Memo to Sierra Club: Stop Promoting Meat

[I joined the Sierra Club last year and they are asking me to renew.  This is the reply I'm sending.]

To Whom It May Concern:

I’ve been asked to renew my membership, and I’m not going to.  I thought you might like to know why.

While I was disappointed with your earlier national position supportive of the hydro-fracking that is set to cause so much trouble in my state, feeling undermined as I and other local activists worked to keep this industry at bay, I’ve been impressed otherwise with your work on a wide variety of issues.  Overall I like the Sierra Club.  We are on the same side – we recognize how crucial it is to act now to avert disaster.

However, there is one huge environmental issue on which we seem to disagree, and that is meat.  I could live with your simply ignoring this issue, like so many other environmental organizations, and you certainly do that.  I counted two articles in the latest newsletter alone (May/June 2012) on which your silence on animal products was deafening. “Water, Water Everywhere” told readers about the water impact of some items, including several which are probably not discretionary, such as tires and cement, while not mentioning beef’s and milk’s huge waste of water.  Beef and milk are 100% optional purchases, and your readers will probably make these purchasing decisions within hours.  The other article was “Fighting Climate Change With Family Planning.”  The point of the graph is to show that family planning can be as helpful as things like running cars on clean hydrogen, and is an important part of the solution.  But if the U.N. is correct that livestock causes 18% of greenhouse gases, much more than cars, why is it not listed there instead of cars?  Why did it not earn any place in this chart?

In short, I did not see a single mention of diet as any part of a problem or solution to any environmental issue in this magazine, nor do I recall seeing any in the issues I have received over the past year.

Instead, unfortunately, unbelievably, you promote meat.  I usually see meat and dairy praised on your “Enjoy the Green Life” page, and this month, “Enjoy Fast Food,” was no exception.  You didn’t take the hint when Michael Pollan refused to recommend fast food, but instead forged ahead to print “fast-food fare that environmentalists can order with a clear conscience,” as recommended by restaurauteurs with no apparent qualifications to answer this question authoritatively.  So you endorse the “burrito bowl with chicken or steak, beans, veggies, sour cream, cheese, and lettuce”?  Chipotle has terrific vegan options; did your writer calculate the impact of this meal compared to a vegan version?  How can your magazine pass this recommendation on to your readers without comment?  And what about Le Pain Quotidien’s item, consisting apparently entirely of ham, cheese, and egg?  What are you thinking?  These items are an environmental nightmare!  Organic means no pesticides or hormones were used, but says nothing about the greenhouse gases, the manure lagoons, the incredible waste of water and energy, and the breath-taking waste of feeding perfectly good food to animals so they can process it inefficiently through their guts, giving you less than you put in.  These items may be less wasteful and polluting than typical fast food, but that is an incredibly low bar to jump over.  I’m not insisting you should print attacks on these menu items, but you should not be claiming they’re guilt-free or conscience-clearing.

I recall tearing my hair out when the Sept/Oct 2011 issue arrived and I read this same column to find you promoting a single-serve microwaveable beef pot roast, telling readers it’s “Earth-Friendly” because its tray is made partly of calcium carbonate so it uses 40% less plastic and emits 55% less greenhouse gas pollution.  But they could switch their packaging from illegally-harvested mahogany crates to recycled banana leaf envelopes and it still wouldn’t change the fact that beef is the worst thing for the environment you can eat, and a single-serving frozen meal is probably one of the worst ways to eat it.  You concluded, “It’s nice to see a well-established brand make a proactive move toward a more sustainable environment.”  Are you serious?  Put something better in the calcium carbonate box.  I get that you want to reward companies that want to do the right thing, but this product is a total green-wash, and you’re using member donations to help them do it.  I subsidize beef enough through my taxes.

From Sierra Magazine

Back to the current issue, you report in “The Next Big Thing” that perhaps “summer barbeques will solve all our problems.”  After mentioning that readers might enjoy a steak this summer, you tell us, without apparent irony, that bio-scientists have found a new “sustainable fuel source:” beef.  Is there any other environmental organization or independent scientist who has studied these food issues and who believes that beef is sustainable?  I suspect Amtrack wants to use beef tallow not because it’s particularly earth-friendly to produce, but because in these times of high fuel prices it is a cheap, available byproduct, given Americans’ appetite for hamburgers.  Unfortunately, tallow is a cheap, available byproduct of an unsustainable livestock industry which is responsible for a large part of most of the environmental crises we face, from water and air pollution, energy waste, acid rain, greenhouse gases, desertification, land degradation, loss of biodiversity, loss of habitat, food-borne illnesses, and antibiotic resistant bacteria.  Did your writer take these factors into account when trumpeting the hydrocarbon and CO emissions reductions?  Magnifying all these problems by endorsing an increase in the demand for beef tallow is the opposite of what the Sierra Club should be doing.

I have been tabling at environmental and health fairs on these issues for the last five years or so, and I am heartened to see a change: people I talk to are starting to arrive at my table already somewhat aware that their diet has an impact on the environment.  But so far this change is no thanks to the Sierra Club; vegetarian organizations are fighting this battle against ignorance mostly alone.  I hope to someday read that the Sierra Club is joining, even leading the effort of encouraging people to consider how their diet affects the earth.  You don’t have to nag people to be vegan – just be upfront and accurate as you go about discussing issues which diet affects.

