The World
Rethinking the Meat-Guzzler
By MARK BITTMAN

A SEA change in the consumption of a resource that Americans take for granted may be in store — something cheap, plentiful, widely enjoyed and a part of daily life. And it isn’t oil.

It’s meat.

The title of this article tips us off that this is to be another meat bashing article. So don’t expect a balanced perspective because you will not be getting one.

The two commodities share a great deal: Like oil, meat is subsidized by the federal government.

Agribiz meat production, including all species of meat animals and poultry, is subsidized under the USDA Farm Bill which is rewritten every four years. A new one is now under review. Over the objections of many, it once again includes massive subsidies to grain farmers, particularly for corn and soy. Grain farmers lobbied successfully for continuation of these subsidies which permit US farmers to sell grain to developing countries at prices which undercut their farmers thus driving them off the land. A point which might be considered by those who advocate producing grain instead of meat so that we can provide grain directly to hungry people: they are already getting it and it is ruining their own farmers.

It is the grain being fed to animals in confined feeding operations (CAFOs) that is directly subsidized, not the meat itself. And it is only too true, as Michael Pollan has effectively written, corn, soy and consequently meat runs on oil. It is impossible to produce monoculture grain and oilseed (corn, soy, canola) except with massive expenditures of fossil fuel.

Bittman is perhaps unaware that locally produced meat animals with access to pasture are not dependent on large inputs of fossil fuel. They run on grass powered by the sun.

 Like oil, meat is subject to accelerating demand as nations become wealthier, and this, in turn, sends prices higher.

As people become wealthier they invariably consume more meat. This is not a character flaw. It is human nature, or perhaps better stated, human physiology. Prices may indeed rise but there is no moral component.

 Finally — like oil — meat is something people are encouraged to consume less of, as the toll exacted by industrial production increases, and becomes increasingly visible.

By whom are people being encouraged to consume less meat and why? To starve out CAFOs? How about we eat non-CAFO meat. That should slow industrial production, right? But wait. Eat less meat because CAFOs are increasingly visible? This is a neatly convoluted example of vegetarian reasoning.

 

Global demand for meat has multiplied in recent years, encouraged by growing affluence and nourished by the proliferation of huge, confined animal feeding operations. These assembly-line meat factories consume enormous amounts of energy, pollute water supplies, generate significant greenhouse gases and require ever-increasing amounts of corn, soy and other grains, a dependency that has led to the destruction of vast swaths of the world’s tropical rain forests.

The foregoing paragraph is such bad writing that I can’t really get at it. Yes, wealthier people eat more meat if they can get it. This has always been true, as stated above. This taste does not require to be satisfied by CAFOs. CAFOs represent an opportunistic and non sustainable commercial response to the taste for meat. We will abolish CAFOs when we as a people get mad enough about them. This will not affect people’s desire for meat and if they happen to be affluent (or hard working homesteaders) they will get it.

The dependency to which Bittman alludes is the manmade dependency of CAFOs for grain. Most people, like Bittman, incorrectly assume that cattle require grain.

Assembly line slaughterhouses are nasty but we know little about their energy consumption. They don’t allow visitors. We do know that the energy they use is primarily that of human labor. They have never been fingered as producers of greenhouse gases. Dead animals are not exhaling CO2 nor do they eat corn.

Just this week, the president of Brazil announced emergency measures to halt the burning and cutting of the country’s rain forests for crop and grazing land. In the last five months alone, the government says, 1,250 square miles were lost.

 

I am pleased to learn that Brazil, now the world’s leading producer of soy, is starting to rethink deforestation. Forests in South and Central America are being cut primarily for soy. It should be noted that most soybeans are destined for oil extraction. The oil is used for human consumption and for industrial purposes. The heat treated defatted soy cake is what animals get.  

Historically, when clearing for new agricultural land, cattle were put on as a catch crop to fatten while the stumps rotted. Now with big equipment forests can be scraped away efficiently and the soil, unimproved by manure or rotting stumps, is treated with herbicides and chemical fertilizer and can be put directly into soy production.

The world’s total meat supply was 71 million tons in 1961. In 2007, it was estimated to be 284 million tons. Per capita consumption has more than doubled over that period. (In the developing world, it rose twice as fast, doubling in the last 20 years.) World meat consumption is expected to double again by 2050, which one expert, Henning Steinfeld of the United Nations, says is resulting in a “relentless growth in livestock production.”

As previously noted, consumption is going up everywhere that income is rising. A great deal of the resulting demand is being met by CAFOs. The demand will not disappear; we need to accept this fact. Instead of telling people they shouldn’t want meat, how about telling them to avoid CAFO meat? How about rescinding the forces aligned against local meat production?

