The Industrialization of Farming
It would be difficult to conceive of a more wasteful, toxic, inhumane, disease-promoting, and destructive food production system than our farmed animal industry. Besides being outrageously inhumane to the animals imprisoned for food—and to the wild animals whose habitats are destroyed and who are poisoned, trapped, and shot by ranchers, agribusiness farmers, government agencies, and the fishing industry as pests and competitors—the farmed animal industry also extravagantly wastes water, petroleum, land, and chemicals; destroys forests and fisheries; severely pollutes land, water and air; and, at enormous expense, floods our markets with products that are toxic in the extreme to our own health. It would not be possible for us to eat the high quantities of inexpensive animal foods that we do today without a massive infusion of fossil fuels into our food production system.
Eating Soil, Water, and Fossil Fuels
The major environmental problem with eating animal foods is that these animals, whose populations are vast, must eat, and eat a lot. Eighty percent of grain grown in the US and about half the fish hauled in are wasted to grow billions of animals big and fat enough to be profitably slaughtered, or to produce dairy products and eggs at the high levels demanded by consumers. And over ninety percent of the protein in this grain turns into the methane, ammonia, urea, and manure that pollute our air and water. A conservative estimate is that the amount of land, grain, water, petroleum, and pollution required to feed one of us the Standard American Diet could feed fifteen of us eating a plant-based diet. Understanding the implications of this is crucial to our survival, because our industrialized animal-based agriculture is disastrously depleting the three essentials on which it depends: soil, water, and fossil fuels.
Most of us have little comprehension of the enormous amount of land devoted to growing grain to feed imprisoned pigs, cows, sheep, birds, and fish. …This ongoing deforestation, which is seven times the amount of deforestation caused by building roads, homes, parking lots, and shopping centers, means loss of wildlife habitat, loss of genetic diversity, loss of topsoil, degradation of streams and rivers, and increased pollution. Forests create topsoil, generate oxygen, clean the air, help bring needed rain, and provide habitat for thousands of species of animals and plants.
Using forest, prairie, and arid lands for animal agriculture destroys complex interconnected ecosystems so that only one desired species can survive on the land. Ranchers and agribusiness farmers see most species besides their livestock and feed grains as pests to be exterminated. The annihilation and disruption of forests, prairie grasslands, and arid regions to graze and grow feed for slaughter-bound animals is not only a destruction of biological diversity and intelligence but has other serious repercussions as well.
Agriculture consumes fully eighty-five percent of all US freshwater resources, mainly to produce animal foods. A day’s production of food for one omnivore human requires more than four thousand gallons of water, compared with less than three hundred gallons for a vegan; this fact represents enormous environmental damage.
Forty percent of irrigation water comes from underground aquifers that take centuries to replenish.
People are being told to conserve water by using low-flow showerheads and toilets. University of California soil and water specialists have estimated that while the purchase of one pound of California lettuce, tomatoes, potatoes, or wheat requires only about 24 gallons of water, the purchase of one pound of California beef requires over 5,200 gallons of water.
Animal foods also require immense quantities of petroleum to produce. For example, while it takes only two calories of fossil fuel to produce one calorie of protein from soybeans, and three calories for wheat and corn, it takes fifty-four calories of petroleum to produce one calorie of protein from beef! Animal agriculture contributes disproportionately to our consumption of petroleum and thus to air and water pollution, global warming, and the wars driven by conflict over dwindling petroleum reserves.
How is it possible that it could take twenty-seven times as much petroleum to supply people with hamburgers as it does to provide soy burgers, and what are the implications of this? Soil used for agriculture tends to become deficient in nitrogen because plants pull it out of the ground to synthesize protein. Traditional solutions were to spread manure or guano to re-enrich the soil, to plant legumes and rotate crops, and to allow the land to lie fallow and replenish itself. In 1909 two German chemists devised a method for fixing atmospheric nitrogen in making ammonia that allowed later scientists to invent methods of producing inorganic nitrogen fertilizer from natural gas cheaply and in immense quantities.
This relatively sudden availability of nitrogen enabled the huge increase in food production that has driven the population explosion of both humans and farmed animals over the last century. It is this same artificial fertilizer that causes nitrogen “nutrient-rich” runoff into streams and rivers, which is one of our most significant water pollution problems, causing excess algae growth, depleting oxygen, and killing fish.