A first step would be to stop promoting it.  I can’t support an organization that does that.

How Green is Our Cuisine?

I went to the University of Rochester today to participate with R.A.V.S. in the Great American Meatout.  Two of us manned our table.

How Green is Our Cuisine? (Click to Zoom)

I trotted out my old “How Green is Our Cuisine?” display, and that was very useful (again).  I can’t believe I considered dismantling this display after the first time.   I thought this time I’d take a picture and tell you what’s included and what I plan to update.  If anyone wants the Word or Jpg files, I still have everything and am happy to share.

After researching, I had a LOT of info I wanted to include.  It is a very busy display, but I am always there to walk people through it.  It’s more of visual aide for my spiel.  The main focus is on greenhouse gases, and assuming people already knew that global warming is very bad, I wanted to make the point that diet is a big part of it (bigger than many other decisions we make for the environment), and how it plays such a big part.

I wrote the information I researched into an essay, A Disregarded Truth.  But verbally, my catch question is, “Did you know that what we eat has an enormous impact on the environment?” and then I continue with the 18% of greenhouse gas emissions fact, which everyone I talked to at the Meatout already knew – great job getting the word out, everybody!  One vegan did gently dispute that number, saying he’d heard it included transport, so somehow it wasn’t right to compare it to transport separately.  I pointed out to him that this wasn’t a pie chart where each slice was separate and all had to add to 100%.  The breakdowns are too complicated for that, and what these numbers say is that if all transport ended, 15% of current greenhouse gas would be saved, and that, separately, if all livestock ended, 18% would be saved.

Anyway, next I usually say, “You might be wondering how livestock can have such a big impact,” at which point I start working down the left side of the display.  Amazon Deforestation is the largest single source of livestock’s contribution, and then Enteric Fermentation is second.

Next I usually go over the image from the N.Y. Times which shows Livestock’s High Energy Costs and Carbon Footprint.  The veggies vs. meat comparison is an eye-opener.  Over on the right I have two sections which try to put diet in context with other decisions that we make.  I chose to illustrate that study from the University of Chicago which looked at choice of car.  However, I have found these charts to just be too complicated.  They’re coming off the display.  Down below, however, is a really neat comparison of choice of bag (paper vs. plastic) compared to choice of what goes in the bag (one day’s groceries for a family of four, omnivore vs. vegan).  People really like this graphic.  I try to be sure to make the point that I’m not belittling these other environmental choices, just showing that diet needs to be way up there on the list of things an environmentalist thinks about.

I put my favorite food pyramid down at the bottom in case anyone asks me what you eat when you don’t eat meat (hey, that’s a catchy caption!).

When I updated this display for schoolchildren last year, I wanted to make it about more than global warming, so I removed a page about What Are We Eating (a lot of meat) and replaced it with some things I wanted to say about the broad range of ongoing disasters of which modern livestock farming is a major cause.  I’ll probably put What Are We Eating? back when I take off the car info. One bit of info I plan to add after “Killing Wildlife” is how many animals the Fish and Wildlife Service kills to protect livestock every year – had a question on that today and couldn’t remember.  It’s a lot.

Because at the kids’ events I was making the point that modern farms don’t look like Charlotte’s Web, I also put a list of how many animals are on the average U.S. farm.

The photos I swiped off the internet.  I deliberately chose mild images that do not show violence, only environmental messes and ordinary crowding.  Nevertheless, people tell me they are shocked.

One last point – notice that I include sources with everything.  I may start with vegan organizations or someone’s blog, but I always follow the sources, make sure they are sources people will trust (like the USDA or UN, not PETA, for instance) and I always print them.  What could be more embarrassing than standing there at an event and having someone tell me, “That’s a myth” or “Why should I believe them?”

All of this said, when I am talking to individuals I seldom yammer blindly on, instead listening for what is important to them.  For instance, someone I talked to today grew up on a farm.  She really wanted to talk, to tell me about her experience, so I listened and asked a lot of questions about how her family related to the animals, how they cared for the environment, and so forth.  After a while I could see that she had strong opinions about caring for animals and was certain that a business that didn’t could not prosper long term.  Every one of the pictures, she said, “I have a problem with that.”   I was able to explain to her how, despite the animals’ poor health, these businesses were able to prosper and even out-compete for the present, but that yes, it put an unsustainable strain on the land and it’s ruining our planet.  I didn’t see any need to argue about whether her small farm practices were a good idea for the planet, health, or peace.  Small steps, low-hanging fruit.  We had a great talk, I learned more about small farmers’ attitudes towards animals and what happens on a small farm, and she went away understanding how most meat in the stores is produced now, and the impact it’s having.   What would have happened if I hadn’t listened first?

