A Plea

An old saying claims that there's no greater zealot than a convert, and perhaps that's true. Or, perhaps, indignation is simply a natural reaction to the discovery that one has been lied to for one's entire life. Some of you who pay attention to my Facebook® posts know that I've been a vegan for about eight months. Without any hyperbole, I view it as the most important decision I've ever made, in terms of tangible, beneficial, impact on my fellow man. I've intended to write something about it for some time, and, for whatever reason, that time is now. This is a long post, but it's much more important than my usual ramblings. I hope you'll read it carefully. 

There seems to me to be essentially three reasons why people chose veganism: 1. health benefits: the evidence is myriad and indisputable that a plant-based diet can prevent and even reverse chronic disease. 2. morality: the practice of raising and slaughtering animals for food should turn even the strongest stomachs. 3. environmental: raising animals for food has a deleterious effect on the planet. I'm not going to discuss these first two. Everyone's health is their own business, and God knows I have enough unhealthy habits that I'm in no position to lecture anybody. Similarly, I'm no a clergy member, and am ill equipped to discourse on empathy, or to try and inculcate it in you if you don't feel it. This third reason, though, is my business, and the business of everybody who likes to breathe clean air, drink clean water, and be able to live above ground.

Since so many of my friends claim to "fucking love science," I'm going to keep this as empirical as possible. Raising animals for food is killing us, and killing the planet. According to the United Nations, animal agriculture produces more greenhouse gas than all global transportation. Let that sink in for a moment. The carbon produced by every car, bus, train, plane, truck, motorcycle, blimp in the world, combined, is still less than that of the cows, pigs, and poultry we consume. Consider how much money has been spent and ink spilled to try and get a handle on transportation carbon emissions. All the government stimulus money, hybrid cars, and "sustainability" initiatives over the last decade will not make a dent in our climate damage if we continue our current dietary practices.

Digging a little deeper renders the situation even more bleak. Transportation, as we all know, produces mainly CO2. Despite what the media would have you believe, CO2 is NOT the most destructive greenhouse gas. Methane, produced from burning natural gas and, in large measure, by cows, has at least 25 times the global warming potential of CO2. But even that isn't the worst of it. Nitrous Oxide (N2O, or "laughing gas") is 296 times more destructive than CO2. Livestock is responsible for 65% of all human-related emissions of this very un-funny substance. Also, it doesn't break down in the atmosphere for more than 150 years. Finally, even if we reduce transportation emissions to zero, we will still exceed our self-imposed limit of 565 gigatonnes CO2-equivalent by 2030, thanks entirely to animal agriculture.

"Very well," you might say, "but I'm sure the 'scientists' will figure out some way to clean up the atmosphere. They're already making progress on it after all." Fine. Here's another way we as a species are committing suicide-by-cow. Animal agriculture uses a shocking amount of fresh water: up to 76 TRILLION gallons annually. Expressed a percentage, this is 80-90% of total water consumption of the United States. You may have heard that the southwest United States will face a serious water shortage in the next 20 years. It's not because of population, it's because of animals. Just growing the crops required to feed animals accountants for 56% of the country's water use. Speaking of those crops, if all of the food we grow were actually given to people (many of whom, you may have heard, are starving), we would have enough to feed 10 billion humans. That's three billion more than the world population, and we could do it, today, if we stopped wasting massive amounts of grain on animal agriculture. For those of you who are sensitive to things like white privilege, it might interest you to know that 82% of the world's starving children live in countries where perfectly good grain is grown to feed to animals to be exported to the west for consumption. 

Back to water, over-consumption isn't the only way livestock are ruining our water supply. They also produce a tremendous amount of pollution via fecal matter, which has to go somewhere. Can you guess where? According to about 20 different sources, animal agriculture is the leading cause of domestic water pollution and ocean dead zones. Many people seem to think this is a humorous discussion. These people should go back to junior high. Animals produce 116,00 lbs of waste per second in America, 130 times more than humans. Think about the money we spend on sewage treatment and pollution prevention in our cities. Now consider a pollution source 130 times greater, with no comprehensive apparatus in place to treat, contain, or clean it up.

