Big Issues Regarding Health and Food

I would like to see America become healthy. I know I said I would address things that matter, but I am not some bloke who thinks all Americans need to get fit and thin. There is more to it. The second leading cause of death in this country, right behind tobacco smoking, is poor diet/health. Americans have an obesity problem, even in children. More people have diabetes, which is more and more effecting kids. In fact, 1 out of 3 children in minorities will have a great chance of getting diabetes. Even I come from a family with a history of diabetes. People need to make a change in their lives and watch the way we eat.

America is driven by the deep desire to buy everything cheap. This has driven companies to produce massive amounts of food, much larger in less time. They no longer see cattle and animals as they are, so they pump them full o enzymes to make them grow, shelter them in terrible conditions, feed them crap, etc. As long as the American people continue to eat the way they current do, things will not improve one bit. In 2005, a study showed that in order to preserve our forests, we spent a total of $8 billion, while in the same year we spent $22 billion on sack food and potato chips. See a problem here?

You can make a difference. It does not take that much of an effort to make an alternative diet. A simple and easy step is to eat less meat. I'm not at talking about eating no meat at all, just reduce the amount you have. There are thousands of there meals to have with less meat, such as pasta. Many people don’t realize that a single person can make a difference.

Schools should feed their students the right food. Schools are the center of education for the next generations and the future. Today, what kids know as far as food in school is what they serve in the cafeteria, buy from vending machines, and/or go to a local store, restaurant, or fast food store.

A change in diet has not just a positive effect on our health, but also the environment and economy. For example, shark fin soup costs the lives of thousands of sharks, just for their fins. There exists alternative to shark fin, even vegetarian.

If you compare countries like America who loves eating meat to those who eat less meat such as South Asia, the countries who eat less meat have much less heart attacks.

Much of our cattle are settled in CAFOs. These are mainly located in desert like areas. These animals eat grass, but grass does not grow there. How do you feed these animals? Nowadays we are training the cows to eat corn, something that these animals are not built to eat and often make them very sick. These corns are genetically modified to grow fast. How much corn do we give these animals? 12 pounds of corn can produce 57 bowls of cornflakes, or 20 loafs of bread. How much meat does 12 pounds of corn produce? Just 1 lb. of meat (which is just one patty of meat). If you were stuck on an island and all you had was 12 ponds of corn, which option would you use? Grow your food or give it to a cow? I think the answer is obvious. What we must understand is that the earth does not have an infinite amount of resources. This is the problem of the entire world’s economic systems, is that they are built on the belief that resources are infinite. What happens when a society runs out of resources, look at what happened at Easter Island.

Can we grow grass in the area to feed the cows? Well you need water for that. Most cattle used for beef are raised in the western America, an area that is mostly dry. The crops they are fed are grown in the west where rainfall is scare and water is a precious resource. How do you get water into the desert, well you transport it there. This takes energy and vast amounts of water to irrigate the crops. Most people are not aware how much water is used to irrigate cattle feed. Los Angeles is known to use up a lot of water -12 million people surrounded by lawns and swimming pools in a semi desert. But irrigating pastier crops in Alfalfa uses more water than all the people in Los Angeles combined, in fact, more than all the cities in California combined. It has been estimated for ever 1,000 lbs. of meat coming from the slaughterhouse has consumed enough fresh water to float a US Naval Destroyer. To grow a pound of apples in California requires 49 gallons of water. To grow a pound of potatoes requires 24 gallons of water. But to grow one pound of beef in California requires 5000 gallons of water.

Where does this water come from? What many people do not know is there is a vast amount of pure fresh water in the heart of America. It is as big as the Louisiana Purchase beneath America, a gift from the ice age, and contains as much water as the Great Lakes. The high plain states depend on this water. The bad news is that we are pumping it all up so rapidly that environmentalists say that it may be bone dry in about 30 years. The vast majority of this water is being sent to irrigate crops to feed cattle. Since the drought of 1988 it is clear how precious water is to us. Our rivers and aquifers are at a very low rate, and the top activity we do as a society that drains water from our rivers and aquifers goes to cattle. Water is the life and blood of not just the west but this whole country. The only way we can save this water for ourselves is to eat less meat and put that water to grow crops that we are going to eat ourselves.