I encourage anyone to do outreach like this.  Brush up on the issues, have some visual materials (you can reproduce my display if I send you the files), and get out there.  Earth Day is coming up – what’s going on in your community?  All the environmental events I’ve been to, I alone or with RAVS am the only one talking about diet.  If you’re not there, is anyone talking about it?  My first event I wasn’t even a member of RAVS – I just talked the event organizers into letting me have a table for free!  I’m an introvert by nature, but I walked in with just this display and a smile.  Visitors asked, “Who are you with?”  Me!  Just me!

A World in Denial of What it Knows

If you are interested in social issues, I bet that title is nothing new to you.  It’s the title of an opinion article in yesterday’s N.Y. Times (link).  The author expands on Donald Rumsfeld’s “known knowns, known unknowns,… and unknown unknowns” to suggest that there are also unknown knowns.

This happens when people ignore something that everybody should really know.  For instance, “What kind of willful obtusity ever suggested that subprime mortgages were a good idea?  An intelligent child would have known that there is no good time to lend money to people who obviously can never repay it.”  The author also mentions Bernie Madoff, whose figures were demonstrated to the S.E.C. nine years before the scandal to be “not merely incredible but mathematically impossible.”

I have been struggling to understand this phenomenon for years, only I have called it the line between ignorance and indifference.  If you have been paying any attention at all to environmental, social, or animal welfare issues, you have probably wondered about this yourself.  I have seen people accept facts and then refute the obvious conclusions.  I have pinned people down in debates to saying the most ridiculous things you can imagine, for instance that a subsistence farming family in South America is to blame for having their only water source, a nearby pond, polluted by foreign farming conglomerates clearing the rainforest for soybean production.  When I asked how this could possibly be their fault, the only thing I could get out of him was, “I can’t let them off so easy as you can.”  Huh?

I think people have worldviews, influenced by their culture (here’s my discussion of American values), prejudices, stereotypes, and habits.  They defend these close to their hearts even in the face of contradictory evidence, because to let them go is frightening.  For instance, the discussion about the South American family was really about bad things happening to good people; the person I was talking to refused to believe in that, I would say because it means ultimately we do not have the final say about what happens to us.  We can wear seat belts and go to church and stay inside when it snows and not use natural gas and still our house can burn to the ground.  This same person once told me that the family of the girl in California who was kidnapped from her bedroom several years ago deserved what happened because her window was not locked, only screened.  When I asked, “What about fresh air?” he said “That’s what air conditioning is for.”  Ridiculous statements to defend a belief based on fear.

Maybe when people refuse to believe that the earth is warming, that we are causing animal extinctions, that starving children and a continent ravaged by AIDS matters, or that suffering is suffering whether it’s a dog or a pig, they are afraid of what it would mean in their lives to accept these ideas.  It would mean changing their habits, for instance driving and eating, and opening up to compassion, even feeling a responsibility to do something.

These issues are a bummer, and sometimes they don’t have easy solutions, or easy solutions are outside what we are willing to consider.  So the defense is to deny them, at the expense of truth.

I don’t have all the answers.  I don’t have a Truth Hotline.  But I know a silly statement when I hear it, such as “It’s logical for me to eat factory farmed pork but get angry about puppy mills, because carrots have feelings, too.”  This is the point at which I suspect we have moved beyond ignorance, beyond indifference, and into the middle of denial, the known we willfully unknow.

Looking for our Keys in the Dark

There’s an old joke: One man is walking down a dark street and comes across another man on his hands and knees under a streetlight.  “What are you doing, friend?” he asks, and the other man answers, “Looking for my keys.”  “Oh,” says the first man, beginning to help him look, “did you lose them here?”  “No,” answers the other man, “I lost them over there, but the light is better here.”

I was thinking of this joke this morning as I walked around a “Live Green” festival after having tabled at a vegetarian society booth for a few hours.  The single most important thing people can do for the environment is change to a plant-based diet, but because no one wants to do that or thinks anyone else will, we fill our festival with recycled-magazine wallets.   Out of about 80 booths, one (ours) was devoted to changing diet.  The other 79 were for solar energy, insulation, electric cars, native herbs, and maple syrup.  There was a booth devoted to a device which will strip the paper label off your cans before you recycle them, because the recycling company just burns them on the can.  To repeat, the same number of booths promoted a can label remover as a plant-based diet.

I stopped by a booth promoting cooling our city’s greenhouse gas emissions, basically trying to get people to be more environmentally responsible.  I was a bit glum at the prospect of being nagged about driving, and she seemed put off by my discouragement, by my disinterest in discussing my laundry-drying habits (line-dry, by the way).  I must admit that it is a bit of a pet peeve of mine to be told by a non-vegan how I could become more environmentally responsible; I do a lot of other stuff, I just feel like those things are dwarfed by my choice of diet.  I picked up the book they were selling, Low Carbon Diet; despite its encouraging title I found a similar ratio: one page about actual diet and 75 pages about various things that will all have much less impact on the environment than what we choose to eat.

To put this into perspective, the U.N. estimates that livestock accounts for 18% of greenhouse gases, which is more than all transportation.  A more recent study suggests it’s 51%.  But both the festival and the book devoted about 1% of their attention to reducing livestock.

