Whatever we do to the earth, we do to ourselves.
—CHIEF SEATTLE
So far in Part II, we’ve been looking at reductionism in terms of nutrition and food policy, and how reductionism’s effects impact individual health outcomes and quality of life through diet. But our reductionist approach to nutrition affects other areas of life, too. Social policy isn’t my area of expertise, but as a member of several high-profile food- and health-policy expert panels, I’ve certainly considered the likely impact of dietary recommendations on social and cultural practices. Thus, I’d be remiss not to at least touch on the way reductionism affects the way we look at social problems, and how the nutrition information that reductionism discourages us from seeing—the benefits of the plant-based diet over one high in animal products—also affects the world we live in.
When you connect the dots of some of our biggest social, economic, and environmental problems, you can clearly see nutrition looming large as a causal factor and potential solution. It turns out that eating—how we literally absorb nature, or an artificial substitute, into our bodies—holds huge implications for how we treat the rest of nature and our fellow humans.
WHAT WE DO TO OURSELVES, WE DO TO THE EARTH
Every July 4th weekend, my adopted home town of Durham, North Carolina, hosts a wonderful crafts and music festival to raise money to preserve a local river. Bands come from all over the country to share their music in a beautiful state park. Vendors sell handmade jewelry, pottery, and clothing. Activists and environmentalists hold forth on solar energy, river cleanup projects, opposition to nuclear facilities, and various other causes. Every napkin, spoon, plate, and cup given out by food vendors is 100 percent biodegradable. In short, you couldn’t hope to find a more environmentally conscious gathering.
Except for one thing: most of the food that festivalgoers shovel into their bodies. Deep-fried funnel cakes slathered in synthetic syrup and confectioners’ sugar. Giant turkey drumsticks, hamburgers, chicken breasts, and corn dogs sourced from factory farms that pump hormones and antibiotics into their products. French fries submerged in fryers of genetically modified cooking oil. While we know that littering and polluting rivers and streams is bad, somehow we’ve accepted that polluting our own bodies is okay, as if what we eat has no impact on the rest of the environment.
I know many environmentalists whose commitment is manifest and commendable, but stops at their lips. It’s understandable; many of our favorite “foods” (or, more properly, food-like items) are highly addictive. And our relationship with food is far more emotionally fraught than, say, our relationship with incandescent light bulbs or plastic shopping bags. But even these far-seeing and far-thinking activists are wearing reductionist blinders if they cannot see that their personal food choices matter at least as much as—and I would argue considerably more than—recycling and using energy-efficient light bulbs.
I began this chapter with a quote, attributed to Chief Seattle: “Whatever we do to the earth, we do to ourselves.” You may have come across it, or some variation on it, before; it’s often invoked by environmentalists to remind us that we can’t clear-cut our forests, pollute our water, and spew toxins into our air without ultimately harming ourselves. But what’s less obvious is that the reverse is equally true: what we eat has a huge impact on our environment. Specifically, our high consumption of animal-based foods contributes to environmental problems like soil loss, groundwater contamination, deforestation, fossil fuel use, and depletion of deep aquifers.
A Cornell University colleague of mine, Dr. David Pimentel, has documented many ways that our system of livestock production wastes precious resources and destroys the environment. He estimates that animal-based food requires about five to fifty times more land and water resources than the same number of calories of plant-based food (depending on various considerations, including animal species and whether the animal is pasture fed). In a world where human hunger is endemic, this inefficient use of resources is a tragedy.
Among Dr. Pimentel’s findings:1
♦ Animal protein production requires eight times as much fossil fuel as plant protein.
♦ The livestock population of the United States consumes five times as much grain (which is not even their natural diet) as the country’s entire human population.
♦ Every kilogram of beef requires 100,000 liters of water to produce. By comparison, a kilogram of wheat requires just 900 liters, and a kilogram of potatoes just 500 liters.
♦ A United Nations–sponsored workshop2 of about 200 experts concluded that 80 percent of deforestation in the tropics is attributable to the creation of new farmland, the majority of which is used for livestock grazing and feed.