Anybody who came through the public education system in the 1990s (at least in a more liberal part of the country) will remember the copious number of hours spent covering the evils of Rainforest destruction and deforestation. I remember the feelings of anger and helplessness quite vividly, as we were told how many thousands of acres were already destroyed, how many species had been lost, how many native cultures annihilated. What weren't we told? You can probably guess. The leading cause of rainforest destruction (91%!!) is animal agriculture, either directly through the creation of grazing land, or indirectly through cultivation of feed crops. We lose as many as 137 unique, irreplaceable, largely unstudied species every single day. There's a human cost too -- native civilizations who've lived in, and relied on, the rainforest for centuries are killed or displaced to make room for ranching. Additionally, 1100 land-rights activists have been killed in Brazil in just the past 20 years.

Fish fair no better than bipeds and quadrupeds. Three quarters of the world's fisheries are exploited or depleted, according to the U.N. Fishing takes a toll on more than just the edible fish, though. Those of you, again, who grew up in the 80s/90s may remember the fuss made over "dolphin-safe" tuna -- tuna that was supposedly caught without dolphin "by-catch." By-catch is an industry term for all the non-edible stuff that gets pulled out of the ocean by huge commercial trawlers. How much of a problem is by-catch? Bear with me here: About 90-100 million lbs of "fish" are caught every year. About 40% of this is discarded as either inedible or poor quality leaving, conservatively, about 60 million lbs of edible fish. According to National Geographic, somewhere in the neighborhood of 2.7 TRILLION animals are pulled from the ocean every year. Let's (very conservatively) estimate that the average fish weighs 1 lb. That means that 0.002% of what's caught actually makes into our food supply. For arguments sake, let's lower that average weight to 1 ounce, meaning 16 edible fish for each of our 60 million lbs, so 960 million animals. That gives us a much more impressive yield of 0.04%. In modern capitalism, if any other industry were this inefficient, it wouldn't last a month, but because we don't place a monetary value on our natural world, it continues unabated. What about those other trillions of animals who are killed by accident? Among them are 40-50 million sharks (you may want to rethink those "live every week like it's shark week" shirts), and 650,000 whales and dolphins. What about shellfish, you ask? It may interest you to know that a large amount of the shrimp we eat in America is peeled by slave laborers in southeast Asia.

Many people make a point of only eating "sustainably" raised meat. Unfortunately, there's no such thing. Pasture-grazed, grass-fed cows actually use even more resources than their factory-farmed cousins because they live longer. They drink more water, produce more shit, and deplete more land. It's also physically impossible to meet current meat demand using "sustainable" methods. If every cow in America were pasture-raised, it would require the entirety of North America and a sizable amount of South America (including mountains, glaciers, and other non-grazable land), and that's just for one country. Again, those of you who are sensitive to privilege would do well to take note here. Everybody simply can't eat pasture-raised grass-fed beef.

What about fish farms? These are very often held up as more sustainable alternatives to commercial fishing. While it's true that they avoid the scourge of by-catch, they compensate in other ways. For starters, it takes fish to raise fish, especially those fish higher up on the food chain. In other words, fish farms require commercial fishing to some degree. They also produce massive amounts of pollution due to the close quarters of the fish (as many as 90,000 in a 100x100 ft pen). Feces, dead fish, blood, rotting food, antibiotics, and more are all released into the ocean in a highly concentrated area, contributing to dead zones. These fish are also generally less healthy than wild-caught, but that's another story.

Many of you, presumably, care about the environment. I know some of you drive hybrid cars, bike or take mass transit, use high-efficiency bulbs and energy-star appliances, and take many other steps to try to limit your environmental footprint. Here's the thing, though: the most substantial action you can take to combat climate change is to give up animal products. For a long time, I operated under the assumption that vegans were self-righteous, annoying, and generally misguided. The first two may occasionally be true, which is why I've tried to stick to facts and avoid moralizing. We are not, however, extreme or misguided. We have adopted the only logical position for anybody claiming to be an environmentalist to hold. There is no way around these facts. They can't be dispelled by Facebook® memes, the tastiness of bacon, the ubiquity of milk, or the addictive properties of cheese (Google "Casein addiction" when you have a minute).

Food is a very personal subject for most people, and discussions like these can set off very bitter, angry, emotional, arguments. At the moment I have 672 friends on Facebook®. If 671 of you furiously unfriend me, but 1 person takes this to heart, I will consider this effort a success.

Please, take this seriously. The food you consume doesn't just affect your body. It affects mine, and everybody else's, and we're getting the point where the effects are going to start becoming difficult to ignore, and, potentially, catastrophic.