Growing meat uses so many resources that it’s a challenge to enumerate them all.
But consider: an estimated 30 percent of the earth’s ice-free land is directly or indirectly
involved in livestock production, according to the United Nation’s Food and Agriculture Organization, which also estimates that livestock production generates nearly a fifth of the world’s greenhouse gases – more than transportation.
To put the energy-using demand of meat production into easy-to-understand terms, Gidon Eshel, a geophysicist at the Bard Center calculated that if Americans were to reduce meat consumption by just 20 percent it would be as if we all switched from a standard sedan – a Camry, say – to the ultra-efficient Prius.
Similarly, a study last year by the National Institute of Livestock and Grassland Science in
Japan estimated that 1 pound of beef is responsible for the equivalent amount of carbon dioxide emitted by the average European car every 70 miles, and burns enough energy to light a 100-watt bulb for over a week. Grain, meat and even energy are roped together in a way that could have dire results. More meat means a corresponding increase in demand for feed, especially corn and soy, which some experts say will contribute to higher prices.
Though some 800 million people on the planet now suffer from hunger or malnutrition,
the majority of corn and soy grown in the world feeds cattle, pigs and chickens. This despite the inherent inefficiencies: about two to five times more grain is required to produce the same amount of calories through livestock as through direct grain consumption, according to Rosamond Naylor, an associate professor of economics at Stanford University.
It is as much as 10 times more in the case of grain-fed beef in the United States. The environmental impact of growing so much grain for animal feed is profound. Agriculture in the United States – much of which now serves the demand for meat – contributes to nearly three-quarters of all water-quality problems in the nation’s rivers and streams, according to the Environmental Protection Agency.
Because the stomachs of cattle are meant to digest grass, not grain, cattle raised industrially thrive only in the sense that they gain weight quickly. This diet made it possible to remove cattle from their natural environment and encourage the efficiency of mass confinement and slaughter.
However, it causes enough health problems that administration of antibiotics is routine, so
much so that it can result in antibiotic-resistant bacteria that threaten the usefulness of
medicines that treat people.