So we’ve got a host of interconnected problems that all stem from our addiction to an animal-protein-based diet. Simply put, our industrial system of animal production is unsustainable. We’re using up our natural resources, such as fresh water and healthy soil, faster than we can replenish them. And the side effects of our animal-protein-driven food economy include environmental toxins and the poisoning of the very air we all depend on for life.
These are serious problems; each of them deserves a book of their own. And they’re only the tip of the iceberg. If you want to learn more, I highly recommend J. Morris Hicks’s excellent work, Healthy Eating, Healthy World. For the purposes of this discussion, however, I want to focus on four problems that neither policy makers nor the media generally see as being connected to diet: two of the most significant environmental crises of our time, global warming and the depletion of America’s deep underground water resources; and the cruelty and violence done to two of the most vulnerable groups on the planet, animals and impoverished humans. We’ll see how reductionist thinking keeps us stuck, and how a wholistic approach can solve these multiple problems simultaneously.
OUR FOOD CHOICES AND GLOBAL WARMING
Let’s start with the most prominent ecological crisis of our time: global warming. When you look seriously at the numbers, you find that switching from a meat-based to a plant-based diet would do more to curb and reverse global warming than any other initiative.
One of the intelligent criticisms of Al Gore’s powerful and important documentary, An Inconvenient Truth, was that its prescriptions were woefully inadequate in light of the problem’s magnitude. Tips like replacing incandescent light bulbs with compact fluorescents, lowering your thermostat by a couple of degrees, and keeping your car tires fully inflated may make you feel virtuous, but have little to no impact on the real problem. A tip sheet available from ClimateCrisis.net announces that reducing the amount of garbage you produce by 10 percent can save 1,200 pounds of carbon dioxide per year. When you do the math, you realize that the other 90 percent of your garbage still produces 10,800 pounds of CO2 each year. Doing the same things a little less intensively is not going to turn global warming around, especially when the CO2 we’ve already produced is going to be trapping heat in the atmosphere for hundreds of years to come. It’s like we’re all on a bus that’s speeding toward the edge of a cliff, and the best idea we have is for everyone to stick their arms out the windows to increase wind resistance. Maybe someone should jump into the driver’s seat and hit the brakes!
In 2006, the United Nations’ Food and Agricultural Organization issued a report that highlighted the connection between animal foods and global warming.3 Its contents are striking because this agency is chiefly responsible for developing livestock operations around the world. Being biased, if anything, toward observing the opposite effect, this report still concluded that eating animal-based foods creates 18 percent of global warming, more than the contributions of either industry or transportation.4 This information, now six years old, is still not widely known.
On the relatively few occasions that food enters discussions on global warming, this 18 percent estimate is brought up. However, a more recent report concludes that this estimate of food’s contribution to warming may be much higher. Robert Goodland, the longtime senior environmental advisor to the president of the World Bank, and Jeff Anhang, his colleague at the World Bank Group, have determined that livestock rearing contributes at least 51 percent of total global warming.
The most famous greenhouse gas, the one that gets most of the attention from the media, activists, and policy makers, is CO2. But CO2 is not the only greenhouse gas, and is not in fact the one most sensitive to reduction efforts. Methane (CH4) offers a more promising lever with which to push back global warming. Molecule for molecule, methane is about twenty-five times more potent in trapping heat than carbon dioxide. But more important, methane, with an atmospheric half-life of seven years, disappears from the atmosphere far faster than carbon dioxide, which has a half-life of more than a century. So almost as soon as we eliminate sources of methane, its contribution to the greenhouse effect begins to wane significantly. By contrast, even after we stop releasing CO2, the gas that has already been released will contribute to global warming for decades.
When the amount of methane in the atmosphere is considered over a twenty-year period, its global warming potential is said to be seventy-two times that of CO2.5 And methane is largely associated with industrial livestock production. This means that reducing meat consumption, the main driver of the livestock industry, may be the most rapid way to affect global warming. It turns out that our present programs, focused on carbon dioxide reduction, are mostly a lot of hot air—in more ways than one.
