Interesting Read

[jianantonic]

When people ask me why I'm vegetarian, one of the main answers I give is "environmental reasons." Here's an article that goes into significant depth on said reasons:
http://www.uuworld.org/ideas/articles/11130.shtml?lj

It's called "Eating Ethically" and it was published on a UU website.


What’s more, while the astounding bushels-per-acre increases over a half-century may scent industrial agriculture with the whiff of efficiency, the system stinks of hemorrhaging oil. According to Michael Pollan, author of The Omnivore’s Dilemma, every bushel of conventionally grown corn requires a half-gallon of fossil fuel to produce (nitrogen fertilizers and pesticides are made from fossil fuels). When you consider that about 60 percent of that corn goes to feed livestock, it’s possible to calculate, as Pollan does in his 2002 New York Times Magazine article “Power Steer,” that a typical steer consumes about 284 gallons of oil in its lifetime. That’s enough fuel to drive an average car from New York to Los Angeles and back. Nor should we neglect the food processing industry, which uses about 10 calories of fossil fuel energy for every single calorie of food energy. That figure doesn’t even include the fuel used to transport your food from farm to plate, which is, on average, a journey of 1,500 miles. Our agriculture system generates 20 to 25 percent of the country’s greenhouse gases every year. In fact, researchers at the University of Chicago just discovered that we could slow the rate of climate change more effectively if meat-eaters went vegan than if they traded their gas-guzzlers in for hybrids.

***

And it’s not only crop varieties that we’re losing. According to Jackson, agriculture is the primary cause of habitat loss for endangered species. A staggering 70 percent of listed endangered species are affected by agriculture, including the pallid sturgeon and the interior least tern, which used to frequent the Missouri and Mississippi Rivers. Non-endangered species are also suffering. Iowans are losing songbirds like the bobolink and the western meadowlark, which used to migrate from Argentina and Central America to nest in the state’s tall grasses—originally the native prairie, then later the planted hayfields. Most Iowa prairie is long gone, and today farmers rarely plant hayfields, so there are fewer and fewer grasslands for these birds to nest in.

***

No wonder we turn a blind eye to our food. The picture looks bleak, the problem overwhelming, and a solution unreachable. It can seem as if our options are to go vegan—a path enthusiastically supported by the Unitarian Universalists for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (UFETA), among other organizations—or to give up. I admit that going vegan feels extreme to me: I have a hard time imagining a happy existence without the pleasure of a good cheese. But giving up is no solution, either. I don’t want to be alienated from my food—and from the planet that produces it. Luckily, there is a middle ground, and the UUA’s Seventh Principle points the way.

***

Inevitably, thinking about ethical eating means thinking about the animals we eat. The Rev. Gary Kowalski, minister of the First Unitarian Universalist Society of Burlington, Vermont, treasurer of UFETA, and author of several books including The Souls of Animals, believes that “the greatest and most effective thing we can do to befriend our own bodies and befriend the environment and other living creatures is to eliminate meat from our dinner table.” In my conversation with him, Kowalski ran down a list of highly persuasive reasons to take this step. He told me that eating a 16-ounce steak is equivalent to driving about 25 miles in your car. Each new vegetarian annually saves three acres of tropical trees. It takes 25 gallons of water to produce a pound of wheat and 25,000 gallons to produce a pound of beef. Clearly, the choice to become a vegetarian—or, even better, a vegan—is an excellent way to diminish your ecological impact.

***

The spinach scare last September—when three people died and 200 people in 26 states got sick from eating packaged spinach contaminated with E. coli—brought home once again the very real dangers of the industrial food system. The E. coli on that spinach grew and thrived in the bellies of cattle on a nearby feedlot—cattle that were fed grain rather than grass. Cows are ruminants: They did not evolve to eat corn, yet that’s what they’re fed regularly in feedlots across the country. Corn makes them sick, and provides an ideal environment in their stomachs for the growth of E. coli, which then leaves their bodies via their manure and leaches from feedlots into the water supply.



Okay so I used more than a few quick snippets. The whole article is much longer and more thorough, but I just really wanted to share all of that.

I'm not much of a vegetarianism preacher - I feel like until I'm a vegan, I really don't have any serious moral high ground here - but I'm all in favor of taking the steps that you can. Even if you don't want to give up meat (the article talks about this at the end), there are so many ways to be a more responsible meat-eater. I just hope more people start thinking about these things.

Peace.

Comments

[flamingophoenix.livejournal.com]

Incidentally, my body may be deciding FOR ME that I'm a vegetarian/almost-vegan. Great. :-P

I do plan to continue to eat any meat my family produces, though, for the rest of my life. Unless I have an epiphany of some sort on the subject.

Well. Maybe "produces" is a bad word. "Animals that my uncle Tommy hunts and/or my uncle Sam raises." There we go.

[flamingophoenix.livejournal.com]

Also: that UU picture at the top of the article looks SUSPICIOUSLY like His Noodly Appendage.

[flamingophoenix.livejournal.com]

Clarification: I already eat relatively little meat, and prefer not to eat mass-produced meat products (though of course I still do).

I may be growing lactose-intolerant.