Veganist: Lose Weight, Get Healthy, Change the World (15 page)

And farmed fish is even worse, because it requires about five pounds of wild-caught fish to reap one pound of farmed fish.
Huh?
I hear you cry. It
what
? As with so much about the meat industry, this reality blows my mind, too. You see, because our oceans are being destroyed, the most desirable fish for human consumption are now, to a huge degree, farmed. The fish the trawlers catch are, often, fish that are less marketable.

The solution? In a twist worthy of George Orwell, the wild-caught fish are fed to the farmed fish, so that, voilà: farmed fish actually cause more deep-sea trawling than, even, the market for wild-caught fish. Are you confused yet? Read it again: It will never make sense, but after a few reads, you’ll likely see that anyone concerned about the environment might consider leaving fish off their diet.

I’m sure everything I’ve just recounted sounds like cause for despair, but in fact, there’s another way of looking at it. Remember Paul Hawken’s challenge at the University of Portland? He continued with words that are deeply relevant to our discussion. He challenged his listeners, “Forget that this task of planet-saving is not possible in the time required. Don’t be put off by people who know what is not possible. Do what needs to be done, and check to see if it was impossible only after you are done.” Sure, things are bad. But we have the power to change it all. We have a powerful new weapon to use against the most serious environmental crisis ever to face humanity. Now that we know a greener diet is even more effective than a greener car (vegan is the new Prius!), we can make a difference at every single meal, simply by leaving the animals off of our plates. We can fix so much of this mess with surprising ease, just by putting down our chicken wings and reaching for a veggie burger instead.

Did you know?

• Approximately 1 billion people—
  1/6
  of the population—on this planet don’t have enough to eat.
  
• 40 percent of the world’s grain goes to feeding livestock.
  
• In the year 2007 alone, approximately 100 million metric tons of grain and corn was turned into biofuels, which in turn drove up food prices for the global poor by 75 percent, according to a World Bank report; in that same period, 756 million metric tons was fed to chickens, pigs, and other farmed animals.
  
• If 1 in 10 people around the globe stopped eating animals, it would free up enough food to feed the 1 billion hungry.
  

Try and wrap your head around this: Right now, approximately a billion people on this planet don’t have enough to eat. That is nearly a sixth of the world’s population. That’s right. One out of every six of our fellow humans has to scrounge for food and feel the ache of an empty stomach every day. And each and every year, tens of millions (15 million of them children) die from starvation-related problems like infections and diarrhea—all this even as Americans get more and more obese.

In fact, in a report by Worldwatch Institute called
Underfed and Overfed
their scientists note that 1.2 billion people in the world are underfed and malnourished, while approximately the same number, a different group of 1.2 billion people, are
over
fed and malnourished. And both the hungry and the overweight have high levels of sickness, shortened life expectancies, and lower levels of productivity, albeit for entirely opposite reasons—the overfed tend to die of cancer, heart disease, and diabetes while the underfed tend to die of infectious diseases and waterborne illnesses.

In another report by Worldwatch called
State of the World
, it was noted that 56 percent of the children in Bangladesh are underfed and underweight to the point of illness; in the same report they also found that 55 percent of adults in the U.S. are so overfed and overweight that
their
health is diminished. The imbalance in food distribution and availability is causing serious problems on both sides of the spectrum. How did this happen?

When I was growing up, my mother used to chide me to finish the dinner on my plate, saying that there were starving people in Africa, and that it was shameful to leave food uneaten. I didn’t quite understand how forcing myself to swallow the last bits of grizzled chicken or beef was being respectful to poor and hungry children in developing countries, but I did what I was told. Instead of feeling like I did the right thing, though, I had a gnawing sense that something was askew. Years later when I read Frances Moore Lappé’s book
Diet for a Small Planet
, I realized that in my earnest desire to do the right thing by the global poor, I was in fact supporting the very hunger I felt so badly about. Here’s why…

When you eat meat, it’s like you are taking food right out of the mouths of the poor. The grain that could have fed hungry people instead is shipped to factory farms to feed the 10 billion animals (in the U.S. alone) who are being fattened up for profitable slaughter.

In order for cows, chickens, and pigs to grow big and fat (and fetch a higher price on the market) they of course have to eat. And eat a lot. They are fed feed that is predominantly composed of corn and soy (grown in the U.S. as well as in developing countries) to make them as big as possible, as quickly as possible. Much of the grain they eat goes just to keeping them alive—breathing, building blood and bone, and repairing tissue—rather than forming edible muscle meat. Of course cows are not designed to eat grains; their natural diet is grasses. (But that’s a whole ’nother subject…)

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 meat-eaters and the world’s poor.”

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?