If this new assessment of the methane contribution is correct, the implications are momentous. I am puzzled as to why more people in the environmental community aren’t paying attention to this. Do they not want to challenge the livestock industry? Maybe we need bioengineers to figure out how to entrap and safely process cow farts. Failing this, maybe we should stop producing and eating the machines that do the farting.6
UNDERGROUND WATER DEPLETION IN THE MIDWEST
As I write this in August 2012, most of the United States is in the grip of its worst drought in over a century. Scientists can debate the connection between this catastrophe and global warming, but there’s no denying that rainwater is in short supply, crops are dying before germination, and vast amounts of groundwater will be needed if our country is to produce enough crops to feed its people. The trouble is, most of the available groundwater either already has been used up by the enormous demands of beef production (each kilogram of beef, remember, requires 100,000 liters of water to produce), or has been polluted by runoff from beef production (huge volumes of water run through feedlots to remove the vast quantities of manure).
The great Ogallala Aquifer, lying under eight Midwestern farming states (South Dakota, Nebraska, Wyoming, Colorado, Kansas, Oklahoma, New Mexico, and Texas), has been especially threatened by animal-based agriculture. Its water collected there ten to twenty million years ago,7 and now contains an estimated volume equal to that of Lake Huron, the second largest of the Great Lakes. This water provides nearly all the water for residential, industrial, and agricultural use in this very large farming region, one of the richest agricultural production areas on the planet. “More than 90% of the water pumped from the Ogallala irrigates at least one fifth of all the U.S. cropland,” according to a major report of the nonprofit Kerr Center for Sustainable Agriculture in Oklahoma.8
It’s crucial that groundwater consumption doesn’t exceed its replenishment by rain. But that’s not what’s happening with the Ogallala Aquifer. Water-intensive livestock farming is depleting it far faster than it can be refilled, to the point where this ancient resource has lost an estimated 9 percent of its water since the 1950s. In other words, we’re using it up faster than rain can replenish it—a recipe for environmental disaster.9
Not only that, the Ogallala water is being polluted with chemicals used in growing feed for cattle production.10 One of the more significant of these is nitrates, which are used in the commercial fertilizer used to produce animal feed and which can be quite toxic for pregnant women and children.11 Saying no to factory-farmed meat from the Midwest can go a long way toward preserving the way of life of the thousands of farmers who provide plant-based food to millions of Americans, as well as improving the health of these millions wherever they consume this food.
ANIMAL CRUELTY, ANIMAL TESTING, AND THE MODERN LIVESTOCK FARM
Another consequence of consuming animal-based foods is animal cruelty: farming practices that, in making the production of animal-based foods more efficient, also increase those animals’ suffering.
Concern for the rights of animals has drawn many people to eat plant-based foods, although as you saw in Part I, this is not what brought me to my present position. Although I certainly embrace the proposition that unnecessary acts of violence against animals should be avoided, it was the findings of experimental animal research—hateful to many in the animal rights community—that started me on the path that ultimately led me to my present position and, eventually, to my enlightenment on this issue. For myself, I am opposed to unnecessary violence of any kind: violence against people, violence against our environment, and violence against other sentient beings. Honoring life of all kinds is the holy grail that I seek.
However, I have much greater concern today regarding violence done to animals than before. In considerable measure, I’ve been spurred to this view because I have watched the emergence of the farming practice called confined animal feeding operation (CAFO), a fancy phrase for factory farming. The main difference between factory farming and the old-time farming of my youth is philosophical. My family and I thought of animals as sensory beings, capable both of comfort and suffering, while factory farmers, by virtue of their business model, see them as virtually lifeless units of production, much like the raw materials of any factory. Early in my career in the late 1960s, I remember well when the dean of the College of Agriculture at Virginia Tech excitedly told us about his consulting work, which led to the livestock operations that eventually became the CAFOs. It was inevitable, as the economies of scale that CAFOs enabled became necessary for the bottom line of any farmer who wanted his operation to survive. The dean painted a technologically advanced picture of automated conveyor belts delivering precise amounts of nutritionally optimized feed to animals. Of automated machinery streamlining the milking of cows. Of contraptions for more efficiently collecting hens’ eggs. All this, he claimed, meant more profit for the farmer.
