Go Vegan in Response to Overpopulation
Even if you argue that shifting to a plant-based diet, a vegan diet, isn't enough to stave off overpopulation, in light of the data showing the depletion of energy, food, fresh water, land space, raw materials and resources as well as the heavy contribution to air and water pollution, deforestization, and global warming caused by a meat-centered diet, how do you -- worried about "overpopulation" consuming the world's resources -- justify consuming meat?!
Shifting to a plant-based diet literally makes a world of difference! It
takes sixteen pounds of grain to produce one pound of beef.
Ronald J. Sider of Evangelicals for Social Action, in his 1977 book, Rich
Christians in an Age of Hunger, pointed out that 220 million Americans were
eating enough food (largely because of the high consumption of grain-fed
livestock) to feed over one billion people in the poorer countries.
Oxfam estimates that in Mexico, 80 percent of the children in rural areas
are undernourished, yet the livestock are fed more grain than the human
population eats! The livestock are exported of course, to satisfy the
developed nations' craving for cheap hamburgers.
In his book, The Hungry Planet, Georg Bergstrom points out that
protein-starved underdeveloped nations export more protein to wealthy
nations than they receive. He calls this "the protein swindle."
Ninety percent of the world's fish meal catch, for example, is exported to
rich countries. One-third of Africa's peanut crop winds up in the stomachs
of European livestock. Half the world's cereal crop is fed to livestock and
the United States annually imports one million tons of vegetable protein
from Third World nations--just to feed its farm animals.
Bergstrom writes: "Sometimes one wonders how many Americans and Western
Europeans have grasped the fact that quite a few of their beef steaks,
quarts of milk, dozens of eggs, and hundreds of broilers are the result, not
of their agriculture, but of the approximately two million metric tons of
protein, mostly of high quality, which astute Western businessmen channel
away from the needy and hungry."
****
Vegan author John Robbins writes in his 1987 Pulitzer Prize nominated Diet
for a New America:
"Half the world's population does not receive an adequate amount of food to
eat. Ten to twenty million die annually of hunger and its effects. The
Institute for Food and Development Policy reports that, 'Forty thousand
children starve to death on this planet every day,' or one child every two
seconds.
"The livestock population of the United States today consumes enough grain
and soybeans to feed over five times the entire human population of the
country. We feed these animals over 80% of the corn we grow, and over 95% of
the oats. Less than half the harvested agricultural acreage in the United
States is used to grow food for people. Most of it is used to grow livestock
feed.
"The world's cattle alone, not to mention pigs and chickens, consume a
quantity of food equal to the caloric needs of 8.7 billion people. It takes
sixteen pounds of grain to produce one pound of beef. According to
Department of Agriculture statistics, one acre of land can grow 20,000
pounds of potatoes. That same acre of land, if used to grow cattlefeed, can
produce less than 165 pounds of beef."
****
In the 2006 edition of The Higher Taste: A Guide to Gourmet Vegetarian
Cooking and a Karma-Free Diet, we read:
Food expert Frances Moore Lappe, author of the 1971 bestseller Diet for a
Small Planet, once said in a television interview that we should look at a
piece of steak as if it were a Cadillac. "What I mean," she explained, "is
that we in America are hooked on gas-guzzling automobiles because of the
illusion of cheap petroleum. Likewise, we got hooked on a grain-fed,
meat-centered diet because of the illusion of cheap grain."
The process of using grain to produce meat is incredibly wasteful: the
USDA's Economic Research Service shows that we receive only one pound of
beef for each sixteen pounds of grain. In his book Proteins: Their
Chemistry and Politics, Dr. Aaron Altschul notes that in terms of calorie
units per acre, a diet of grains, vegetables, and beans will support twenty
times as many people than a meat-centered diet.
As it stands now, about half of the harvested acreage in America and in a
number of European, African, and Asian countries is used to feed animals.
If the earth's arable land were used primarily for the production of
vegetarian foods, the planet could easily support a human population of
twenty billion or larger.
