Veganist_ Lose Weight, Get Healthy, Change the World - Kathy Freston [60]
It takes many pounds of grain to create just one pound of meat—more than 16 to 1 in the case of beef. Put another way, a quantity of grain that could feed fifty people creates just one 8-ounce steak, a “small” steak by some standards.
Essentially, as long as the animal agriculture industry is willing to pay more than developing nations for the grain used to feed their animals, the global poor will suffer. In fact, 40 percent of the world’s grain goes to feeding livestock. People in developing countries simply cannot match the prices paid by more affluent countries, with their insatiable appetites for meat. And it’s not only the grain that gets wasted on feeding livestock; water and soil here and abroad are being used at that same wasteful rate. Instead of growing food for subsistence in their own backyards, the world’s poor are starving while farming cash crops to send abroad. Simply put, our addiction to meat has created an imbalance in the distribution and availability of food. A plant-based diet would reduce our reliance on a system of trade that is harmful to the global poor.
If you’ve been alert to this debate at all, you’ve probably heard that the grain fed to farmed animals is feed grain, not food grain. While that might be technically correct, the land, water, fuel, and all the other resources that go into raising crops which feed livestock could instead be used to grow food grains that are suitable for humans. It is an easy and sensible switch to make.
You might also hear that grazing animals eat grasses that cannot be consumed by humans, thereby serving as an intrinsic link in making food fit for human consumption by converting the vegetation into edible protein (animal flesh); but for the developed world, this is the very definition of a specious argument: It sounds good, but it falls flat under even the most cursory scrutiny. In the United States, more than 95 percent of pigs, chickens, and turkeys never spend any time in pasture, even though these animals were built for greens. The only animals who spend any significant amount of time grazing are cattle (about six months), and even they are crammed together in feedlots for more than half their lives, where they are fed vast quantities of animal feed. It is the business of these factory farms to get the animals as fat as possible as quickly as possible, and this is accomplished by keeping them indoors gorging on animal feed.
The Biofuel Connection
There is a direct and measurable relationship between human starvation and the grain being grown for industry. A few years ago, the UN’s special envoy on food, Jean Ziegler, decried the growing production of biofuels: While human beings are starving, she argued, it is a crime against humanity that grains and corn would be converted into fuel. She has a point: According to the UN, in 2007 approximately 100 million metric tons of grain and corn was turned into biofuels.
Biofuels have driven up food prices for the global poor by 75 percent, according to a World Bank report. The Guardian’s coverage of the report notes that “[r]ising food prices have pushed 100 [million] people worldwide below the poverty line…and have sparked riots from Bangladesh to Egypt.”
The thing is, more than 756 million metric tons of grain and corn were fed to farmed animals in the same year, as was almost all the global soy crop (approximately 220 million metric tons). In our global marketplace, if you choose to eat chicken, you are (in a very real way) a part of a macroeconomic system that causes a billion people to go hungry for want of any food at all. The Worldwatch Institute puts it this way: “[M]eat consumption is an inefficient use of grain—the grain is used more efficiently when consumed by humans. Continued growth in meat output is dependent on feeding grain to animals, creating competition for grain between affluent