Think about the extra stages of production that are required to get dead chickens, pigs, or other animals from the farm to the table:

1. Grow more than 10 times as much corn, grain, and soy as would be required if we ate the plants directly. How do you get those plants? First you drive an oil-powered machine to plow the land. Then you have another oil-powered machine that drives along and it plants the seeds. Then you have to irrigate the plants, but how do you irrigate them? You pump the water through pipelines, and that pump is powered by electricity well where does that electricity come from? In the U.S. It comes from either coal or natural gas. The next thing you have to do it fertilize it -ALL commercial fertilizer is made from ammonia, and the feedstock for ammonia is natural gas. So you have these ammonia fertilizer sprayed on the plants, driven by another oil-powered vehicle, and then the crop dusters come along that are powered by oil. The pesticides are all made from petroleum. When it's time to harvest, you drive another oil-powered machine and finally you harvest it.

*Note the chemicals (nitrates from fertilizer and manure) from agriculture find their way into our lakes, rivers, and water system, killing thousands of animals and threaten human life. If a pregnant woman drinks this water, researches say that her fetus has a large chance of having birth defects. Corn is the major crops that uses the largest amount of insecticides, herbicides, and fertilizer in the nation.

2. Transport -- in gas-guzzling, pollution-spewing 18-wheelers -- all that grain and soy to feed manufacturers.

3. Operate the feed mill (again, using massive amounts of resources).

4. Truck the feed to the factory farms, again by gas-guzzling, pollution-spewing 18-wheelers.

5. Operate the factory farms.

6. Truck the animals many miles to slaughterhouses using (you guessed it) pollution-spewing trucks that run on oil.

7. Operate the slaughterhouses - which have a LOT of problems that will be discussed in another article.

8. Truck the meat to processing plants, again with oil-powered trucks.

9. Operate the meat processing plants.

10. Truck the meat to grocery stores (in refrigerated trucks, but still run on oil).

11. Keep the meat in refrigerators or freezers at the stores.

12. Customers have to drive their oil-powered cars to whatever distance, pick up the meat, and then drive it back home. Usually, they carry their groceries in plastic bags, which is made from oil.

No matter where meat comes from, raising animals for food will require that exponentially more calories be fed to animals than they can produce in their flesh, and it will require all those extra stages of CO2-intensive production as well. Only grass-fed cows eat food from land that could not otherwise be used to grow food for human beings, and even grass-fed cows require much more water and create much more pollution than vegan foods do.

If we eat less meat, less land will be needed to house cattle or keep clear for crops. Those croplands could be reforested to the tens of thousands of acres which could help from lumber for houses, more oxygen and less carbon dioxide (effective against global warming), stabilizes the top soil, purifies the water, provides a home for the wild life, attracts tourists, and more. Land with a forest is more valuable than a clear land with a cow on it. It would also mean we would have less chemicals being poured into the environment. We would have less heart attacks, less strokes, less cancer and less fear of cancer, less diabetes, we would be fitter, healthier, and more happy people.

Did you know that according to the FAO (Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations), as much as 70% of the food produced worldwide is lost through spoilage, inefficient processing and preparation, and plate waste. Nationwide, U.S. households throw away food worth as much as $43 BILLION a year - almost twice the $24 billion a year needed to eliminate global hunger and malnutrition. Seriously, we can all live a better, healthier, easier life if all we do is care!

1. The earth will only allow a certain number of top carnivores.

2. We can’t escape the Second Law of Thermodynamics and ecological efficiency no matter what other rationalizations you pit against it. As one student wrote in the TD: "It doesn't really matter how different the statistics are… even the best case scenario is horrific”.

3. Comparing resource use of grass-fed versus grain-fed: Although there’s a case for grass-fed being a better option is some ways, there’s still one extra trophic level - they’re both wasteful practices according to the second Law. Anyway, there’s not enough grazing land to support ALL the cattle being raised at this moment, and grazing cattle cause a tremendous amount of loss of biodiversity in the ecosystems in which they are grazing (and degrading).

4. Animal agriculture is swallowing up the world’s NPP.

5. The rules have changed since we were a just several million people on the planet! We can’t use the excuse that “mankind has always done …this or that”. There are simply not enough resources to support our present logarithmic population growth, certainly not in the way we’re currently managing things. Once we overshoot our own carrying capacity, natural processes will limit the number of unsustainable practices we engage in, whether we’re prepared to do so or not.