Points and facts such as these have led food experts to point out that the
world hunger problem is largely illusory. The Global Hunger Alliance
writes: "Most hunger deaths are due to chronic malnutrition caused by
inequitable distribution and inefficient use of existing food resources. At
the same time, wasteful agricultural practices, such as the intensive
livestock operations known as factory farming, are rapidly polluting and
depleting the natural resources upon which all life depends. Trying to
produce more foods by these methods would lead only to more water pollution,
soil degradation, and, ultimately, more hunger."
A report submitted to the United Nations World Food Conference concurs:
"The overconsumption of meat by the rich means hunger for the poor. This
wasteful agriculture must be changed--by the suppression of feedlots where
beef are fattened on grains, and even a massive reduction of beef cattle."
Pound for pound, many vegetarian foods are better sources of protein than
meat. A 100-gram portion of lentils yields twenty-five grams of protein,
while a hundred grams of soybeans yields thirty-four grams of protein.
But although meat provides less protein, it costs more. A spot check of
supermarkets in Florida in August 2005 showed sirloin steak costing $7.87 a
pound, while staple ingredients for delicious vegetarian meals averaged less
than $1.50 a pound.
Becoming a vegetarian could potentially save an individual shopper at least
several hundred dollars each year, thousands of dollars over the course of a
lifetime. The savings to consumers as a whole would amount to billions of
dollars annually. Considering all this, it's hard to see how anyone could
afford not to become a vegetarian.
"If you could feel or see the suffering, you wouldn't think twice. Give
back life. Don't eat meat." - actress Kim Basinger
****
Vegan author John Robbins similarly writes in his 1987 Pulitzer Prize
nominated Diet for a New America:
"The livestock population of the United States today consumes enough grain
and soybeans to feed over five times the entire human population of the
country. We feed these animals over 80% of the corn we grow, and over 95% of
the oats... Less than half the harvested agricultural acreage in the United
States is used to grow food for people. Most of it is used to grow livestock
feed...
"The developing nations are copying us. They associate meat-eating with the
economic status of the developed nations, and strive to emulate it. The tiny
minority who can afford meat in those countries eats it, even while many of
their people go to bed hungry at night, and mothers watch their children
starve...
"To supply one person with a meat habit food for a year requires
three-and-a-quarter acres. To supply one lacto-ovo-vegetarian requires only
one-half of an acre. To supply one pure vegetarian (vegan) requires only
one-sixth of an acre. In other words, a given acreage can feed twenty times
as many people eating a pure vegetarian (vegan) diet-style as it could
people eating the standard American diet-style...
"In a world in which a child dies of starvation every two seconds, an
agricultural system designed to feed our meat habit is a blasphemy. Yet it
continues, because we continue to support it. Those who profit from this
system do not need us to condone what they are doing. The only support they
need from us is our money. As long as enough people continue to purchase
their products they will have the resources to fight reforms, pump millions
of dollars of 'educational' propaganda into our schools, and defend
themselves against medical and ethical truths.
"A rapidly growing number of Americans are withdrawing support from this
insane system by refusing to consume meat. For them, this new direction in
diet-style is a way of joining hands with others and saying we will not
support a system which wastes such vast amounts of food while people in this
world do not have enough to eat."
Raising animals for food, even raising animals for animal by-products like
milk and eggs, means wasting valuable acreage, because the animals have to
be fed plant food! If we eat lower on the food chain, fewer resources are
required to feed everyone, which means less agricultural acreage, etc.,
which means fewer rodents and insects are killed when fields are ploughed
for farming, etc.
If you carry this argument to its logical conclusion, a vegan diet is the
least violent, because it requires one-third less acreage than a
lacto-ovo-vegetarian diet, and twenty times less acreage than a
meat-centered diet.
****
Jeremy Rifkin, author of a dozen influential books and President of the
Foundation on Economic Trends, writes in his 1992 bestseller Beyond Beef:
"Cattle and other livestock are devouring much of the grain produced on the
planet. It need be emphasized that this is a new phenomenon, unlike anything
ever experienced before.
"Contrary to popular belief, the poor are getting poorer each year...
Increased poverty has meant increased malnutrition. On the African
continent, nearly one in every four human beings is malnourished. In Latin
America, nearly one out of every seven people goes to bed hungry each night.
