Green with Skepticism: Vegetarianism
As of January 1, 2012 I have been a vegetarian. It originally started as a way to support my significant other, who really wants to be a vegetarian, but I’m the cook so he was often tempted by the glorious smell of bacon or steak….. But since then I have become the more avid vegetarian between the two of us for ethical reasons.
I should start out by saying I checked with my doctor before starting this diet. She told me to only eat 2 -3 tofu meals per week and to try and eat fish twice a week, so I do that. I also eat protein rich foods like beans, nuts and seeds. If you’re going to be a vegetarian I highly suggest that you talk to your doctor and ensure that you can afford to take meat out of your diet (both monetarily and physically). And, as always, I am not an expert in this particular topic so please feel free to jump in and correct anything.
Anyway… now when the hubby and I go out for chow I am the one ensuring that I don’t eat meat. He will still go for a fast food burger, tacos or wings. We went to Medieval Times and he got the big ol’ leg of chicken and a rack of ribs while I munched down on hummus and rice with beans.
What has changed?
At first it was an issue of consent and animal rights (which I think is best saved for another post another day) and while this hasn’t become a non-issue for me, environmental impacts have become a larger one. The human population has reached 7 billion people – and we all need to be fed. I think people should substantially decrease their meat intake. In America it has become a symbol of freedom and manliness to eat meat. Things like the double down have emerged that just make me want to vomit. The relentless consumption of meat is costing us, big time.
I’m not a big fan of PETA but this quote really emphasizes my stance on meat consumption:
According to Environmental Defense, if every American skipped one meal of chicken per week and substituted vegetarian foods instead, the carbon dioxide savings would be the same as taking more than half a million cars off U.S. roads.
Inefficient
Just on the face of it, the idea of growing crops to feed animals that feed humans is a mathematically bad idea. In an ecological system, organisms are organized into different “trophic”, or feeding, levels, which indicate their positions in the food chain, with prey organisms at the bottom and predators at the top. In a food chain composed of grain, cows, and humans, grain would be of trophic level 1; cows that eat grain at level 2; and humans that eat cows at level 3. Whenever the trophic level goes up, the total biomass, or energy, decreases tremendously. This is because organisms are very inefficient at converting the energy they consume into their own body mass, and therefore an organism at level 2 must eat a lot of organisms at level 1 – many times their own weight – in order to survive. Much of the energy from the food they eat goes into self-repairing mechanisms and developing bones and skin that cannot be eaten by humans.
The degree of wastefulness of this process varies depending on which study one looks at. According to organizations with vested interests such as the US National Cattlemen’s Beef Association, it takes 4.5kg of grain to produce 1kg of beef, while the US Department of Agricultural Economic Research Service gives a figure of 16kg of grain for 1kg of beef (taken from The Food Revolution). The Council for Agricultural Science and Technology assessed the studies in this area and released these results:
Water
A LOT of water is used for producing meat. The figures, again, are hard to nail down, with a study supported by the California Beef Council reporting 2680L of water producing 1kg of beef, while a report by a widely-published Cornell University ecologist, David Pimentel, tells of 100,000L of water per 1kg of beef (this figure was adjusted by Pimentel in a more recent article to around 50,000L per kg). This is huge! What does it take to grow wheat? 900L per kg! Fresh water is going to become more scarce and Canada can't support everyone (although we'll probably try because we love you).
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Personally, I'm holding out for lab-grown meat, because if I was to ever go vegetarian I think I'd consume so much humous that I'd double my weight in a year.
The efficiency argument is an interesting one, because it's highly context-sensitive.
Growing crops to feed animals is ridiculous on the face of it. Farmers would far prefer to let animals eat whatever is growing on the ground underneath them. If it's possible to do where they live, that's exactly what they do. What you end up with is the counter-intuitive situation that it is more carbon-efficent for someone in the UK to eat lamb imported from New Zealand than to eat the home-grown product. And the lamb tends to be leaner, too.
One more thing to keep in mind is that the feed conversion ratio and environmental efficiency of farm animals (not just meat, eggs and dairy as well) are both improving over time thanks to science. New statisical modelling techniques, more powerful supercomputers and high-throughput sequencing are a pretty powerful mix, as it turns out. (Full disclosure: I work on this very problem for a certain percentage of my time. The rest of it is trying to cure cancer.)
It's far less expensive and takes less work and land area to feed animals grain and corn instead of grass, so most farmers prefer not to grass feed, even if it's possible where they live. The price of grass-fed meat is at least twice the price of factory-farm meat. My family owns a dairy farm, and if they switched to grass feeding, they would only be able to feed a small portion of the cows they have now (like closer to a tenth than a half) so it's usually not worth it economically.