When large tracts of land are used to grow only one crop, the fields strongly attract “pest” species that feed on that specific crop. Because of the lack of variety in the plant and insect population of the area, few birds and other predators come there to feed, and the pests become immune to the ever-increasing levels of pesticides directed at them.
This intensive agriculture is unsustainable. The more it damages land and water supplies and drains aquifers, the more fossil fuel input it requires to irrigate, replace nutrients, provide pest protection, and simply hold crop production constant. Unless we switch from eating resource-gobbling animal foods, we will have to face the consequences of our limited and declining supply of fossil fuels.
The warning signals have been flying for a long time. They have been plain to see. But the world turned a blind eye, and failed to read the message. Our lack of preparedness is itself amazing, given the importance of oil to our lives.
It’s less amazing when we realize that our ability to block feedback is an integral aspect of the mentality of domination and disconnectedness that eating animal foods requires. We are unfortunately only too willing to cooperate with the military-industrial-meat complex by unconsciously suppressing any healthy feedback that might threaten our eating habits.
The Toxins in Animal Agriculture
The vast, monocropped fields devoted to feeding the animals we eat cover millions of acres of land and are heavily doused with toxic pesticides and fertilizers.
These toxic fields are the foundation of the dairy products and eggs we eat, as well as the beef, poultry, pork, and many fish. …The carcinogenic residues of the chemical fertilizers and pesticides used on these fields contaminate our rivers and oceans. They concentrate in the animal foods we eat and in our own flesh and milk as well.
Fungicides, insecticides, herbicides, and chemical fertilizer residues concentrate in livestock excrement. Anyone building a house knows how strict most communities are about human sewage disposal, and yet disposal of livestock sewage is virtually unregulated.
Farmed animal waste disposal is much less regulated than human waste disposal because animal agriculture industries are supported in their resistance of regulations by their friends in governmental agencies and politicians beholden to them for campaign contributions. This unregulated toxic waste pollutes groundwater, rivers, lakes, and oceans. When gigantic open lagoons of pig excrement spill, the resulting out breaks of pfisteria can kill millions of fish and seriously harm human swimmers in downstream rivers and bays.
Livestock excrement causes horrific air pollution as well, as those who are unfortunate enough to live near these operations attest. The stench causes mental stress and respiratory ailments, and when the manure dries, it can blow for miles around. Livestock also emit large quantities of methane gas, which is a major factor in global warming because it retains heat more strongly than carbon dioxide. Grilling animal flesh creates more air pollution: researchers have discovered that much of the smog haze over cities is formed not just by cars but by the smoke and fat particles of thousands of fast-food restaurants and kitchens grilling meat.
Healing the Earth and the Economy
If we all ate a plant-based diet, we could feed ourselves on a small fraction of the land and grains that eating an animal-based diet requires. For example, researchers estimate that 2.5 acres of land can meet the food energy needs of twenty-two people eating potatoes, nineteen people eating corn, twenty-three people eating cabbage, fifteen people eating wheat, or two people eating chicken or dairy products, and only one person eating beef or eggs.
Everyone on earth could be fed easily because we currently grow more than enough grain to feed ten billion people; our current practice of feeding this grain to untold billions of animals and eating them forces over a billion of us to endure chronic malnutrition and starvation while another billion suffer from the obesity, diabetes, heart disease, and cancer linked with eating diets high in animal foods.
The drugs we take to combat these diseases are discharged through the urine, flow into the water and become yet another major stream that adds to the pollution of our earth. This is an especially serious problem surrounding some of the larger cities of the industrialized world. Toxins—like other negative consequences of animal foods—don’t just disappear once we swallow them. They are excreted right into our ecosystems, although large traces accumulate in the fatty tissues of our bodies as well. Thus, by eating a more plant-based diet we could reduce our pollution of the earth, and our own bodies could become less polluted and diseased.
Switching to a plant-based diet, we could reduce petroleum usage and imports enormously, and slash the amount of hydrocarbons and carbon dioxide that contribute to air pollution and global warming. …Desolate monocropped fields devoted to livestock feed could be planted with trees, bringing back forests, streams, and wildlife. Marine ecosystems could rebuild, rain forests could begin healing, and with our demand for resources of all kinds dramatically reduced, environmental and military tension could ease. Grain that is now fed to the live-stock of the world’s wealthy could feed the starving poor.