In Asia and the Pacific, 28 percent of the people border on starvation,
experiencing the gnawing pain of a perpetual hunger."
"In the Near East, one in ten people is underfed. Chronic hunger now affects
upwards of 1.3 billion people, according to the world Health Organization --
a statistic all the more striking in a world where one third of all the
grain produced is being fed to cattle and other livestock. Never before in
human history has such a large percentage of our species -- nearly 25
percent -- been malnourished.
"The transition of world agriculture from food grain to feed grains
represents an... evil whose consequences may be far greater and longer
lasting than any past examples of violence inflicted by men against their
fellow human beings."
****
Vegan author John Robbins writes in his 1992 bestseller, May All Be Fed:
"The Worldwatch Institute has released a remarkable report entitled Taking
Stock: Animal Farming and the Environment, which lists nation after nation
where food deprivation has followed the switch from a grain-based diet to a
meat-based one.
"Most of the nations importing grain from the United States were once
self-sufficient in grain. The main reason they aren't is the rise in meat
production and consumption...
"In country after country the pattern is repeated. Livestock industries are
consuming feed to such an extent that now almost all Third World nations
must import grain. Seventy-five percent of Third World imports of corn,
barley, sorghum, and oats are fed to animals, not to people. In country
after country, the demand for meat among the rich is squeezing out staple
production for the poor..."
"Many of us believe that hunger exists because there's not enough food to go
around," writes vegan author John Robbins in his Pulitzer Prize nominated
Diet for a New America. "But as Frances Moore Lappe and her anti-hunger
organization Food First! have shown, the real cause of hunger is a scarcity
of justice, not a scarcity of food."
****
In a 2011 article entitled Ending Animal Agriculture: The Real Solution to
the Food Crisis, Mac McDaniel writes:
"It will never cease to amaze me how people are so dedicated to the idea of
eating animals. We're looking at a global food crisis by 2050 and... we're
trying to George Lucas our way out of it with prototypes, science fiction,
and undeveloped technology.
"With any discussion of food shortages, the 800 lb. gorilla in the room is
animal agriculture. (Nearly 75) percent of all agriculture land is used to
raise livestock, and a third of land used for growing crops is used for
growing feed for livestock. You simply can't talk about increasing food
supplies without talking about eliminating animal agriculture...
"It doesn't take a scientist to see the common sense that feeding plants to
animals, and then eating the animals, is a horribly inefficient way to
produce food...
"That means between 75% and 90% of the gross weight of the food in the
scenario is being completely wasted...
"The only solution to the global food crisis is the end of animal
agriculture. Freeing up that much farmland would not only increase food
supplies by incalculable amounts -- which would inevitably all but end
hunger in the third world -- it would benefit the health of everyone in the
western world. And at the same time, it would finally end... the bloodiest
and most violent era in human existence."
****
Barbara Parham writes in her 1979 paperback, What's Wrong With Eating Meat?:
"According to Buckminster Fuller, there are enough resources at present to
feed, clothe, house and educate every human being on the planet at American
middle class standards. The Institute for Food and Development Policy has
shown that there is no country in the world in which the people cannot feed
themselves from their own resources.
"Moreover, there is no correlation between land density and hunger. China
has twice as many people per cultivated acre as India, yet less of a hunger
problem. Bangladesh has just one-half the people per cultivated acre that
Taiwan has, yet Taiwan has no starvation, while Bangladesh has one of the
highest rates in the world. The most densely populated countries in the
world today are not India and Bangladesh, but Holland and Japan."
* * * *
I agree, humans do more than consume food: we need not only food, but
clothing, shelter, supporting technology, etc... But animal agriculture
consumes fossil fuel energy, fresh water, land space, raw materials at an
alarming rate, and contributes heavily to air and water pollution,
deforestization, and global warming. (See below):
Vegan author John Robbins provides these points and facts in his Pulitzer
Prize nominated Diet for a New America (1987):
Half the water consumed in the U.S. irrigates land growing feed and fodder
for livestock. Huge amounts of water wash away their excrement. U.S.
livestock produce twenty times as much excrement as the entire human
population, creating sewage which is ten to several hundred times as
concentrated as raw domestic sewage.