Why are vegetarians the only ones seriously talking about reducing animal consumption?  Why are environmentalists reducing the most important thing people can do for the environment to a footnote?  If the answer is that changing our diet is too difficult, either for them or for the people they’re trying to convince, then aren’t they looking for their keys under the light?  The key isn’t there!  The answer isn’t there either, and as good as it feels, we can’t solve our environmental problems by pestering each other about hemp grocery bags while we continue to consume more meat per capita than any other country besides Uruguay.  Making computer chips into earrings for people who already have too many may be the low-hanging fruit, but diet is the enormous watermelon lurking in the back of the garden.  It occurred to me that the logical way to make the most difference is to stop eating most animal products, and then gently promote this to others to magnify the effect.  That’s what I do, and as much as I’d like to get involved with other environmental organizations, both local and national, I find I can’t get excited about suggesting fluorescent light bulbs to people eating too much meat, and the organizations’ diet myopia makes me tear my hair out.

I don’t mean to belittle these other efforts, I really don’t.  They are an important part of the picture.  It does help to recycle can labels.  But to invest so heavily in them while ignoring our best chance at saving our planet is beyond foolish.  It’s reckless.

For two hours this morning, I stood “in the dark” and invited people to taste free vegan samples, and if they wanted to, chat about meat’s effect on the environment.  My goal was to make it seem less strange or unreasonable.  Eating less meat and suggesting it to others may not be the easy place to look, but it’s where the keys are.

“Enjoy the Green Life” with Microwaveable Beef Pot Roast

Sierra Club's Plan for Environmental Sustainability

Why is The Sierra Club promoting Boston Market’s one-serving frozen Beef Pot Roast?

It’s “Earth-Friendly” because its tray is made partly of calcium carbonate so it uses 40% less plastic and emits 55% less greenhouse gas pollution.  But they could switch their packaging from illegally-harvested mahogany crates to recycled banana leaf envelopes and it still wouldn’t change the fact that beef is the worst thing for the environment you can eat, and a single-serving frozen meal is probably one of the worst ways to eat it.

Sierra concludes, “It’s nice to see a well-established brand make a proactive move toward a more sustainable environment.”

Just Food

I’ve begun reading Just Food by James E. McWilliams, but I don’t think I’m going to finish it.  It was recommended by a fellow vegan, activist Colleen Patrick-Goudreau, and I found myself wondering several times whether I’d gotten the wrong book.

I agree that blindly buying local is probably not very helpful.  This has been clear to anyone doing research for some time, but a lot of people still don’t understand, and he seems to do a good job of explaining it.  You’ve probably heard the argument that driving to the farmer’s market is wasteful, but even if you walk or buy local at your regular supermarket stop, it’s not always better.  The problem is that transportation is often such a small part of the overall environmental and energy impact of food production.  Also included are the efficiency of the farm machines, the climate where the food is grown, the use of inputs such as fertilizer, the consumer’s storage and cooking methods, and type of food purchased (here is short post I wrote about Local vs. Vegan).

His next chapter is on organics, and how they are not the golden answer either.  I had been clued into this in a previous book I read, The End of Food, by Paul Roberts.  That comprehensive book was so thoroughly researched, so deep and broad in subject, long and dense with information and thoughts, I was intimidated to post about it and never did.  McWilliams’ main issues with organics seem to come back to its inefficiencies – it takes more land and inputs to get the same amount of food.  Not only is this a waste of these resources, but the system cannot be sustainably scaled up to meet the demands of a growing world population.  As far as reducing the toxic impact on the environment, he points out that, for instance, manure can add heavy metals to the soils and plants use conventional nitrogen more efficiently than organic, leading to leaching and pollution.  Roberts and McWilliam agree that with both conventional and organic there just doesn’t seem to be any getting away from external inputs, trucking something from far away out to the field.  “Closed” systems with cows grazing and chickens eating bugs in the grass can be very efficient but just don’t scale up very well.

Where I part company with McWilliams completely is in his third chapter on GM foods.  I think I can sum up McWilliams’ position like this: he doesn’t like the business tactics of agritech companies, but feels we should trust them and government regulators with regards to safety, give the technology the benefit of the doubt, and in fact GM is necessary to feed the world.

I read a book, Seeds of Deception, by Jeffrey M. Smith.  I am not sure that book is perfect, but it raised some very good points, and left me in doubt of virtually everything McWilliams says on the subject.  When I got to McWilliams’ section on Bt, I had my “gotcha” moment.  I knew he was not giving the whole story.  Bt is a bacterium which kills caterpillars, and organic farmers use it as a pesticide.  It’s not harmful to other species, and so makes an excellent targeted pest control.  Biotech companies have modified the genes of corn, potatoes, and cotton to produce the Bt toxin, and thus their own pesticide.  McWilliams says that the opposition to this technology was about people not wanting to eat a food with pesticide in every cell, but that Bt is harmless to non-target species and in fact sprayed onto organic crops.  I thought that was fair enough until I read this, that GM Bt is not the same as natural Bt, only natural Bt has been tested with humans, and that Bt is now showing up in human (including fetus) blood, which would not happen with quickly-degrading natural Bt.