6. Some of us are using more than our fair share of resources; others must do with less or go without.

7. Presently, only the privileged have the luxury of eating meat at the rate they do. (In an affluent society, a person may not be considered “rich”, but may nevertheless be privileged.) The affluent require an extremely high amount of energy, resources and land to maintain their diet, and contribute to more waste and pollution.

8. Poor countries export grain to make money, while their own people are starving from not having enough to eat. Land which could feed them is instead used to grow cattle feed which is shipped to affluent countries.

9. Nutrient cycles are overtaxed and disrupted due to excess nitrogen waste (especially from concentrated feedlot manure), increased phosphorous waste, and increased carbon dioxide production inherent in the way agribusiness grows crops for animal feed.

10. Cattle produce the greenhouse gas, methane, contributing to the enhanced greenhouse effect (climate change).

11. The world is losing fertile land – forests and grasslands are being destroyed for growing animal feed and for grazing; deserts are degraded by overgrazing. Anywhere cattle are grazed, we see severe reduction in biodiversity of both plants and animals. Marine and freshwater habitats are being degraded by stockyard runoff. Species in competition with livestock are destroyed as well, including keystone species such as wolves and prairie dogs.

12. Using our land sustainably means reducing our resource use, waste, and pollution. That unequivocally means reducing and replacing the harmful practices of animal agriculture with more sustainable ones, repairing our soils, growing crops sustainably to feed humans, and removing greed and profit from the food distribution equation. This will result in a decrease in the inequality in standard of living for a global population. These things will not happen unless the demand for high throughput meat goes down.

13. One of the reasons for this discussion was to help you recognize high-throughput when you see it, and avoid it.

14. Human health – Studies have shown that diets high in red meat lead to a higher mortality rate. Diets high in meat can cause diseases attributed to overnutrition, such as obesity and heart disease.

15. Processing and Transportation costs - pollution plus use of oil, plus all the energy and land it takes to grow animals, cut them up, dispose of their carcasses, perhaps cook and otherwise process, package and ship, store (refrigeration), and finally, more waste – as is the case in the US, much (lowest estimate is over 40%) is not eaten and must be trashed!

16. Carrying capacity, Hunger and Poverty - Meat consumption creates significant increase in one’s ecological footprint. You can feed more people if we all ate lower on the trophic levels. If we reduce meat demand, we enable more people to live well on this planet. Some people don’t do their part to reduce their “food footprint” based on the excuse that there’s plenty of food and the problems lie with distribution and politics. Does this argument distract you from doing your part? Does that mean we ignore the waste/inefficiency/degradation/pollution issue just because charities can’t keep up with the hunger problem, or because governments aren’t properly regulating corporate practices? If we reduce demand, we reduce the numbers of acres dedicated to wasteful animal agriculture, we reduce the amount of pollution we create, we increase the amount of available, fertile farmland, we increase the amount of water, food and energy available to other creatures on this planet, and we shame politicians into following suit.

17. We reduce our dependence on oil, a nonrenewable resource.

18. Other factors - business, government, special interests, greed, profits, affluenza, selfishness, status quo mentality

19. Reducing our own personal meat consumption is a simple, inexpensive action that requires no new laws, and has the most immediate realization of benefits: to humans (health), plants, animals, grasslands, deserts, rainforests, wetlands, oceans and fresh water, air, and soil, with less pollution, less waste of water, petroleum, and energy, less soil erosion, less greenhouse gases, less habitat loss, and (of course) increased ecological efficiency for the whole planet.

AND THAT’S JUST ONE THING YOU RESEARCHED, ONE THING YOU CAN DO, WHICH CAN MAKE A HUGE IMPACT. WE’VE BEEN UNSUSTAINABLE IN OUR AGRICULTURAL METHODS, AND WE NEED TO TURN IT AROUND.

HOW?

DON’T SUPPORT HARMFUL PRACTICES.

SUPPORT ONLY SUSTAINABLE PRACTICES AND PRODUCTS!

Once we discover the evidence, what can “little” citizens do against “big” profit-centered corporations and do-nothing government agencies? How can we help empower the masses to throw off their veil of misinformation and break out of the deep rut of status quo?

We do have power because businesses need us to make their profits. Quit encouraging profits for those who are damaging our planet, our health, and our prosperity: Vote with your pocketbook! Refuse to buy unsustainable products and services, and changes WILL miraculously occur!