Cows are mostly docile animals. They certainly feel and express emotions. In times gone by, they mostly spent much of their fifteen to twenty years in the pasture (in spring, summer, and fall) or in barns bedded with straw (in winter). In CAFOs, dairy cows live only three or four years, coinciding with their years of peak milk production. They are penned up in tight living (dying) quarters, never again to be pastured on green grass after they begin producing milk. I am constantly reminded of this practice on my jogging route in upstate New York, where I see cows that live in a giant CAFO poking their heads slightly out of their open-air building, as if they were craving the lush grass outside.
Young cows’ tails are frequently chopped off (a practice known as docking), leaving only a stub a foot or so long, so that the person milking the cows avoids getting “switched” with a filthy, often manure-encrusted, tail—something I remember all too well. A stub for a tail doesn’t do much to keep the flies off a cow’s back—that’s what tails are for—and if this irritation from flies affects a cow’s milk production, she is drenched with a pesticide spray that can get into the milk we find in our supermarkets.
Most factory-farmed cows are injected with a growth hormone to increase their milk production that also increases their udder size, sometimes to painful dimensions—a physical condition that promotes inflammation called mastitis. Antibiotics are then required to reduce the resulting infections, increasing the amounts of antibiotics, pesticides, blood, and bacteria in the milk that we buy and consume. What a unique cocktail for human consumption!
It’s a very different world these days on the farm—and it gets worse. Chickens unable to move in their cages because they’re forced to stand in one place long enough for their feet to permanently wrap around the wire mesh on the cage bottom, fixing them in place. Unnatural, abnormal lighting cycles used to make hens lay more eggs and increase the producer’s profit. Pigs that give birth to their young in so-called farrowing crates, in which the piglets must nurse from the other side of parallel bars arranged to keep them separate from their mothers.
Then there’s the stench in which these animals are forced to spend their entire existence. Walk into a chicken house with thousands of birds and you can feel your eyes burn and tear up. And it’s not just animals that can’t avoid the smell; if you live near a factory farm, you know that humans are subjected to it, too. I know the smell of cow manure—I shoveled it enough! Today’s cow manure has a pungent medicinal smell that is not what it was during my youth.
It’s not just the animals that have suffered greatly in this transformation of American agriculture. Family farms, the kind I was raised on, are rapidly going out of business. As I travel through the countryside these days, I see so many once-beautiful barns now mere stick skeletons of old boards covered with weeds. The directive to “get big or get out” has bankrupted most non-factory operations. And government subsidies to the CAFOs obscure the fact that they are as unsustainable economically as they are environmentally.
If you think that it’s natural for human beings to eat animals, consider just how unnatural are the lives and deaths of the animals that make up the American food supply in the twenty-first century.
HUMAN POVERTY
Animals and farmers are not the only victims of our animal-based diet. When small-scale agriculture is converted to industrial-scale animal production in the developing world, small land holders are forced off their subsistence plots, and have no way to afford the food being produced on their former land.
I have worked in several desperately poor areas of the world, where my eyes were opened to the connection between meat production and the economic enslavement of the poorest, most vulnerable people in those areas. I’ve been in the slums of Manila and Port-au-Prince and have seen firsthand desperately hungry children begging for food in a society where the elite eat steak produced on land stolen from the poor. I’ve seen long stretches of the best land in the Dominican Republic taken away from local farmers and handed to American and German firms, to raise livestock destined to become cheap hamburgers back home. I’ve heard stories of how this “best land” was “obtained” for cattle raising while small land owners were forced into the mountains, where food production is difficult if not impossible.
