The Observer. 22 June 2008.
Is meat off the menu?
Yes says Raj Patel: growing food for animals is a waste of
resources in an overcrowded world. No says Joanna Blythman:
with much of the world unsuitable for crops, meat is essential
America is the most overweight country on earth. Only three out of
10 Americans have a normal body weight. I should have guessed
that one of the side effects of moving to the US would be bloating.
Since leaving London for America a decade ago, I've put on a
couple of stone. It's easy enough to blame the food environment
here. This is, after all, the land where Reagan pronounced tomato
ketchup a fruit and, more recently, where French fries and chocolate-
covered cherries were legally dubbed 'fresh produce' under a US
Department of Agriculture (USDA) regulation known as the batter-
coating rule.
I can't just censure America for my condition, of course. Getting
older and stopping smoking have accelerated my middle-age spread.
I'm more active now than I used to be, but that hasn't kept the
podge at bay. And I'm convinced that part of the problem is that
I eat meat. I came to America a vegetarian and I've lapsed into
occasional chicken and fish (though, because of a residual
Hinduism, no beef).
I'm not the only person to be blaming flesh for bad outcomes.
In America, meat has been getting some bad press recently. The
Humane Society of the United States earlier this year posted a
widely circulated video, filmed undercover at an abattoir in
California. It shows workers ramming cows with fork-lift trucks in
order to persuade them to walk. There was a financial incentive for
them to do it - 'downer cows', cows that are too sick to walk, are
prohibited from entering the food system. By the time the story
broke and the USDA announced a recall, most of the beef had
already been distributed and fed to children through the school-meal
programme.
Even Oprah has announced that she's going vegan, if only for a three-
week 'cleanse'. Oprah has had run-ins with the meat industry before.
In 1998, on hearing that American cows were being fed to other
American cows in very British BSE-generating practices, she
'stopped cold' her beef consumption. A group of Texas cattlemen
were aggrieved. They used one of the handful of legal restrictions to
free speech rights in the US: you're not allowed to disparage
agricultural products here. They claimed that Oprah had done just that.
They lost in court. Twice. Yet the implication, not too far from the
surface in Oprah's vegan detox diet, is that there's something fairly
toxic about meat.
Meat consumption has come under attack on grounds of ethics,
environment and health and has even been blamed for the global food
crisis. A couple of weeks back, George Bush said: 'Worldwide, there
is increasing demand. There turns out to be prosperity in the
developing world, which is good... So, for example, just as an
interesting thought for you, there are 350 million people in India who
are classified as middle class... Their middle class is larger than our
entire population. And when you start getting wealth, you start
demanding better nutrition and better food, and so demand is high,
and that causes the price to go up.'
More people demanding more meat means that more land is dedicated
not to growing food for people, but food for animals - up to 9kg of
grain for every kilo of beef.
Ratcheting up meat consumption will drive up the price of feed grains,
other things being equal.
Except that other things aren't equal. Evidence suggests that it's hard
to impeach either India or China's meat-eating habits. According to
Daryll Ray at the University of Tennessee, the US government's own
figures show that China has been a net ex****ter of meats since 2001,
subsidised to some extent by the running down of local grain stores,
and an increased im****t of soybeans. Moreover, it has produced more
grain than it has consumed for every year since 2005, and continues
to ex****t heavily. When it comes to India, Ray says the story is much
the same as China's. In fact India has been a net ex****ter of grains and
meat over nearly all of the past two decades even though it has the
world's largest number of hungry people. So the problem is a little
deeper than more Indians demanding things, as George Bush claims.
Blaming the world's two most populous countries, India and China,
is a bit of misdirection, particularly when the facts point the other
way. Although India's chicken consumption has gone from 0.2 million
tonnes to 2.3 million today, beef consumption is more or less the
same as it was in 1990 and, because of the cultural tilt against it, not
forecast to change.
China is certainly the world's largest consumer of meat in aggregate,
and that is because it is the world's most populous country. Meat
consumption has increased from 24kg per person in 1980 to 54kg
last year, and the chief of China operations for Tyson Foods, the
world's largest meat packer, predicts that this is the last year that
China will be self-sufficient in protein. Against this, soaring prices
for meat in China are certainly taking the edge off demand. But until
China's meat demand extends its footprint beyond its borders,
country number three in terms of global population, the United
States, remains a little more obviously culpable. Meat consumption
here is rather less sustainable than in China or India. Americans eat an
awful lot of meat - around 90kg of meat and fish per person per year.
Within the US, meat manufacturing is tremendously resource-
intensive. Partly, this is because there's just so much meat around
- nine billion animals per year according to one estimate. They
require water, land and environmental services, all of which
they're using unsustainably. More than half of American pastures
are being over-grazed, and are losing soil at six times their
sustainable rate. Water resources are also stretched to breaking
point - it takes 100 times more water to produce a kilo of animal
than vegetable.
And you've also got the problem of ****. Much of America's
cheaper meat is produced on Concentrated Animal-Feeding
Operations (CAFO), huge lots on which animals are confined, fed
and slaughtered within the same vast facility. These operations
produce the equivalent of five tonnes of waste for every US citizen.
But the waste isn't regulated in the same way. As researchers in a
2005 Johns Hopkins University study noted, a typical CAFO has
about 5,000 animals on it. That number of pigs produces as much
waste as a city of 20,000 people, but without any of the plumbing.