The Consequences of Evading Consequences
Eating animal foods is the elephant in our living room that we all pretend not to see—unrecognized behavior that destroys our family but is taboo to confront or discuss.
The toxins used in industrial agriculture are highly profitable for the wealthy and privileged elite that dominates our cultural conversations through its power over the media, government, and education. The military-industrial-meat-medical-media complex has and offers no incentive to reduce animal food consumption. Poisoning the earth with massive doses of toxic chemicals and petroleum-based fertilizers is highly profitable for the petroleum and chemical industries. These toxins cause cancer, which is highly profitable to the chemical-pharmaceutical-medical complex. While the world’s rich omnivores waste precious supplies of grain, petroleum, water, and land feeding and eating fattened animals, the world’s poor have little grain to eat or clean water to drink, and their chronic hunger, thirst, and misery create conditions for war, terrorism, and drug addiction, which are extremely profitable industries as well.
The richest fifth of the world’s population gets obesity, heart disease, and diabetes, also highly profitable for industry. The transnational corporations profit from animal food consumption, as do the big banks, which have made the loans that have built the whole complex and demand a healthy return on their investments. The system spreads relentlessly and globally, and while corporate and bank returns may be healthy, people, animals, and ecosystems throughout the world fall ill and are exploited and destroyed.
With its immense financial resources and legendary influence at all levels of government, animal agribusiness receives billions of dollars in subsidies, price supports, income assistance, emergency assistance, commodity loans, direct payments, allotments, tax breaks, rail and feed subsidies, grazing privileges, the dairy export incentive program, and other governmental services every year. Without this aid, the industry could never survive in its present form; the cheapest hamburger meat would cost at least thirty-five dollars per pound without taxpayer-funded irrigation systems, subsidies, remediation allowances, and countless other government handouts.
This elite, an inevitable result of our culture’s mentality of domination and exclusion, controls agribusiness, industry, and the governmental, media, military, educational, medical, and financial institutions. These institutions promote eating animals because the slavery of animals is fundamental to this elite’s power structure… by controlling the concentration of money and political power and thereby managing thought through manipulation of education, religion, government, and other social institutions.
It is no accident that we find transnational corporations increasingly intruding in and controlling our public and private lives. Corporations are manifestations of our desire to evade responsibility and they are rooted in the violence on our plates, for through our daily meals, we kill, confine, and abuse animals in ways for which we cannot bear to be responsible.
Eating the violence on our plates requires an evasion of responsibility so that we come to believe our actions don’t make much difference. This erroneous belief is actually rooted in our semi-conscious understanding that with every meal we cause exactly the kind of suffering and pollution that we would naturally want to prevent.
One way this is done is through increasing corporate control of medicine and science. Today, the medical-pharmaceutical industry’s emphasis is on genetics. As corporations pave their way into university research facilities with much-needed funding, we see that academic assumptions are following corporate money lines. Researchers are encouraged by grant money, prestige, and peer pressure to view disease and health in terms of genetics, because this is a profitable view for the pharmaceutical industry—and is in alignment with the mechanistic and reductionist mentality that underlies conventional science.
If we can be convinced that our diseases are due to mere “genetic predisposition” over which we have no control, then the corporations have us right where they want us: at their mercy. And they have no mercy. The gene theories have appeal because they release us from responsibility for our inner attitudes and outer actions and place us securely in the hands of the corporations that profit from our forsaking our ultimate responsibility for our health.
Much of medical research today is actually an apparently desperate quest to find ways to continue eating animal foods and to escape the consequences of our cruel and unnatural practices. Do we really want to be successful in this?
We become free as we stop cooperating with the system of domination that would like to feed us its blood foods. If the blood of animals is on our hands, we are—perhaps unwittingly—enslaved. The powerful elite that controls the military industrial meat medical media complex strives to pull the strings of control ever tighter, and with awareness we can see it all around us.
Our lives flow from our beliefs, and our beliefs are conditioned by our daily actions. As we act, so we build our character and so we become.