People were also upset that Bt pollen would get onto milkweed and kill monarch butterflies and their caterpillars, which eat only milkweed.  I didn’t like his criticism of the Cornell study which found this, which begins by telling us that “monarch larvae and their butterflies do not eat corn pollen, only milkweed” [p.82].  This is false, since while they only choose to eat milkweed, they will eat corn pollen if their milkweed is dusted with it, as would happen in or near a corn field, since corn is wind-pollinated.  This is the whole issue Cornell was looking into, not what would happen if monarchs changed their diet.  The rest of his reasons mostly seem to be the hope that corn pollination and monarch feeding would never coincide.  Cornell assumed it might happen at least sometimes, but McWilliams finds it “unlikely.”   I have to let this one go, since I don’t feel I have the knowledge to evaluate the sources of the studies that refuted this.

Which brings me to a related point.  I don’t know who to trust any more.  I don’t consider myself paranoid or a conspiracy theorist.  Maybe I have read too many fear-mongering books, but here’s the running tally: I don’t feel I can trust business, the USDA, the FDA, Congress, the Supreme Court, universities (many of whom rely on corporate funding), or the media (many of whom rely on corporate advertising).  I’m sure these bodies are mostly composed of good people, but so often the ones in real power have an incentive to omit or lie.  In order to know whether Bt crops are truly harmful to monarchs, I need to not only evaluate the study’s methods, which fortunately is done in peer review, but also know who is paying whom. Monsanto is so enormous, has so much at stake, and has clearly engaged in intimidation (seen “Food, Inc”?), that it is not inconceivable that much of this research is biased.  I’ve lost my faith, not in people, but in institutions.

Returning to the gotcha point, there is another issue regarding GM Bt, and I read this chapter in vain for his discussion of it: insect resistance.  Wikipedia puts it well: “Constant exposure to a toxin creates evolutionary pressure for pests resistant to that toxin.”  Organic farmers foresaw this, and indeed it is happening, despite some measures biotech has taken to forestall it.   A population of Diamondback moths is now resistant to the spray form, and a population of pink bollworms is resistant to the GM crop.  Organic farmers are opposed to Bt crops because it takes an important public resource, Bt toxin, makes money off of it for a short term, and then ruins it for everyone and moves on.  Maybe we could call it “resistance pollution.”  McWilliams is silent on this important issue, and it is my main criticism, my firm handle to know that he is leaving important points out of this book.

One of McWilliams’ prime reasons for supporting GM crops is that it reduces pesticides.  Indeed it does seem to, but I don’t think it’s worth it.  As bad as pesticides and herbicides are in the environment, they are nothing compared with a new plant let loose, if it turns out to be bad.  We can stop using pesticides and slowly the environment clears the toxin.  But once you have introduced a seed into the wild, the incredible power of reproduction, the whole reason for all life on earth, takes over.  Unintended contamination has already happened.  We’re tinkering with things that can’t be undone, genies that will not go back into their petri dishes.

McWilliams concedes in the end that this is a very complex issue with many counterarguments.  I just wish he had not come down so squarely on the biotech side.

I’m going to move on to one more chapter, or actually, I just skimmed half of it – on meat, McWilliams and I seem to agree.  He is a very, very reluctant semi-vegetarian, having come to the conclusion that “a necessary precondition for eating a sustainable diet is to radically reduce meat made from animals that dwell on land” [p.118].  It’s too bad he has such a hard time with a vegetarian diet – I wonder if he would do better with more support.  But it does lend credibility to his research, and he seems to do a good job of summing up the enormous breadth and depth of negative impact that livestock has on the environment.

But he was preaching to the choir here, and I don’t think I’m going to read any more, since his Bt resistance omission has caused me to lose faith in his take on other issues I quietly questioned but could not downright refute.  I applaud the idea of a citizen (he’s a history professor) speaking out and challenging the wisdom of the crowds.  I think these are very important discussions to have, even when I disagree with him, and it’s probably unfair of me to criticize him when I didn’t let him finish.

I would recommend The End of Food.  Having read two opinions on the GM issue, I would like to read another book on that, perhaps more credible than either Smith’s or McWilliam’s.  How I evaluate that is beyond me.

120 More Children Now Know What a Real Farm Looks Like…

…and why it matters.

I went back to the zoo again today, to give another presentation with fellow vegan Carol like we did last year. This post might only make sense if you have read last year’s.

Orangutan

Darnit, I forgot to bring my camera.  I walked past the lemurs we stood in front of last time.  They still have their 12″ weed in a pot to remind them of the natural world, but I see that their cage has been updated with a 2 x 4 foot scrap of grassy sod thrown down onto the concrete.  I saw these scraps scattered in all of the concrete-floored cages.  I didn’t see any animals enjoying them during my stay.  I saw an emu staring longingly out the back of her cage into the woods, sod scrap ignored behind her.

I found this photo from our zoo online, so you can see the orangutan’s concrete and steel “habitat.”

We were to be talking to 5th graders today, so I altered a little from last year when we had middle-schoolers.  I varied the talk a bit as class by class had their turn, and the following is what we ended up with, seeming to work very well with this age group.  I had decided these were the main points I wanted to make:

1. Farm animals do not live on idyllic farms; they live on factory farms.
2. Factory farms pollute.  Also, eating animals is more wasteful than eating plants.
3. Cutting back on animal products can make a big difference for the environment, probably bigger than most other choices the kids have.  And it isn’t all or nothing.

