Eating the Food Our Food Eats

On an episode of the TV show Parks and Recreation, the character Ron, after being served a plate of salad, tells his waiter, “There’s been a mistake. You’ve accidentally given me the food that my food eats.” The line is funny, but buried within it is a disturbing message about what Americans eat, and what that means for a sustainable planet.

Americans love to eat meat. We eat more meat per capita than any other country except one: Luxembourg [1]. But we eat more meat in a day than Luxumbourgers eat in a year. In terms of total meat consumed, China is on top, but its population is more than four times that of the U.S. A typical Chinese eats only 43% the amount of meat a typical American does [2].

But eating meat is a good thing, right? After all, humans are omnivorous, and each of us has an inner hunter-gatherer inside us. But most hunter-gatherer societies rely on plants for the bulk of their diet, with meat being an occasional if welcome supplement. And it’s a way of life that only works for small groups of people, not for the billions in the world today. 

To satisfy the meat demand of its large population, and to be the world’s fourth leading exporter of meat [3], the United States has developed meat production to an industrial, and highly unsustainable, scale. Let’s look at why American meat production and consumption is unsustainable:

Oil: Cows are fed corn, and the artificial fertilizer and diesel-fueled farm machinery needed trn needs water to thrive. In the relatively dry American Midwest and Great Plains, the water comes mostly from underground aquifers. These aquifers are being depleted much faster than they are replenished by rain.

Land: Using cows to convert inedible (for humans) plants into edible meat is an inefficient use of land. A half-acre of land can support a person eating a low-fat vegetarian diet for a year, while more than two acres are needed to support a person eating a high-fat meat-intensive diet [4]. With a limited (and decreasing) amount of arable land in the world, and the world’s population continuing to grow, eating large amounts of meat may be a luxury the world can no longer afford.

Drugs: Meat production is a business, and the faster a cow can grow, the sooner it can be processed into meat. Feeding cows antibiotics and growth hormones is a cheap and effective way to make them grow bigger and faster. Even if, as the USDA assures us [5], the drugs don’t affect the quality of the meat, the reliance on antibiotics could lead to the next problem . . .

Disease: Corn-fed cows are kept at a density far higher than more traditional pasture-fed cows. This makes transference of disease from cow to cow easier, while the intensive use of antibiotics creates diseases more resistant to antibiotics. It hasn’t happened yet, but a widespread bovine epidemic is not impossible.

Methane: All large animals, including humans, produce methane as a by-product of digesting food, and methane is 23 times more effective a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide [6]. Cows are particularly good at producing methane. One kilogram of beef is equivalent to 34.6 kg of CO. Depending on the cow and the car, the annual greenhouse gas output of one cow can be equal to that of a car driven nearly 8,000 miles [7].

Disparity: Americans eat nearly 123 kg of meat each year [8]. Most of the world’s population eats far less meat that Americans do. This disparity could have political consequences.

All of this seems to add up to one conclusion: our consumption of meat, and especially beef, is unsustainable. So what can we do about it? We’re architects and designers. Most of us aren’t raising cows for food. But what if each of us makes an effort to reduce our consumption of meat? What if each of us decides to go meatless for, say, two days a week? What if, for one week each month, we eat no beef? What if, once in a while, we serve vegetarian food at project meetings? And what if we spread the word to our friends and colleagues? It may not be enough to change the world, but it will help.

I know what you’re thinking: this guy’s a militant vegetarian who expects everyone else to get on the veggie bandwagon. Not so. I love meat. I love steaks and burgers and fried chicken and pork chops and bacon. Put me in a Brazilian barbeque restaurant (where meat is served till you beg them to stop) and I’m in, pardon the metaphor, hog heaven. I rarely go more than a day without eating meat. Yet as I write this, I’ve been a vegetarian for more than a day and a half, and I plan on remaining one until at least lunchtime tomorrow. Two days a week isn’t so bad, and even a small reduction in meat consumption is better than no reduction at all. I’m willing to give it a try. Are you? 

Update on March 21, 2017: According to an article in today's New York Times [9], American have been cutting down on their beef eating, and to a lesser extent in their pork and chicken eating as well. From 2005 to 2014, Americans reduced their beef consumption by 19%.

Footnotes:

1. According to http://www.insidermonkey.com/blog/the-10-countries-that-eat-the-most-meat-331539/8/. Not all sources agree with this. Some give top billing to Hong Kong, others to Australia (and some don’t even mention tiny Luxembourg (see footnote 2)). But writing “Luxembourgers” was more fun than “Australians” or “Hong Kongese.”
2. Source: http://www.forbes.com/sites/niallmccarthy/2015/08/05/which-countries-eat-the-most-meat-each-year-infographic/.
3. Source: http://www.indexmundi.com/agriculture/?commodity=beef-and-veal-meat&graph=exports.
4. Source: http://www.news.cornell.edu/stories/2007/10/diet-little-meat-more-efficient-many-vegetarian-diets. This Cornell study also determined, surprisingly, that a mostly vegetarian diet supplemented with small amounts of meat is the most efficient use of land for food.
5. Source: http://www.fda.gov/AnimalVeterinary/SafetyHealth/ProductSafetyInformation/ucm055436.htm.
6. Source: http://www3.epa.gov/climatechange/ghgemissions/gases/ch4.html. (Some sources say methane is only 23 times more effective than carbon dioxide. See footnote 7.)
7. Source: http://timeforchange.org/are-cows-cause-of-global-warming-meat-methane-CO2.
8. According to http://www.businessinsider.com/countries-that-eat-the-most-meat-around-the-world-2015-8. Other sources, such as http://www.forbes.com/sites/niallmccarthy/2015/08/05/which-countries-eat-the-most-meat-each-year-infographic/, put it at around 90 kg/year. Either way, it’s a lot of meat.
9. https://mobile.nytimes.com/2017/03/21/dining/beef-consumption-emissions.html?smid=tw-nytimes&smtyp=cur&_r=0&referer=https://t.co/IIdsHDR85j