shellfishing beds.”

Nearly every aspect of meat production, he goes on to say “from grazing-related loss of cropland and open space, to the inefficient feeding of vast quantities of water and grain to cattle in a hungry world, to pollution from “factory farms”—is an environmental disaster with wide and sometimes catastrophic consequences.” Peter Cheeke, an agriculture professor from Oregon State University, sees factory farming as “a frontal assault on the environment, with massive groundwater and air pollution problems.”.

I have a feeling that 10 minutes in a slaughterhouse would be all any one of us would need to put us off meat forever. A good look at the way most “meat” animals spend their relatively short lives would also turn many of us into vegetarians. The mass production methods used to raise these animals are something we would just as soon not think about or know about.

Did you know that animals that collapse at the slaughterhouse door or during transportation are called “downers,” and their corpses are routinely processed for human consumption? The diseased ones are “rendered” into “meat meal” and fed back to the pigs and chickens we eat and added to pet food. This according to the USDA.

Reading all that really made me rethink our “need” for meat. I know that we get protein from non-meat sources. It’s a myth that plants don’t contain complete proteins. They are just arranged differently. Most nutritionists agree that we consume much more protein than we need. It’s actually bad for your health! The Chinese stay healthy on a quarter of what we eat and even we consumed two thirds less than we do now just 30 years ago.

So if you want to do something wonderful for your body as well as for the environment – cut back on your consumption of meat. Eat at least one meal a day that has no meat. Or try one day a week with no meat, or just eating much smaller portions. Your body will thank you! And so will the planet.

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This column comes to you courtesy of the Environmental Concerns Group of the DeFuniak Springs Garden Club.