Americans eat about the same amount of meat as we have for some time, about eight ounces a day, roughly twice the global average. At about 5 percent of the world’s population, we “process” (that is, grow and kill) nearly 10 billion animals a year, more than 15 percent of the world’s total.

“Americans eat the same amount of meat as we have for some time.” Yes. Would you believe for over a century? American consumption of meat has actually declined during this 100 year period. By no standard is eight ounces of meat per day excessive. While it may be twice the global average, the rest of the world did not choose to abstain from meat. Lack of meat has been enforced by poverty.

The US exports a lot of beef, pork and poultry. A significant motivation for NAIS* is to defend that export market by creating a perception that US meat is totally safe.  

Growing meat (it’s hard to use the word “raising” when applied to animals in factory farms) 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.

Gee whiz! Thirty percent (30%) of the world’s ice free land has always been involved in agriculture, which has historically integrated crops and livestock.

Correction: The FAO stated that livestock production generated nearly a fifth of the world’s methane, not “greenhouse gases”. There is a significant difference. CO2, the greenhouse gas which is produced in the greatest volume, re-enters the atmosphere when manure lagoons ferment. Cattle on pasture are able to sequester CO2 by treading manure and dead grass into the earth.

What the FAO was warning about was methane production. Of recent years methane emissions from ruminants have attracted journalistic attention largely because earlier reports invariably referred to the emissions as farts; this concept seemed irresistible to journalists. After ten years, they do seem at last to recognize that methane is being belched out the mouth.

All fermentation produces methane. The rumen is a fermentation vat, consequently produces its share. Rumen bacteria have been breaking down cellulose by fermentation since the beginning of time. All cellulose is ultimately broken down by bacteria, if not within the rumen of a cow, then by bacteria inside of caterpillars or other plant eating species or by soil bacteria. Were this not happening, dead plant material would be piled to the moon.

Vast amounts of methane is now being released by tundra, melting due to global warming. Several spots in the South China Sea and sea off of California have been discovered to be the source of great bubbles of methane from the ocean floor.

Growing meat animals, raising meat animals, whatever words one chooses, Bittman lumps them together in a blanket condemnation for which he may be forgiven, since that is what the FAO has done. He (and the FAO) needs to sort out what it is he objects to. Is it confined animal feeding operations (CAFOs) with their millions of animals packed together eating grain and excreting manure and dependent upon antibiotics for their survival? Or does he object to animals under any circumstances? When I complain of CAFOs I am complaining of bad animal husbandry. Properly cared for farm animals and wild animals pollute neither the local nor the atmospheric environment. There are now fewer grazing animals than there have been for the last 10 million years.  Buffalo (American bison), just to mention one species, formed grazing herds a mile wide which sometimes took two days to march past. They are credited with having kept the grass of the Great Plains in a healthy condition. The digestive process of the buffalo is the same as that of a cow. 

If cattle are crammed together all of their emissions become more obvious and unlike cattle on pasture, become offensive. The experts have not yet told us whether cows on grain produce proportionately more methane than cows on pasture. It seems unlikely, since the rumens of confined cattle have little of the source material (grass and hay) available. Nature has been somehow dealing with methane for a long time. Millions of ruminants have been around a long time. The excess methane load is of recent origin. Ipso facto, a recent factor must be sought.

 

To put the energy-using demand of meat production into easy-to-understand terms, Gidon Eshel, a geophysicist at the Bard Center, and Pamela A. Martin, an assistant professor of geophysics at the University of Chicago, 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 2.2 pounds of beef is responsible for the equivalent amount of carbon dioxide emitted by the average European car every 155 miles, and burns enough energy to light a 100-watt bulb for nearly 20 days.

By focusing on CAFO meat production, the Bard Center figures miss the point, as do all arguments designed to make people feel bad about eating meat. But perhaps meat eaters can develop a system of EcoPoints which can be traded for permission to eat meat. If I ride my bike to work, may I eat a steak?

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.

This will be inconvenient for citizens of wealthier nations, but it could have tragic consequences for those of poorer ones, especially if higher prices for feed divert production away from food crops. The demand for ethanol is already pushing up prices, and explains, in part, the 40 percent rise last year in the food price index calculated by the United Nations’ Food and Agricultural Organization.

