Not as extreme as the standard western diet…
What would you say is the greatest threat to our existence? War? Famine? Aliens? Well, what if I were to say that it’s the Western diet – crazy right? Give me a few minutes to explain myself and you might be surprised.
If everyone ate a Western diet, we would now need 3 planet earths to sustain us. As outlandish as that claim sounds it is very distressingly true – for Americans that figure goes up to a staggering 4.1 planets! Vegetarianism and Veganism is about so much more than caring about the suffering of animals, it’s also about caring for the human race and about wanting our children and grandchildren to have a planet to live on. We can no longer afford to be ignorant about the
damage that the Western diet causes.
Almost 30% of the available ice-free surface area on the planet is dedicated to livestock. To some of you that may not sound like a lot, but when you break it down and realise that 3.5 billion acres could feed 10 billion vegetarians but only 2.5 billion omnivores, that figure becomes pretty shocking. Can we really afford to dedicate so much food and land to a luxury diet? Friends of the Earth estimated that each year, forest land equivalent to the size of Latvia is used to grow crops to feed cattle and a similar acreage of peat and wetlands has been converted into farmland… is it only me that finds this figure disturbing?
In conjunction with this, many people are aware that water is fast becoming the new oil, in a few years time countries will be going to war over it, but do you know where most of it goes? I guarantee that this isn’t caused by people leaving the tap on when they brush their teeth or watering the grass during a heat wave. It also only takes approximately 229 lbs of water to grow one lb of rice and only 60 lbs to grow one pound of potatoes. So where is it all going?
Well, it takes an overwhelming 20,000 lbs of water to produce that juicy 16oz steak and an astonishing 1,000 litres to produce 1 litre of milk – that’s less than the average 2 pint bottle! Farming now uses a gobsmacking 70% of all water available to humans; now give me a counter argument to veganism that justifies this abuse of natural resources.
As well as draining the planet’s resources, omnivorous diets also have a direct impact on global warming. In fact, livestock farming ranks as one of the three greatest sources of climate changing emissions, with the combined total of emissions reaching a staggering 51% of the global total in 2009 – this is more than all forms of transport put together!
There is a lot of talk about immigration of late, but nobody realises that a 3 degree temperature rise would create 100 million eco-refugees, if what is happening now is a crisis then how will we cope when that happens? We won’t.
Temperatures have already risen 1.3 degrees above the long-term average, and this year we saw the hottest first five months of any year ever recorded. We’re running out of excuses to maintain such a destructive diet, if something doesn’t change now, then when?
To further this onslaught by the meat and dairy industry, animal waste, sewage, nitrogen
compounds and fertiliser from factory farms are swept into rivers creating ‘dead zones’ that take up all of the oxygen so that little can live. There are nearly 400 dead zones across the world with a combined size equivalent to that of Ethiopia – a country with almost 95 million people in it!
Our seas are so full of toxic chemicals from this industry that 90% of fish and other ocean life, such as plants and coral have perished in the last 100 years. A single waste spill from a North Carolina pig factory killed 10 million fish in 1995 and closed 364,000 acres of coastal wetlands, which are vital for
cleansing and filtering our water, providing essential habitats for threatened plants and animals.
Pescetarianism is also rapidly becoming one of the most unrealistic diets in our society due to the tragic consequences of overfishing. All of our fisheries have been predicted to collapse by 2048, meaning that all major economic fish species and most higher forms of sea life will be completely extinct. As 70+% of our planet is ocean, this annihilation of life will trigger a cascade reaction among all of the food chains across the planet and our ocean ecosystems will break down.
This cannot simply be avoided by reducing your intake of seafood. However, as every year trillions of fish are ground into food pellets for livestock, making the naturally vegetarian cow the oceans deadliest predator, it makes us the planet’s deadliest parasite by default.
If the suffering of the planet or the suffering of innocent animals doesn’t dissuade you from
continuing your current diet, then what about the suffering of other human beings? Regardless of your views on the torture and slaughter that goes on in factory farms, when we suffer we suffer as equals and trust me humans are suffering. How can we justify feeding 50% of the world’s crops to livestock when every day 1 billion people go hungry? With the UNPD’s estimations that we’re heading towards a population of 9 billion by 2050, and 10 billion by 2100, the urgency to rethink our relationship with animals is extreme.
Children across the world starve because their croplands now produce meat for foreigners, and farmers sell what little crops they can produce to the West instead of feeding their own. Those crops sold to the West will never feed starving mouths; they will feed livestock so that the
privileged among us can eat meat. Yes, eating meat is a privilege, a privilege that contributes to the deaths of 20 million people every year due to malnutrition. Reducing our global meat consumption by just 10% can feed 100 million people, you do the maths.
However, it’s important to acknowledge the damage that this diet is doing to us directly in regards to ourselves and our friends and family. An omnivorous diet and the animal agriculture that comes with it accounts for many modern day diseases and the increased struggle that we face trying to combat them. Zoonotic diseases that are passed to us from bugs and animals now account for 3 out of 5 new human sicknesses, such as bird flu and swine flu. These diseases now threaten a pandemic to rival the Black Death, a devastating disease that wiped out half of Europe.
The large majority of these diseases are the result of animal agriculture, but rather than going to the source of the problem we are constantly fighting for solutions to treat it rather than solve it. This is counterproductive due to the fact that millions of pounds of antibiotics are added to animal feed each year to speed up cattle growth, thus contributing to the rise of resistant bacteria, making it more difficult to treat human illnesses.
The actual meat that we are eating massively contributes to the fact that nearly 70% of the West is either obese or overweight; in the UK alone we are more overweight than we have been at any other time in the past 3 decades. With 67% of men and 57% of women either obese or overweight in the UK, and with the risk of breast and prostate cancer significantly higher for meat eaters, along with risk of heart attack being at a startling 50%, it makes you wonder what it is that keeps us doing this to ourselves. What are the benefits?
Well, the risk of heart attack is only 4% for vegetarians, and medical professionals now say that the optimal amount of meat that we should be consuming is nothing. Empirically and epidemiologically, we all have a better chance of living longer, happier and healthier lives by avoiding meat, dairy and eggs.
The Bowland Lady 