Everything I’ve discussed so far—the overproduction and consumption of meat, the omnipresence of junk food, our declining health, the contribution of agribusiness to global warming and other environmental horrors—happened gradually: A hundred years ago, none of this was in sight. But though it began slowly, the process accelerated wildly following World War II, and went out of control 20 or 30 years later.
Meat’s industrial revolution
How did meat production became industrialized? How did the family farm become the factory farm?
In 1900, 41 percent of American workers were employed in agriculture; now, that number is less than 2 percent. Many of us still live in or near rural areas, though, and even city dwellers can sense the familiarity, obligation, affection, and gratitude traditional farming families must have felt. There’s no time off from farm work but the payoff—whether eggs, milk, meat, or all of these, plus hides, leather, fertilizer, pillows, and more (companionship, too, of course)—made raising animals a natural part of life.
Animals killed each year in the U.S. for food:
9 billion CHICKENS
100 million PIGS
250 million TURKEYS
36 million COWS
Until the early twentieth century most animals were treated in much the same way they had been for a couple of thousand years. Raising more animals than your family could use was always a way to augment the family income; but it was to feed an increasingly urban population in the twentieth century that farmers starting raising chickens for meat as well as eggs, and moved cattle and pigs into feed-lots, the progenitors of the modern confined and feeding operations (CAFOs).
As should be expected in a society with few limits on business, there was an opportunity to make real money on food animals. Since they were destined for death anyway, it made sense—from a purely economic perspective, at least—to raise them as efficiently as possible. For better or worse, the human mind is malleable enough to consider raising animals destined for the table not much differently from making plastic, even while keeping pets in the house.
Perhaps no one could have seen the result. But today’s factory farm is a living hell that has far more in common with factories—places where things are mass-produced in the quickest and most cost-efficient manner possible—than it does with people working the land and raising animals. This kind of farming is accelerating globally, but it’s a mature industry in the United States, where nearly all of our food requires some form of mechanization, synthetic chemicals, drugs, refrigeration, heating, cooking, radiation, freezing, long-distance transportation—or a combination of any or all of these.
The number of animals killed in the United States each year is staggering, something like 9 billion chickens, 36 million cows (including 1 million for veal), 100 million pigs, and 250 million turkeys. These numbers swell further when you consider the dairy cows (9 million) and egg-laying chickens (300 million), which aren’t intentionally put to death but live in conditions that most Americans would consider unbelievably cruel if they were applied to dogs, cats, parakeets, or any other animal not customarily eaten.
Cheap soy and cheap corn yield cheap meat (and cheap lives)
There are, at first glance, advantages to all this, or at least one advantage: even with rapidly rising costs, meat remains relatively inexpensive. At an average of $1.69 per pound for chicken, $2.85 for pork, and $4.11 for beef, with double cheeseburgers still going for 99 cents and meat-based “casual dining” meals at around $10, the vast majority of Americans can easily afford to eat meat at least once a day, and often more.
More than 50% of the corn grown in the United States is fed to animals.
But neither factory farming nor our junk food habit could exist without cheap corn and soybeans (wheat plays a role, too, but a slightly lesser one).
There’s nothing intrinsically wrong with corn or soy; whole cultures have relied on each as their main source of nourishment. But in the United States, and increasingly around the world, an overwhelming proportion of farmland is devoted to growing these two crops, not for us to eat directly (the most commonly grown varieties are not fit for human consumption), but to feed to animals or convert to oil or sugar. So dominant have these crops become (wheat, rice, and cotton are the other giants), that America no longer grows enough edible fruits and vegetables for everyone to eat our own government’s recommended five servings a day. Were we all to do so, we’d be dependent on imported vegetables!
More than 50 percent of the corn grown in this country is being fed to animals; of the remainder, most finds its way into junk food (usually in the form of high fructose corn syrup), corn oil, and ethanol.
The story of soy is similarly dismal: Nearly 60 percent finds its way into processed food; the rest is used to make soy oil and animal feed (globally, 90 percent of soy meal is fed to animals). This makes it easy to understand why more than 1 billion people around the world are overweight. (The trendy term for this phenomenon is “globesity.”)
1 billion people in the world are chronically hungry;
1 billion are overweight.