So, like last year Carol started out asking the kids why they thought someone might want to be vegetarian, and again the kids all mentioned the “not killing the animals” issue first.  Some kids were able to come up with health, but not a single one of 120 kids thought of the environment.  So Carol talked for a minute about how wasteful eating animals is before turning it over to me.

I had copies of the same books as last year, so showed them the same images from Charlotte’s Web and Minerva Louise.  I said I loved these books and thought they were great for depicting kindness and loyalty, for instance, but they they were not very good at showing today’s farms.  I said most animals had not lived on farms like this for 50 to 60 years, and that it was important to understand that because it was hard to see how Wilbur and Minerva Louise could be threatening the environment.

Then I showed them the same three photos from last year, two of battery cage hens and this one of pigs.  I explained what the pictures showed and read the 2007 national average of animals per farm I had posted on my display board:

Old McDonald Had How Many Chickens?
Average number of animals per U.S. farm site in 2007:
Cattle    3,810
Dairy    1,481
Pigs    5,144
“Broiler” Chickens    168,000
Egg-laying Chickens    614,000
Source: Factory Farm Map

The kids were shocked at the numbers for battery cage hens: 200,000 per barn, several barns per farm, that’s over half a million hens, not the dozen we might imagine living behind the farmhouse.

Next I wanted to give them an overview of the breadth of problems factory farming contributes to, so I read from my display board again:

Modern Livestock Farming is a major cause of:

• Water Pollution
• Air Pollution
• Acid Rain
• Greenhouse Gases
• Land Degradation
• Loss of Biodiversity
• Loss of Habitat
• Killing Wildlife
• Diseases like salmonella, e. coli, and MRSA, swine flu, avian flu
• Antibiotic-resistant bacteria

Then I started tackling as many of those as I could cover, usually just a few, but I had to be flexible because we often had extra time, except for the group where after the teacher got off her cell phone, in the middle of my talk, she began loudly asking the kids who needed to go to the bathroom; after a minute of sorting out where they would meet when they came back, being seemingly oblivious to the fact that I was trying to give a talk five feet away from her, she walked off to the restrooms with half the class.  This was a teacher.  It just occurred to me that possibly it was not just atrocious manners but sabotage.

Slash and Burn

Moving on, I covered greenhouse gases first, because that is what the display had been originally designed about (“A Disregarded Truth”).  I told them about how livestock causes more greenhouse gases than transportation, then moved onto Amazon deforestation with photos like this, as well as a photo of resulting pastureland and soybean fields.  I said the soybeans were not for tofu but for animal feed.  I told the kids I’d heard sort of a sad joke, that chickens were eating the rainforest, and this is what it referred to, chickens eating rainforest soybeans.

Burning Manure Mountain at Nebraska Feedlot

Then I showed two photos that covered air & water pollution and greenhouse gases all at once.  This is my favorite to show to kids.  I say, “Doesn’t this look like a lovely scene?  I might hang this on my wall.  It seems to be some gentle cattle with the snowy Rocky Mountains behind them.  But this is actually the edge of a feedlot,” and I show them two photos of feedlots.  “Can anyone guess what these mountains really are?”  No one could.  “They’re mountains of poop!  Not only that, they’re on fire!  Mountains of flaming poop!”  Fifth graders found this very interesting.  I went on to explain that there are so many animals in the feedlot that there is no good way to dispose of their manure, so it piles up in this mess.  It washes down to pollute the land and water, it puts out ammonia and hydrogen sulfide to contribute significantly to acid rain, which damages aquatic ecosystems, kills fish, and damages forests, among other things.  Finally the poop mountains, in addition to stench, put out methane, a potent greenhouse gas, which along with cow burps and farts makes them a significant contributor to global warming.

Pig Manure Lagoon

This is the second picture, and I would say, “this looks like any pond you might find on a farm.  You’d expect to see ducks on it.  But there’s a sign posted there and it says, ‘Keep Out, Polluted Water.’  You don’t want to swim in this pond, because it’s a pig manure lagoon.  Now, Kodak can’t run a pipe out the back of its factory and pour raw sewage or other toxic pollution into a pit, but farms do not even need a permit to do it as long as they don’t intend to dump in a stream.  But these lagoons leak all the time, have killed millions of fish, and farm runoff is the main reason why 60% of American streams are polluted.”

Then I would talk about the waste of energy using this graphic from Marc Bittman.  Maybe it was because it was later in the talk, but this did not seem to interest the 5th graders as much as the middle-schoolers last year.  Click to enlarge.

I wanted to make the point that what we eat is a really important environmental decision in comparison with so many of the efforts we hear about all the time, like driving too much and turning off the lights, so I talked about this graphic on my display: its-not-the-bag.  I made sure to say that I wasn’t belittling the other choices we are urged to make for the environment, just pointing out that what we eat, though we hardly ever hear about it, belongs at the top of that list.

