Hope's Edge_ The Next Diet for a Small Planet - Frances Moore Lappe [44]
If our food is not getting to the hungry, if our food exports actually prop up some of the world’s most repressive governments, then why exhort Americans to feed less grain to livestock? Why not pour even more of our grain into livestock, so that at least it does not block needed change abroad?
At the same time I was asking myself these questions, I was studying the agricultural system in the United States. In the process, Diet for a Small Planet took on new and deeper meaning. The first edition of this book explained how our production system takes abundant grain, which hungry people can’t afford, and shrinks it into meat, which better-off people will pay for. But I didn’t fully appreciate that our production system not only reduces abundance but actually mines the very resources on which our future food security rests.
2.
Like Driving a Cadillac
A FEW MONTHS ago a Brazilian friend, Mauro, passed through town. As he sat down to eat at a friend’s house, his friend lifted a sizzling piece of prime beef off the stove. “You’re eating that today,” Mauro remarked, “but you won’t be in ten years. Would you drive a Cadillac? Ten years from now you’ll realize that eating that chunk of meat is as crazy as driving a Cadillac.”
Mauro is right: a grain-fed-meat-centered diet is like driving a Cadillac. Yet many Americans who have reluctantly given up their gas-guzzling cars would never think of questioning the resource costs of their grain-fed-meat diet. So let me try to give you some sense of the enormity of the resources flowing into livestock production in the United States. The consequences of a grain-fed-meat diet may be as severe as those of a nation of Cadillac drivers.
A detailed 1978 study sponsored by the Departments of Interior and Commerce produced startling figures showing that the value of raw materials consumed to produce food from livestock is greater than the value of all oil, gas, and coal consumed in this country.1 Expressed another way, one-third of the value of all raw materials consumed for all purposes in the United States is consumed in livestock foods.2
How can this be?
The Protein Factory in Reverse
Excluding exports, about one-half of our harvested acreage goes to feed livestock. Over the last forty years the amount of grain, soybeans, and special feeds going to American livestock has doubled. Now approaching 200 million tons, it is equal in volume to all the grain that is now imported throughout the world.3 Today our livestock consume ten times the grain that we Americans eat directly4 and they outweigh the human population of our country four to one.5
These staggering estimates reflect the revolution that has taken place in meat and poultry production and consumption since about 1950.
First, beef. Because cattle are ruminants, they don’t need to consume protein sources like grain or soybeans to produce protein for us. Ruminants have the simplest nutritional requirements of any animal because of a unique fermentation “vat” in front of their true stomach. This vat, the rumen, is a protein factory. With the help of billions of bacteria and protozoa, the rumen produces microbial protein, which then passes on to the true stomach, where it is treated just like any other protein. Not only does the rumen enable the ruminant to thrive without dietary protein, B vitamins, or essential fatty acids, it also enables the animal to digest large quantities of fibrous foodstuffs inedible by humans.6
The ruminant can recycle a wide variety of waste products into high-protein foods. Successful animal feeds have come from orange juice squeeze remainders in Florida, cocoa residue in Ghana, coffee processing residue in Britain, and bananas (too ripe to export) in the Caribbean. Ruminants will thrive on single-celled protein, such as bacteria or yeast produced in special factories, and they can utilize some of the cellulose in waste products such as wood pulp, newsprint, and bark. In Marin County, near my home in San Francisco, ranchers are feeding apple pulp and cottonseed