Animal wastes cause thrice as much water pollution than does the U.S. human
population; the meat industry causes thrice as much harmful organic water
pollution than the rest of the nation's industries combined.
Meat producers, the number one industrial polluters in our nation,
contribute to half the water pollution in the United States.
Vegan author John Robbins writes:
The water that goes into a 1,000 lb. steer could float a destroyer. It takes
25 gallons of water to produce a pound of wheat, but 2,500 gallons to
produce a pound of meat. If these costs weren't subsidized by the American
taxpayers, the cheapest hamburger meat would be $35 per pound!
Subsidizing the California meat industry costs taxpayers $24 billion
annually. Livestock producers are California's biggest consumers of water.
Every tax dollar the state doles out to livestock producers costs taxpayers
over seven dollars in lost wages, higher living costs and reduced business
income. Seventeen western states have enough water supplies to support
economies and populations twice as large as the present.
According to vegan author John Robbins:
Overgrazing of cattle leads to topsoil erosion, turning once-arable land
into desert. We lose four million acres of topsoil each year and 85 percent
of this loss is directly caused by raising livestock.
To replace the soil we've lost, we're chopping down our forests. Since 1967,
the rate of deforestation in the U.S. has been one acre every five seconds.
For each acre cleared in urbanization, seven are cleared for grazing or
growing livestock feed.
One-third of all raw materials in the U.S. are consumed by the livestock
industry and it takes thrice as much fossil fuel energy to produce meat than
it does to produce plant foods.
A report on the energy crisis in Scientific American warned: "The trends in
meat consumption and energy consumption are on a collision course."
****
Mother and daughter, Jennifer Horsman and Jaime Flowers, write in their 2007
book, Please Don't Eat the Animals:
Meat production causes deforestation, which then contributes to global
warming. Trees convert carbon dioxide into oxygen, and the destruction of
forests around the globe to make room for grazing cattle furthers the
greenhouse effect.
The Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations reports that
the annual rate of tropical deforestation has increased from nine million
hectares in 1980 to 16.8 million hectares in 1990, and unfortunately, this
destruction has accelerated since then. By 1994, a staggering 200 million
hectares of rainforest had been destroyed in South America just for cattle.
"The impact of countless hooves and mouths over the years has done more to
alter the type of vegetation and land forms of the West than all the water
projects, strip mines, power plants, freeways, and sub-division developments
combined." - Philip Fradkin, in Audubon, National Audubon Society, New York
Agricultural meat production generates air pollution. As manure decomposes,
it releases over four hundred volatile organic compounds, many of which are
extremely harmful to human health. Nitrogen, a major by-product of animal
wastes, changes to ammonia as it escapes into the air, and this is a major
source of acid rain. Worldwide, livestock produce over thirty million tons
of ammonia. Hydrogen sulfide, another chemical released from animal waste,
can cause irreversible neurological damage, even at low levels.
Livestock production affects a startling 70 to 85 percent of the land area
of the United States, United Kingdom, and the European Union. That includes
the public and private rangeland used for grazing, as well as the land used
to produce the crops that feed the animals.
By comparison, urbanization only affects three percent of the United States
land area, slightly larger for the European Union and the United Kingdom.
Meat production consumes the world's land resources.
Half of all fresh water worldwide is used for thirsty livestock. Producing
eight ounces of beef requires an unimaginable 25,000 liters of water, or the
water necessary for one pound of steak equals the water consumption of the
average household for a year.
The Worldwatch Institute estimates one pound of steak from a steer raised in
a feedlot costs: five pounds of grain, a whopping 2,500 gallons of water,
the energy equivalent of a gallon of gasoline, and about 34 pounds of
topsoil.
Thirty-three percent of our nation's raw materials and fossil fuels go into
livestock destined for slaughter. In a vegan economy, only two percent of
our resources will go to the production of food.
"It seems disingenuous for the intellectual elite of the first world to
dwell on the subject of too many babies being born in the second- and
third-world nations while virtually ignoring the overpopulation of cattle
and the realities of a food chain that robs the poor of sustenance to feed
the rich a steady diet of grain-fed meat."