Lastly, I made the point that while the two of us are vegan, the kids did not need to be vegan to make a difference, and that any amount of meat they cut down would help the problem.

Carol asked if any of the kids thought they might like to choose less meat after hearing what I had said, and most kids raised their hands.  She handed out some materials, mostly PCRM’s Kids Get Healthy booklet, which looked really nice.

Carol told me a fellow vegan had asked her, “They let you talk about vegetarianism to 5th graders?”  She answered, “So far!”

51%

Worldwatch Institute (Wikipedia entry) is claiming that the 18% greenhouse-gases-from-livestock figure that the U.N. came up with is too low, and the actual number should be 51%.

Last year the U.N. did urge people to move to veganism.

Why I care what other people eat

I was commenting at a blog the other day in favor of recent proposed legislation meant to nudge people into making better food choices.  A reply to my reply asked me why I care what other people eat.  I had to think this over a bit, but I have an answer, and prefer to give it its own space here on my own blog.

I care what other people eat because of compassion, the food environment my family faces, and concerns about costs and sustainability.

First the background.  People are not making food choices in a vacuum.  They are making those decisions in an environment which is slanted in such a way that they are encouraged to make unhealthy choices.  Unhealthy food is subsidized by the government (through grain which is converted into meat, sugar, and fat) and is more profitable for food companies and retailers.  Unhealthy quantities are pushed on us through ubiquitous placement and marketing by a food system that needs us to buy more, more, more, in order to remain competitive.  The fact that we can only eat so much has been ignored and, actually, disproved; turns out we can eat more calories than we used to, and than we should.

What this means is that the status quo, expecting people to suddenly make better choices, regardless of whether they are children, whether they can afford it, whether it is available in their neighborhood, and whether they are relentlessly marketed unhealthy food, is unrealistic, as has been proven by decades of rising obesity.  Thirty-four percent of the U.S. population is now obese, and an additional 34% are overweight.  Yes, that’s 68% of adults over a healthy weight.   Almost 17% of U.S. children ages 2-19 are obese.  How is a two-year-old responsible for being obese?  How will blaming the child’s parents help the child?  Scroll down at this page from the CDC to see an amazing map showing the population relentlessly getting heavier, state by state, through the years.  Blaming individuals hasn’t worked for the past 30 years, as obesity rates have risen, so what makes us think that it’s going to work in the future?

The U.S. Center for Disease Control introduces their entire obesity section not with an urge to “put down the fries, fatty,” but with this:

American society has become ‘obesogenic,’ characterized by environments that promote increased food intake, nonhealthful foods, and physical inactivity. Policy and environmental change initiatives that make healthy choices in nutrition and physical activity available, affordable, and easy will likely prove most effective in combating obesity.

But to return to the question, so what?  I provide good food for my family and we are healthy.  Why don’t I mind my own business?  Why should I care what my proverbial neighbor eats?

I care because I have compassion.  The same compassion that leads me to forgo eating animal products leads me to support legislation that tries to undo the unfair food environment in which we are immersed, an environment I have been lucky to resist not because I’m a superior human being with stronger character (I’m not) but probably because of a combination of good genes, good socioeconomic status, a mother who ate well during pregnancy and nursing and cared about nutrition and family suppers, and a leaflet someone handed me that led me to become vegan.  I have compassion for the 68% of overweight adults and the real suffering that ensues; the risks for these diseases increases:

• Coronary heart disease
• Type 2 diabetes
• Cancers (endometrial, breast, and colon)
• Hypertension (high blood pressure)
• Dyslipidemia (for example, high total cholesterol or high levels of triglycerides)
• Stroke
• Liver and Gallbladder disease
• Sleep apnea and respiratory problems
• Osteoarthritis (a degeneration of cartilage and its underlying bone within a joint)
• Gynecological problems (abnormal menses, infertility)

People who are overweight also suffer social stigma, employment bias, and low self-esteem, often along with a continual struggle with the unhealthy food that surrounds them.  Overweight people often report that they never stop thinking about food – it controls their lives much like an addictive drug.  For this I have compassion, and if I can speak up to encourage laws to prevent overweight and obesity, I will.  I care.

I have compassion for the 925 million hungry of this world who would like to eat the grain wasted when it is fed to animals.  Thirty-six million people died of malnutrition in 2006.  Of course this is not all our fault, and this is a complex issue, but our country’s food policies, including subsidies which not only encourage our inefficient consumption but also unfair trade, absolutely play a strong role.  I support domestic and international policies and encouragement of personal diets that take world malnutrition into account.  I care.

I also have compassion for the animals suffering in this food system under government-skewed economics that encourage us to eat more of them because their feed is subsidized and their negative environmental and health impacts are not paid for at the checkout counter.  If I can encourage legislation that brings the price of meat in line with the real costs, I will.  If I can lift the veil of secrecy that hides the horrible things done to farm animals in our name, I will.  I care.