Even more distressing is the sheer waste of feeding corn and soy to animals and using it to produce junk food. There are nearly a billion chronically hungry people on our planet, and we have the means—the food, even—to nourish them. According to the FAO, “world agriculture produces 17 percent more calories per person today than it did 30 years ago, despite a 70 percent population increase” (emphasis added). The researchers estimate that’s about 2,720 calories per person, per day. To help visualize this absurdity, consider that the beef in one Big Mac is equivalent—in terms of grain produced and consumed—to five loaves of bread. But instead of feeding the hungry with grain, a lot of it is going to the waistline of people in wealthy countries—often to their detriment.
It’s no exaggeration to say that soy and corn are killers, whether directly (soy oil is used to make trans fat, and high fructose corn syrup is about the most useless form of calories ever created) or indirectly (their cultivation is an environmental nightmare, and as animal feed in factories they’re perpetuating a destructive system). And their use in these capacities is depriving millions of the food they desperately need. If we simply shifted resources to growing crops that fed people directly, we’d go a long way toward resolving many issues of health, agriculture, and the environment.
Soy, corn, and American farmland
Traditional farming—regenerative farming, as it’s sometimes called now—relies on crop rotation to rest and replenish the soil. This method goes back thousands of years, and is mentioned in the Bible, which mandates that fields remain fallow one year in seven, to give them time to recover.
Different crops use different nutrients, so that planting certain crops sequentially may actually improve soil quality. “Cover” crops, another part of this plan, are grown primarily to return nutrients to the soil. With care, this kind of farming can be done productively and organically, without the aid of man-made chemicals.
Planting only one or two crops is called monoculture, and this type of farming is typically used for commodity crops, like corn (which accounts for 27 percent of the harvested crops in the United States) and soy (another 25 percent). Monoculture doesn’t return nutrients to the soil, so it can’t be effective without the aid of chemical fertilizers, which in turn consume huge resources of energy because they’re based on fossil fuels that must be refined and usually transported long distances.
Plus, chemicals do nothing to replenish micronutrients or the beneficial characteristics of the land. Our soil, once this country’s most valuable resource, is not only becoming depleted, it’s literally vanishing. In other countries, so is the forest: Demand for soy, primarily for animal feed, is a principal agent in deforestation in South America.
Together, soy and corn account for 50% of the total U.S. harvest.
So, you have two crops coming to dominate first U.S. farmland and then global farmland. You have forests destroyed to grow more of these crops. As a result, you have diminishing resources. These two crops produce food that is either next to useless or damaging to humans when consumed in large quantities. When it is fed to animals, it is inefficient (remember, up to 40 times as much energy is needed to produce one calorie of meat as to produce one calorie of grain) and environmentally destructive.
Furthermore, cows were never meant to eat soy or corn; the digestive system of cows developed to eat grasses. But you cannot possibly raise as many cattle as are sold on pasture, or as many pigs in sties, or as many chickens in yards, so producers had to figure out another, more “efficient” way to raise these animals. That way is confinement: sometimes in pastures, sometimes in cages, sometimes in concrete, almost always with soy and corn as feed. (It’s actually even worse: Although chickens, pigs, and cows are herbivores, naturally foraging for plant food, we’ve turned them into carnivores, often supplementing their grain with ground-up animal parts.)
50% of the antibiotics administered in the United States go to animals.
The combination of crowded living conditions and unnatural feed makes the animals vulnerable to disease, so they’re often given subtherapeutic antibiotic treatment to keep them just healthy enough to survive, put on weight, and get to market—fast. (Half of the antibiotics administered in the United States go to animals, not humans; cattle are also routinely given growth hormones.) Feeding animals antibiotics increases antibiotic resistance in humans, and though the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) says hormones do humans no harm, other people believe the jury is still out on this one.
In fact, unless you’re one of the people making millions or billions of dollars from this system, it’s all bad.
Why we can’t (yet) be nice to animals
I’m going to skip most of the deplorable stuff about factory farming. In fact any detailed description of growing animals industrially (the word “raising” is really misapplied here) would sicken anyone who has even the slightest feeling for other species (this includes all pet owners who are not extreme hypocrites), or who believes that the earth is to be shared by all creatures (except maybe mosquitoes), or who believes in fairness, justice, or kindness.