--Jeremy Rifkin, pro-life AND pro-animal author, Beyond Beef: The Rise and
Fall of the Cattle Culture, and president of the Greenhouse Crisis
Foundation
****
From PETA Asia:
"Would you ever open your refrigerator, pull out sixteen plates of pasta,
toss fifteen in the trash, and then eat just one plate of food? How about
level five square meters of rain forest for a single meal? That sounds
ludicrous, right? But if you're eating chickens, fish, pigs, cows, eggs, or
dairy products, that's what you're doing: wasting resources and destroying
our environment.
"According to the United Nations, raising animals for food (including land
used for grazing and land used to grow feed crops) now uses a staggering 30
percent of the Earth's land mass. A vegan diet requires 1,100 liters of
water per day to produce, while a meat-based diet requires more than 15,000
liters per day. That means that it takes the equivalent of 50 bathtubs of
water to produce just one steak.
"And we haven't even gotten into the staggering 51 percent or more of global
greenhouse-gas emissions that are caused by animal agriculture, according to
a report published by the Worldwatch Institute!
"But we do have some good news: Science shows that going vegan is one of the
most effective ways to fight climate change as well as one of the most
powerful steps that you can take to make your life greener and healthier. It
alleviates pressure on the world's precious resources, helps tackle climate
change and world hunger, and radically decreases your own risk of developing
life-threatening diseases. And don't forget that it saves the lives of
animals, too!
"So in honor of Earth Day, please take the vegan pledge to save the Earth."
****
Oakland Veg, promoting a plant-based diet in Oakland, CA, sent out the
following email on Earth Day:
"There are lots of ways to help the environment, but the easiest (and most
delicious) is to choose Chipotle's sofritas instead of pork carnitas, a
veggie burger instead of a cow burger, or rich coconut milk for your coffee
instead of cow’s milk. Here’s how you’ll be helping with by choosing chips
and guacamole instead of chicken wings:
"Animal agriculture is responsible for fifteen percent of human-induced
greenhouse gas emissions and is recognized by the Food and Agriculture
Organization of the United Nations as one of the 'top two or three most
significant contributors to the most serious environmental problems, at
every scale from local to global.'
"Pasture expansion for farm animals is a key driver of deforestation,
especially in Latin America.
Worldwide, more land is used to raise and feed farm animals than for any
other purpose. More than 97 percent of soymeal and 60 percent of the barley
and corn produced globally are fed to farm animals.
"According to the Sierra Club, if Americans reduced meat consumption by just
20 percent, it’d have the same environmental benefit as everyone switching
from a standard sedan to a hybrid vehicle.
"So enjoy your Earth Day dinner tonight, and…THANK YOU. Thanks for caring
and thanks for doing something positive!"
****
Some find it easier to be vegan on certain days of the week as a way to
transition to being completely vegan. Sir Paul McCartney has endorsed a
"Meatless Mondays" campaign. In 2011, the San Francisco Board of
Supervisors signed a VegDay Resolution encouraging a plant-based diet on
Mondays. They point out that if everyone in San Francisco went veg one day
per week, it would save 37,000,000 lbs. of greenhouse gas emissions. That
is the equivalent of taking 123,822 cars off the streets of San Francisco!
According to the Sierra Club, if Americans reduced meat consumption by just
twenty percent, it would have the same environmental benefit as everyone
switching from a standard sedan to a hybrid vehicle.
Les Brown of the Overseas Development Council similarly calculates that if
Americans reduced their meat consumption by only ten percent per year, it
would free at least twelve million tons of grain for human consumption -- or
*enough* to feed sixty million people.
Even if you argue that shifting to a plant-based diet, a vegan diet, isn't
enough to stave off overpopulation, in light of the data showing the
depletion of energy, food, fresh water, land space, raw materials and
resources as well as the heavy contribution to air and water pollution,
deforestization, and global warming caused by a meat-centered diet, how do
you -- worried about "overpopulation" consuming the world's resources --
justify consuming meat?!