My children eat well at home, and I pack lunches for them because the school lunches are not healthy.  Did you know there is currently no limit to the amount of sugar that can be in a USDA-approved school lunch?  And yet there are minimum calorie requirements, and insufficient funding.  Hmm, how can schools put in enough calories with hardly any money?  Sugar and fat are the cheapest calories (remember corn oil and high fructose corn syrup are subsidized by the government?), but the fat actually is restricted to 35% of calories (still a lot), so now you know why school lunches are loaded with fat and sugar.  So I support legislation to improve school lunch standards for other kids, even though I side-step them myself.  Here are some other ways I mentioned in an earlier blog about how the food environment impacts my kids despite my best efforts.  We seldom eat out or watch TV, but my kids have personally encountered these:

Restaurant kids meals are always horrible, commercials on TV encourage kids to eat unhealthy food, teachers have kids visit web sites from candy companies in school, unhealthy snacks are often given to kids in preschool programs, lollypops are handed out on the way out of restaurants, fast food restaurants line the streets near schools, candy and sugary drinks are sold at gas stations and drug stores on the way home from school, schools have vending machines selling sports drinks and candy, weekly birthday or holiday parties include cupcakes with 4″ of icing, classes that behave well earn pizza or doughnut parties; chips, cookies, ice cream, and Little Debbie snack bars are sold daily in the lunchrooms, and on the first day of school my son’s teacher handed out taffy to kids who raised their hands.  Every one of these situations makes parents’ job, to raise healthy kids, harder.

Someday soon my kids will be on their own.  I hope that I, like my mother, can inoculate them against the toxic food environment they will face 24/7.  But if I can speak out to help improve that environment to make healthy decisions easier, I will.  I care.

I’m concerned about our nation’s diet’s effect on health care costs.  The Physician’s Committee for Responsible Medicine makes the connection between this issue and our hair-tearing about the high costs of medical care:

“Even if the steak and cheese produced on American farms foster health problems, our government rallies behind agribusiness all the way to the emergency room.  Sadly, every administration in recent decades has been caught up in a system that not only tolerates ill health, but encourages it.” – Barnard

Almost 10% of total U.S. medical expenditures are attributed to overweight and obesity.  The Congressional Budget Office calculates that if obesity rates continue to rise from 2007′s 28% to 37% in 2020, health care spending will be 7% higher than it would be if obesity rates were to be reversed and drop to 20%.  I support legislation that will lead to a reversal in obesity rates because I care about health care costs that our family pays through insurance premiums and taxes.

I’m very concerned about the environmental unsustainability of Americans’ current eating patterns, and trends in the developing world.  We eat more meat per capita than any other country except Uruguay, so we can hardly ask others to cut back, but the planet cannot, cannot support even the current worldwide population eating like Americans do.  I’m not talking about causing some pollution somewhere, maybe a few frogs die, I mean it’s physically impossible, but on the way to the impossible we will irreparably harm our planet.  Our choice of diet is having an enormous and unsustainable impact on water usage and pollution, acid rain, soil erosion and pollution, air pollution, global warming, wildlife, oceans, antibiotics, and non-renewable energy.  I don’t mean that our unavoidable need to eat causes these problems, I mean we make them magnitudes worse than they need to be because of the discretionary foods we choose to put in our mouths.  The example we set, the culture we export, and our inability to ask others to do what we cannot is setting the stage for a disaster.  The U.N. knows this and is urging the world to adopt a plant-based diet.  One of the suggestions to reduce energy use from a University of Wisconsin researcher who calculated energy use of foods is to “decrease consumption of beef, sugar, and highly processed foods.”  But right now our government is subsidizing exactly these foods through grain subsidies, making them cheaper and therefore increasing sales.  I support ending those subsidies, or if that is politically impractical, counterbalancing them with taxes on unhealthy foods or subsidies on healthy foods.  I care what people eat because our diet is ruining our planet.

All legislation is not equal.  We can debate the merits of particular bills, their costs and effectiveness.  But first we need to care.

We Feed the World

Every five seconds a child under ten dies of starvation. A child that dies of starvation is in effect murdered.

-Jean Ziegler, UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food

I just watched “We Feed the World,” a documentary about the globalized food industry.  A quote on the front cover uses the word “absurdities” and I think that’s an apt description.  The first segment, showing how difficult it is for farmers trying to make a living growing wheat, which sells for a lower price than road salt, ends by showing enormous quantities of two-day-old bread being discarded; I’m talking a mountain of bread dumped by the truckload, while mentioned several times during the film is the fact that 100,000 people die of starvation every day.

I had a little trouble relating to this Austrian film with English subtitles.  Quantities were often metric, currency was in euros, and most of the complaints were about the new E.U. laws.  In a way I found it comforting that America doesn’t have the only stupid food system, but of course there is real suffering involved here.

After seeing how poorly this industry is working for so many farmers and consumers (can we call starving people consumers?), the filmmaker makes a visit to Nestle for an interview with the CEO, Peter Brabeck.  I don’t think I agreed with a single thing he said, and of course ending the movie with his out-of-touch words is the whole point.  I don’t often talk back to movies, but I gave Peter Brabeck a piece of my mind when he called the notion that people have a public right to water “extreme.”

Other topics covered in the documentary are large-scale fishing, hybrid seeds, rainforest deforestation for soybeans for animal feeds (“chickens eating the rainforest”), broiler chicken production, and greenhouse vegetables.