My cousin owns a dairy farm, and it’s far cheaper for him to let the cows eat the grass under them than buy crops to feed them. I’m sure that your assessment of the economics of your family’s farm is correct, too. It all depends on where in the world you live.
Righto then.
The fact your argument overlooks, though, is that land can't just be used for anything. Some land simply can't grow crops at all, or human-edible crops. Ceasing animal farming on such land actually makes the process less efficient.
Right, vegetarian…eat fish. Like I said – my dr. recommended it so i get local fish at least once a week sometimes twice, but it's super expensive. And any local, non factory farm meat (when i visit my mom in Guelph, for example…we go to the local butcher's farm and pick it up directly) I eat as well. I need to make sure I'm healthy and local/small farm meat doesn't go against my ethics.
Words have meanings for a reason. You can't just go throwing them about using them to mean whatever the hell you want them to mean. A vegetarian is someone that doesn't eat meat. Not someone who eats fish regularly and other meat every now and then.
Some words have very specific meanings, while many others have multiple meanings. The word vegetarian has grown to connote many different lifestyles that are largely similar. Lacto-vegetarians eat dairy and ovo-vegetarians eat eggs. Just because they include some meat products doesn't mean they don't still share the majority of the ethics and lifestyle with other vegetarians. It would be saying because someone is 75% Asian they shouldn't be called Asian. Pedantically arguing about the meaning of this one word is to miss the whole point of the article – that most of our current methods of meat-production is highly ethically problematic.
Dairy and eggs aren't meat.
Your example is completely invalid, because nobody eats solely meat. We're not differentiating 'people who eat meat' from 'people who eat not-meat'. If we were, then whatever comprised the majority of your diet would suffice if someone were to insist on labeling you. But since most people eat mostly not-meat anyway, why the fuck is eating slightly more not-meat and slightly less meat – but still plenty of meat – worthy of distinction?
Because most people eat chicken, cow or pig on a daily basis … if not more than once a day. I haven't eaten chicken, cow or pig since I took the label of being a vegetarian. I guess if you want to be pedantic you would call me a pescetarian but I am allergic to shellfish and hate the taste of most fish so I eat very little of it when I do eat it.
It is *very* worthy of distinction because I still actively avoid cow/pig/chicken/etc. where others do not… these are staple foods in todays north american diet.
"But since most people eat mostly not-meat anyway, why the fuck is eating slightly more not-meat and slightly less meat – but still plenty of meat – worthy of distinction?"
Because maybe you should read Katie's argument a bit better before posting. She said she eats fish once or twice a week, which is pretty different from the average American diet of getting about 25% of daily calories from meat, wouldn't you say so? And yes, if you got over 95% of your calories from vegetables, I'd call you a vegetarian.
katie: except when it comes from that small farm, right? I don't eat pig. At all. Do I get a label?
John Xu: Then you clearly don't understand what vegetarianism is.
I haven't had meat off the farm but I may if I go home and my mom has some – yes I may consider eating it because it's logially inconsistent for me to be against it. But when I get back to the city I'll still call myself a vegetarian. This is really far off of the point of the post, though. You can remove the point where I say I'm a vegetarian and everything in the post still stands….
One more thing, while I think of it: Most of the problems identified in this post aren't true of insects. Even though we eat more meat than we should, we'd all be better off if we ate less livestock and more insects.
I say "more" insects because, of course, we already eat quite a bit. Just not on purpose.
Presumeably we use some of this for leather, suede, pet food, glue, vitamin supplements and whatever else?
This is a good point which would have to go into any analysis about what the net impact would be of transitioning to a no-meat economy.
We're not talking shark fins or mink, where you just use one part of the animal and throw the rest away. Pretty much every part of a cow or sheep is used in one way or another. For many of the materials that we get from farm animals, we either don't have a good synthetic substitute. If we do, it's invariably made from petrochemicals, and hence has a similar or worse carbon footprint.
Great post!
FYI, someone who eats fish but no other meat is a pescetarian, not vegetarian. The reason these terms are important to me is where I live there are a lot of people say they're vegetarian when they eat chicken or fish too. Then when I go to a restaurant and ask if a dish is vegetarian, or let a party host know I'm vegetarian, they think it's OK if it has chicken or fish.
Also, a vegetarian diet is way less expensive than one that includes meat. Beans, rice, lentils, and peas are my staples and they're just about the most inexpensive foods you can buy.
I doubt Katie will ever see this, but I just wanted to say that last year I became a vegetarian because of this post. To my pleasant surprise, I’ve lost at least thirty pounds thus far. Thanks! 😀