Veganist_ Lose Weight, Get Healthy, Change the World - Kathy Freston [61]
To compound the problem, as countries like China and India become wealthier, there is an increasing demand for meat because meat is seen as a status symbol; meat seems to represent wealth because those who are poor cannot afford it. One of my best friends is Chinese, and she tells me how, when she was young and living in a humble village in the countryside a few hours outside Beijing, she and her family would enjoy a once-a-year feast of a pig’s head roasted over a pit. They couldn’t afford the choicer cuts of the animal, but always dreamed of one day being able to eat more and “better” meat like they saw rich people do.
Now that she and her family have moved definitively out of that class, it’s hard for my friend to make sense of going back to the way she ate in childhood—mostly a plant-based diet of rice, soy, and vegetables with only a tiny little bit of meat or fish as garnish or flavoring. She didn’t want to eat what she thought was a peasant’s diet now that she had “arrived,” so meat became the main event at every meal. (I have since disabused her of the notion that a plant-based diet is associated with deprivation or asceticism!) So as more and more previously poor people enter the middle class, more animals will be raised for their newly acquired tastes and budgets, which exponentially undermines the efforts of the remaining global poor to be able to feed themselves.
Even Peter R. Cheeke, an industry expert and a professor of animal agriculture at Oregon State University acknowledges, “Beef has become a symbol of the extravagant, resource-consuming American who is destroying the global environment to live a life of luxury, while most of the rest of the world suffer pestilence and famine…. Strictly on a scientific basis, there can be no dispute that corn and soybean meal are used with more efficiency, and can provide food for more people, when they are eaten directly by people rather than being fed to swine or poultry to be converted to pork, chicken meat, or eggs for human consumption.”
And how about this amazing statistic: if one in ten people around the globe stopped eating animals, it would free up enough food to feed the one billion hungry—so says a report called Feeding the Future, by the National Library of Medicine at the National Institutes of Health.
Why should we care about all this? After all, anyone reading this book is likely living in a wealthy country with plenty to eat. Most of us hopefully have a sincere desire to see everyone do well and thrive, whether they live near us and within our communities or not. We want to see the scourge of hunger and poverty end, but short of sending money through organizations to people in need, we don’t quite know how to make a meaningful difference. But when we change our diet to reflect our values—for example, the belief that food is a basic human right—we feel like we are on track with our better instincts. By cutting back on or forgoing meat, dairy, fish, and eggs in favor of a plant-based diet, we say no to a system that makes it ever more difficult for poor people to feed themselves. We know that we can’t have peace in the world—or in our souls, for that matter—if any one of us is starving.
And isn’t it just perfect that the very diet that can help to eradicate hunger can also prevent and reverse the most serious of our modern diseases, turn around environmental disaster, and lessen the suffering of billions of animals?
PROMISE 8:
You Will Reduce Animal Suffering
Did you know?
The vast majority—over 95 percent—of animals are raised in factory farms and not on the old-fashioned family farms of memory.
In typical egg-producing operations, egg-laying hens are crammed by the bunch into tiny wire cages stacked one upon the other for hundreds of yards. They cannot spread their wings, and they are often piled on top of each other; sometimes with broken bones, open sores, and feather loss.
Broiler chickens, which make up 8.5 of the nearly 10 billion animals raised for food each year, are often drugged up and genetically