The simple math of industrial animal-protein production speaks volumes. In a world where millions of people die of starvation and starvation-related diseases every year, we still inexplicably insist on the gross inefficiency of cycling our plant production through animals before considering it “food.” Feeding meat-producing animals rather than feeding humans directly means we lose upward of 90 percent of the calories otherwise available for our consumption. And, as “low-carb” advocates are fond of pointing out, animal-based foods have no carbohydrates, which should, in reality, comprise about 80 percent of a truly healthy diet. Factory-farmed animals on this planet consume more calories than all the humans, by a long shot. Through this lens, the issue of world hunger seems a lot less like a problem of production or distribution and more like a problem with our personal priorities.
Factory farming and large-scale livestock farming also erode the land they use, making it nearly impossible for impoverished nations to pull themselves out of poverty in the future. We see this most distressingly in Latin American countries, whose rainforests are daily logged and converted into fields to grow grain for cattle. After a few years, the soil fertility is spent, and rain and wind erodes what little topsoil remains. Industrial agriculture can eke out a few more grain harvests through heavy application of nitrogen-based fertilizers and herbicides, but after a couple of decades, all that remains is dead earth, a biological desert that will take millennia to recover. The multinational companies that wreak this havoc don’t suffer, of course. They just move their operations to the next bit of fertile land—as long as they can still find some. Local farmers are left to pay the price.
If you are interested in solving the global problem of human poverty, you have many choices. You can “like” antipoverty status updates on Facebook. You can donate money to relief organizations that you trust. You can sign online petitions. You can volunteer to raise money. You can even join an advocacy or relief group and get involved on the ground. But one of the most important actions you can take is to say “no” to the system that expropriates subsistence-farming land and turns it into unsustainable feedlots that produce meat for us, cash for the wealthy, and misery, servitude, and starvation for the masses. You can stop consuming factory-farmed meat and dairy.
THE FOOD CONNECTION
We have a problem. No, we have many, many problems. Quixotically, we lament each problem, one by one, rarely seeing their connections to the food we choose to put in our bodies. We create specialists to help us solve each problem as if it stood alone. As a consequence, we fail to see interconnections, and we fail to see the whole. On several occasions, I’ve been invited to speak to environmental groups and have been asked to explain what I see as the obvious connections between environmental and health issues.
Choosing plant-based foods over animal-based foods reduces pain in so many ways. It alleviates our bodily pain.12 It minimizes the pain animals experience by reducing CAFO farming. It also reduces human suffering associated with global poverty and hunger. Given all that, it’s easy to see that investing in programs that promote, distribute, and encourage the growing of whole, plant-based foods in poor countries would be far more economical and effective than reductionist attempts to solve all these problems separately, as if they had nothing to do with one another.
The problems we face are far more connected than disconnected. Think of the way galaxies are made up of clusters of stars, held together by gravity; these social problems are clustered the same way, except the gravitational pull between them is the food we choose to eat.
The proportion of each of these problems that can be resolved by consuming whole, plant-based foods varies, of course. But for this discussion, those proportions don’t matter as much as the fact that we can affect all of these problems in a positive way by doing the very same thing: eating better. There is no dietary or lifestyle strategy that is more comprehensive and effective in reducing and eliminating these problems than the routine consumption of whole, plant-based foods.
The single most important explanation for our failure to solve these problems, as with our failure to solve our health crisis, is our paradigm-driven inability and unwillingness to look for their larger context. The more I contemplate the meaning of paradigms and our failure to recognize them, the more I become aware of their subtle but powerful control over our thinking. The more I contemplate the role of reductionism within these paradigms, the more I become aware of the way reductionism makes it even more difficult to visualize paradigms and their boundaries. The reductionist mental prison is the main thing keeping us from doing grand things for ourselves, each other, and the rest of sentient life on earth. We need to learn how to look for the natural networks that connect many seemingly disconnected events and activities. Only through doing so can we finally find the answers that elude us—whether that’s the answer to global warming, the solution to world hunger, or the effective and compassionate healing of our society’s most fearful health problems.