Let’s cut to the chase. From conception to death, everything about the living conditions of animals raised in confinement is horrific. And the food these animals produce is unnatural, drug-tainted, and—compared with food from traditionally raised animals—tasteless. Furthermore, the impact on the environment and our bodies is, if not yet catastrophic, then certainly damaging.
Yet as much as we may despise this situation, we cannot resolve the plight of our fellow animals simply by deciding to be kind. We may be able to improve their existence slightly, for example by mandating an increase in the space allotted for each individual animal (though it’s hard to imagine any government agency doing so). But even this wouldn’t help much, because such changes cannot possibly be significant at our current levels of consumption.
At first look, grass-fed beef is an attractive alternative, since pastured cattle are in a more natural environment than those raised in confinement. But regardless of whether grass-fed beef is better for the health of the planet—and it’s not entirely clear that it is—the world’s pastures cannot even come close to supporting the 1.3 billion cattle currently being produced.
And as demand for meat is increasing, any additional grass-fed cattle would not replace those raised in confinement but just add to their numbers. Since about 70 percent of the world’s farmland—one-third of the ice-free land surface of the earth—is dedicated to livestock, directly or indirectly (by indirectly I mean, for example, growing feed), to raise the amount of beef on grass that is currently being produced in confinement would mean destroying nearly all existing forests and farmlands.
About 70% of the world’s farmland is dedicated to livestock production.
There isn’t enough room. Factory farming was developed in large part to consolidate resources and make it possible to raise enough animals to meet inflated demand. If you hate factory farming (and you should), your primary concern should be reducing consumption.
Even if we could treat animals more humanely and maintain current production numbers—logically impossible, but let’s pretend—if we were to give the animals more space, better food, fewer drugs, access to outside, and so on—the environment would still suffer, to their detriment and ours.
Production will not decrease as long as it’s profitable, so we need to reduce it, and we can do so only by reducing demand. (Production would be less profitable with stricter laws and law enforcement, and with lower subsidies for corn and soy, but the federal government, no matter who’s running it, shows no inclination to move in that direction.)
It’s much like energy: Successive governments have encouraged and supported an oil-based economy while discouraging more sustainable forms of energy, knowing all the while that the result would be pollution, war, and rising costs. And still, it’s clear there isn’t enough oil for all.
As with oil, our governments have supported the production of meat and the transformation of grain into refined carbohydrates, knowing that high consumption of both would use farmland that could be better used in other ways, that it would damage the health of individuals and, now, that it has contributed to global warming. And still there isn’t enough for all.
Production will not decrease so long as it’s profitable—we need to reduce demand.
Even if the America-first argument were pragmatic, no one with a conscience could seriously argue that Americans are entitled to eat more meat than people in other countries, just as no one can argue that only we should have the freedom to drive cars. And just as we must reduce our consumption of energy—and we will, either by planning to do so, by increased demand for limited resources by developing countries, by seeing a worldwide energy crisis, or most likely by all three—we must reduce our consumption of meat and dairy food. In fact, if the developing world increases its meat consumption to a level approaching ours, that would amount to committing global suicide.
Until just a couple of years ago, when people talked about the effects of industrialized meat production on the environment, they were talking about rampant antibiotic usage; contamination of local land and water by fertilizers used to produce feed; the impact of pesticides and herbicides; the devastation of the world’s forests, cleared for land on which to raise more livestock, or for their feed; the stink created by (in particular) pigs grown in confinement, and the effect this has on human (and other) neighbors; water usage; and a host of less well-publicized issues.
Livestock produce more greenhouse gas than the emissions caused by transportation.
These are all important, but the creation of greenhouse gas trumps them all. Livestock produce more greenhouse gas than the emissions caused by transportation or anything else except energy production. Add to this the humane and human health issues and one could easily and sensibly argue that it makes more sense to cut down on eating meat than it does to cut down on driving.
Written by Mark Bittman in "Food Matters - A Guide to Conscious Eating", Simon & Schuster, New York, 2009, excerpts part 1. Digitized, adapted and illustrated to be posted by Leopoldo Costa.