Skinny Bitch_ Ultimate Everyday Cookbook - Kim Barnouin [5]
Go figure. The world isn’t flat. Everything we do becomes a part of the vicious circle, and what we eat has a lot more to do with this than most think. Animal agriculture makes a 40 percent greater contribution to global warming than all transportation in the world combined; it is the number one cause of climate change.4
But, it doesn’t end there. According to the United Nations, factory farming is one of the most significant contributors to the most serious environmental problems—land degradation, climate change, air pollution, water shortage, water pollution, and loss of biodiversity—on a local and global scale.5
This isn’t just a problem. The common cold is a problem. These environmental problems, my friend, are a disease.
So, it’s clear, our diets are pissing off the planet. Here are the five major ways our food systems are contributing to our own demise.
1. GREENHOUSE GAS EMISSIONS
Bad news. As much as we would like our foods to be raw, natural, and fresh from healthy soil, they are far from it. On today’s consumer farm, our foods are grown with massive amounts of pesticides, herbicides, and chemical fertilizers, all of which are making you, me, and the earth sick.
Raising animals for human consumption is one of the world’s leading emitters of carbon dioxide (CO2), and the number one source of methane and nitrous oxide emissions.6 Those are just the big guns, but there are more culprits. You can call them ammonia, hydrogen sulfide, carbon monoxide, cyanide, and phosphorus, for starters. As you could have guessed, these greenhouse gases are not something we want spraying into our atmosphere like a fire hose. But they do, trapping heat and depleting the ozone layer, contributing to a third of the globe’s total greenhouse gas emissions.7
The process by which these manmade gases get from the farm into the air is not exactly what I’d call dinner-table conversation. One way is that farm animals, such as cattle, goats, chickens, sheep, and hogs, emit methane when they exhale to digest their food. Think of it as one disgusting burp. But here is where things get really appetizing. Like humans, animals poop, too. With one major difference: We humans have built waste-management infrastructures like toilets and sewage systems to manage our crap, while animals just do their business and have no choice but to rely on farmers to clean up after them. That’s where the problem comes in. There are billions of animals pissing and shitting on factory farms. They produce 130 times as much waste as the human population—roughly 87,000 pounds of poop per second. Despite this, there is no safe, reliable system in place for disposing of farmed animal waste. Nobody is hauling it off, nobody is flushing it down the potty, and nobody is regulating it.8 Instead, we control the problem by storing it in huge, open-air waste lagoons that are the size of football fields. If poop was polite and stayed within the confines of these pleasant lagoons without harming a fly, then maybe, just maybe, it would be a start in the right direction. But this shit is emitting greenhouse gases that, combined, are 324 times more harmful than carbon dioxide.9 And, we cannot blame the animals. It’s the standard diet of more than 756 million tons of grain and corn fed to animals in feed-lots per year that causes this unrestricted emission of methane and nitrous oxide.10 Remember, by nature’s standards, cows are supposed to eat grass and chickens are designed to nibble on wheat, veggies, and grass. But we have decided to play God. Leave it to us.
Now, sometimes farmers recycle manure so they can use it as fertilizer in agricultural fields. This is when nitrogen likes to play a little cloning game and produce even more nitrous oxide. This nitrogen free-for-all is then absorbed by the atmosphere, soil, water, and ocean, further adding to the greenhouse effect.11 And so goes the circle of life.
Sorry, honey, but I’m not done