At one of the largest lots in the US, at the Harris Cattle Ranch in
Coalinga, California, 100,000 cattle are housed on a ranch roughly
twice the size of Hyde Park. The waste from these animals is
stored in a lagoon of **** bigger than Wembley Stadium. Although
such lagoons are meant to be insulated from the rest of the
environment, there are re****ts of effluent leaching into local water
supplies. In 1999, Hurricane Floyd caused 50 lagoons to flood in
North Carolina, and one lagoon burst its banks, releasing 2 million
gallons of soupy red liquid.
For CAFO workers, who are some of the poorest in the country,
respiratory disease rates are high. And when the waste makes it to
the sea, the results are even worse. The run-off is rich in fertilisers.
As a result of the run-off in the Mississippi, CAFOs cause an
annual 'dead zone' in the Gulf of Mexico the size of New Jersey.
And yet CAFOs remain largely untouched by government.
The effects of meat consumption reach beyond America's borders.
According to the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United
Nations, nearly a fifth of all greenhouse-gas emissions come from
livestock - more than from all forms of trans****t. Global livestock
production is set to double between now and 2050, setting another
hurdle on the road to sustainable emissions levels.
A University of Chicago study argued that the average meat eater in
the US produces about 1.5 tonnes of CO[squared] more than a
vegetarian per year. That's because animals are hungry and the grain
they eat takes energy, usually fossil fuels, to produce. It takes 2.2
calories of fossil fuel energy to produce a single calorie of plant
protein, according to researchers at Cornell University. And lots of
that plant protein is required to make animal protein. For chicken, the
ratio of energy in to protein out is 4:1. For ****k it's 17:1. For lamb,
50:1. For beef, 54:1.
This is a lot of energy, and a lot of grain that gets diverted. The
amount of grains fed to US livestock would be enough to feed 840
million people on a plant-based diet. The number of food-insecure
people in the world in 2006 was, incidentally, 854 million. Of course,
this isn't simply anAmerican phenomenon - in aggregate, rich
countries feed about 60 per cent of their grain to livestock.
According to the Union of Concerned Scientists, nearly 70 per cent
of antibiotics used in the US are destined to be used on livestock.
The meat industry is, understandably, feeling a little defensive. 'It
seems the public is getting a terminal case of nutrition whiplash. A
study one week contradicts the findings of a study released the
previous week and has led to consumers either being downright
confused and sceptical, or altogether tuned out from that kind of
news re****ting,' says Dave Ray from the American Meat Institute.
Yet the US diet, high in meat and low in fresh fruits and vegetables,
is being increasingly indicted. The Johns Hopkins study argues that
it leads to higher rates of heart disease, stroke, cancer and diabetes.
The cost associated with poor diet in just these diseases has been
estimated at $33 billion per year.
Yet there is enough food to feed the world now and in the future.
But not if larger and larger slices of it go to feed animals - a fact
that the governments of India, China, and the United States seem
unprepared to address.
At the moment, only about two per cent of Americans are vegans.
So the question remains: why is it so hard to go cold tofu? John
Cunningham, consumer research manager at the Vegetarian Research
Group, has commissioned a series of surveys on meat consumption
since the early 1990s, and he has noticed some trends. The number
of vegetarians has been going up. Between 2.5 per cent and 10 per
cent of Americans are now vegetarian, almost double from a decade
before, with numbers of young people higher than the general
population. 'There's been a deep change', says Cunningham. 'If you
talked about being vegetarian in the 1980s, people were incredulous.
Today, people say, "Wow, that's great, I wish I could do that".'
More people are finding a way to get there, but me, I'm still stuck.
Why do I find it so hard to ****ge out the meat from my diet? Well,
there's a persistent trend in the data.
Vegetarian women outnumber men by two to one. Cunningham notes
that there's a connection between meat and masculinity, particularly
around beef. 'No one had their manhood questioned for not eating a
chicken sandwich,' he says, 'but if you don't eat a hamburger, well...'
Bob Torres, author of Making a Killing, a study of the philosophy
and political economy of veganism, has seen this too. In his job as
a professor, he has worked with young men from s****ts teams.
'Many don't get very far giving up meat - they get all kinds of ****
from their team mates, who say things like their athletic performance
is going to decline, they're pussies, they're not man enough. And
when they find out I'm vegan, some people ask me whether I did it
because my wife made me.'
There are other reasons why it's so hard to give up meat.
It's certainly harder for working-class Americans to eat sustainably
when they are working and living in 'food deserts', those parts of
the country where fresh fruit and vegetables are hard to come by,
and where processed meats are readily found on convenience-store
shelves. But I don't have these excuses. It's entirely possible for
me to make the right decision.
And the evidence for me rather tilts against meat consumption.
I care about climate change, animal suffering and the condition
of people in developing countries. Addressing meat's problems
will require a range of policies, from ending the subsidy to meat
prices from workers' low wages, to pricing the full cost of meat's
pollution into its price, to addressing unsustainable practices in
agriculture.
But in caring about all this, eating meat is a big strike against my
conscience. For this, I can't blame America, China or India.
I can only blame myself. It's becoming increasingly clear to
me that I'll need to become more human, even if, in America, it
means I'm less of a man.
ยท Raj Patel is the author of Stuffed and Starved (****tobello
Books), www.stuffedandstarved.org
http://lifeandhealth.guardian.co.uk/food/story/0,,2286172,00.html
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