CHAPTER 3 – Ethical Eating – Why Becoming a Vegetarian is Good for You and for the Earth
Some people become vegetarians because they simply find meat unappetizing—chewing and digesting chunks of animal flesh isn’t their idea of fine dining. And that’s a perfectly valid reason to embrace a vegetarian lifestyle. But for many others, vegetarianism is part of their commitment to living their lives with as much environmental, moral, and political responsibility as possible—and becoming a vegetarian is a natural part of that resolve.
In fact, just because humans can digest meat and metabolize the protein, that doesn’t mean we were designed to eat meat as a primary nutritional source. Yes, we can eat meat, but the way our bodies are built shows that we function more efficiently on plant foods. One clue is the design of our teeth. If you examine the teeth of true carnivorous animals, theirs are long, sharp, and pointed in the front for the purpose of tearing away flesh. Our so-called canine teeth—the four teeth in the front corners of our mouths—are very poorly designed for the task when you compare them to the teeth of dogs, cats, lions, and wolves. Human teeth are short, blunt, and only very slightly rounded on top—not designed to tear at meat at all! Similarly, the lower jaws of meat-eating animals open very wide but move very little from side to side, and this adds power and stability to their bite. Like other plant-eating animals, our jaws not only open and close but also move forward, backward, and side to side; they are designed to bite off pieces of plant matter which are then grinded into smaller pieces by the flat molars.
But the most important evolutionary development that sets humans apart from other animals is our huge, overdeveloped brain. We have the ability to choose what we eat and how we live; we aren’t just eating machines forced by the circumstances of nature to eat a specific diet. As a human, you can make decisions based on science, ethics, morals, and good old-fashioned common sense.
Every choice you make has repercussions, from the excess packaging that you toss in the trash (plastic and cardboard that ends up in a landfill) to the light bulbs that you use (most likely manufactured by a company that supplies nuclear triggers to bomb manufacturers). The food you choose to eat is no exception. In our industrialized Western world, meat appears in tidy wrapped packages in our grocer’s shop, so we don’t usually think about where it came from—the resources used to raise the animal, the additives pumped into the feed to increase production, and the manner in which the animals live and die. But every time you buy meat, you support the system that created it, and chances are, you have no idea just what that entails!
What’s the Beef with the Cattle Industry?
One of the most eye-opening revelations in Frances Moore Lappé’s provocative 1971 book, Diet for a Small Planet, was the information on the environmentally disastrous impact of the beef industry. According to Moore, one of the biggest effects was on the groundwater supply that we used for drinking, cooking, and bathing. In the United States alone, the various underground water tables are dropping from six inches to six feet per year. Today, even as our water supplies are dwindling, almost half of the water in the United States each year is used to irrigate land to grow food—with vast quantities of that going to produce the grain that’s fed to farm animals.
The rate of return—the amount of food we get for the amount of water we use—on animal protein is pretty poor. As an example, it takes about twenty-three gallons of water to produce a pound of tomatoes. Compare that to the estimated at least two thousand gallons of water used to produce a pound of beef. In her book, Lappé called cattle a “protein factory in reverse,” meaning they consume more protein than they provide! For every pound of beef that a steer provides, it eats seven pounds of grain and soy protein. So, from the environmental point of view, doesn’t it make more sense to just eat the grains?
As global warming due to air pollution becomes an even more dire development, scientists are looking not only to the pollutants produced by cars and factories, but to that produced by factory farming as well. Cattle produce methane gas (and if you’ve ever driven past a stockyard, you know how dense that gas can be!), and
methane makes up 9 percent of the gases contributing to the greenhouse effect—approximately seventy to eighty tons of methane per year. They also produce waste high in nitrous oxide, another factor in global warming. In fact, animal waste is the largest source of nitrous oxide emission in the environment, making up 95 percent. As more and more rain forest is leveled to create pastures for grazing, cattle farming in these cleared areas also contributes to global warming. And the runoff from cattle farms— containing nitrogen, phosphorous, waste-borne pathogens, and detergents—often flows directly into the waterways, destroying fish habitats and leaching into the groundwater that is used for our daily needs.
Then there’s the massive use of fossil fuels required to get beef to the market. Today’s massive, high-tech factory farms burn fuel to run the machinery that provides heating, lighting, and cooling, in addition to the gasoline that fuels the trucks that deliver the feed and transport the cattle and meat to the market. The Worldwatch Institute estimates that it takes about forty-eight gallons of gasoline to provide the red meat and poultry that an average American consumes in a year.