An Inconvenient Diet

I last blogged about my goal to eat less than 60# of meat this year. That's all meat -- everything with a liver: calves, scallops, frogs, squab, llama, and mutton. None of this 'I still eat chicken' horseshit...all meat.

My reasoning is based on information I've read over the past several years suggesting that raising animals for meat is among the most environmentally irrational things we do. I read Robbin's book Diet For A New America in 1992 and I still recall the passage about how much water is conserved by eating just one less pound of beef per year. The actual number is immaterial and besides, I don't exactly remember it...but it was profound enough for me to retain the concept.

I read Frances Moore Lappe's Diet for a Small Planet a few years back, and more numbers: 7# of vegetable matter (grain, grass, soy) on average to produce 1# of edible meat. Beef cows are 16:1. Of the 540 billion pounds of meat consumed by the world every year, 3.2 trillion pounds of grain then becomes inaccessible to human consumption.

Now I'm not particularly concerned that if we used this to feed people there would be no starving people in the world...because hunger is always more a scarcity of democracy than of food. Neither am I particularly concerned about animal welfare. And I'm not terribly concerned (for the purposes of this blog) with the billions spent to bypass heart arteries. No, my real concern lies with the fossil fuel inputs needed to convert ~3.8 trillion pounds into meat. Sure, a bunch of that requires no inputs at all (grass grazing) but we don't do much of that here in the U.S. anymore. Production feedlots, feeding grain to animals not entirely biologically designed to eat grain -- all this takes heroic amounts of energy vs. what's required to grow vegetable matter directly for human consumption.

If I'm gonna blog about energy and Merika's wasteful practices, then this is one more thing I gotta take personal action with...and it's not easy, because I follow an inconvenient diet.

I am an off again but usually on again meatarian. But when I'm off I'm pretty sure that every time I avoid meat I am polluting less (36# of CO2 for every 1# of meat), and that's about all I can do. So my goal this year is to eat at or below the 90# per person per year world average because the people in the bottom half probably emit a fifth of the overall pollution the top half does. And the very top (those living in the Fattest Cities -- Houston, Kansas City, etc...) both suffer from myriad health issues along with being disproportionately gross indirect polluters.

This is an important point -- this indirect pollution. Most Merikans climb into their vehicles, motor to the store and buy styrofoam packaged pre-cut meat without a single thought as to where their food comes from. I'm OK with this concept (I don't need to know how the TV signal gets to my TV or how the damn thing works to be able to watch it), but I'm not OK with blinkering an entire sector of pollution only because we don't see it happening directly in front of us.

I will reiterate my long held position that pollution is always acceptable but only up to the point that the environment can absorb it. I am personally convinced we are exceeding the carrying capacity of our environment...so I will try to take further personal action to represent that belief.