“Grain, meat and energy are roped together” artificially by a system of governmental and corporate controls which exists for profit, not to feed people. In my opinion, ethanol production from corn is a poor idea. After accounting for all the fossil fuel energy inputs required to produce corn, many analysts put the net energy gain at no more than 10%. My cynical view is that the big push towards ethanol from corn can be traced back to the fact that of all the potential energy producing systems on the table, ethanol is the one that requires the most fossil fuel. Oil company profits are minimally impacted. And by the way, meat is a food crop.

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 above statement is a variant on the nursery admonition to “Clean your plate, just think of all the starving children in the world.” The child of course then says, “So send it to them.” In the first place, you can’t send this or any other food to them unless somebody buys it. Farmers don’t work for free and should not have to. In the second place, as most of us, apparently excepting economics professors, are well aware, sending shipments of food to starving populations is at best a short term response to hunger at home or abroad.

In the second place, this tired and overworked admonition is invariably couched in terms of calories. Calories are convenient mathematical units applied to food. But calories derived from grain will support life only briefly. A calorie served up in meat or other animal products (dairy, eggs) will support life and reproduction indefinitely.

People in every traditional culture ever known surround themselves with animals. They don’t do it to waste food. They do it because animals are food. They are the most efficient food source and the food source that supports life, health and reproduction. If those traditional cultures also produce crops for themselves they share these with their animals. They don’t consider this to be wasteful. To call it an “inherent inefficiency” is seeing food production from an urban based, and usually vegetarian slanted viewpoint.

Local food production in which animal and plant production is integrated is what has worked from earliest times. We can do it again when they let us. It will help if food writers were to recognize this logic.

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.

What does this mean, anyhow? Does growing grain create ¾ of the problem? Or is he saying grain contributes to ¾ of some fraction of the problem? Does he suppose that converting grain directly to human diets would cause grain to pollute less?

The cows and other animals on my pasture do not contribute to any identifiable pollution of either water or land. Neither does any grain that I grow.

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. But 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.

The above statement is essentially true. We need to abolish CAFOs. They are a cancer on our land and our souls.

But a word needs to be said about efficiency. Since grain is not the natural diet of cattle, why should it be expected to convert as efficiently to weight gain as it does in species that are well adapted to digesting grain such as pigs and chickens? And what is meant by efficiency? Piling on the grain efficiently generates income for corporations so long as they have access to subsidized grain and are not compelled to take responsibility for resulting pollution. The belief that cattle are poor feed converters is a myth and a cheap shot.

See Endnote for an explanation of the difference between agricultural efficiency and productivity. They are not the same thing.

Those grain-fed animals, in turn, are contributing to health problems among the world’s wealthier citizens — heart disease, some types of cancer, diabetes. The argument that meat provides useful protein makes sense, if the quantities are small. But the “you gotta eat meat” claim collapses at American levels. Even if the amount of meat we eat weren’t harmful, it’s way more than enough.

Whenever research offers the least hint linking meat to illness there follows a stream of dire warnings. No causal connection with meat has ever been found for the above diseases or any other. Correlation is not causation. Piles of research refuting any such cause and effect have been published but seem of little interest to critics of meat. Space here does not permit a comprehensive discussion, which I would love to provide. I will merely note that several traditional cultures such as the Inuit and Masai have subsisted on a diet of virtually nothing but animal products and exhibited exceptionally good health. The Masai still do, but the Inuit now live on sodas and vegetable shortening and sad to say, have all the diseases mentioned above.

The eight ounces of meat Bittman mentions is not “way more than enough”. Neither he nor anybody else is qualified to make such a statement. Less may be sufficient for Bittman. Divide that 8 oz. into three meals a day and it is pretty skimpy for a nursing mother or a man doing farm work.       

Americans are downing close to 200 pounds of meat, poultry and fish per capita per year (dairy and eggs are separate, and hardly insignificant), an increase of 50 pounds per person from 50 years ago. We each consume something like 110 grams of protein a day, about twice the federal government’s recommended allowance; of that, about 75 grams come from animal protein. (The recommended level is itself considered by many dietary experts to be higher than it needs to be.) It’s likely that most of us would do just fine on around 30 grams of protein a day, virtually all of it from plant sources.

 

Bittman’s figures are insupportable. Nobody but God knows how much Americans or anybody else eats of anything. It is entirely guesswork based on what are called “disappearance figures”. These are calculations based on collating reports of how much of a commodity, meat for instance, was produced, (a figure which is itself never hard currency) calculating carcass weights, trying to get accurate figures from supermarket and restaurant sales figures, then making a guestimate. To be remotely accurate you need also to take into account household waste; figures for this are likely more accurate as researchers have spent a lot of time sorting garbage to obtain it. They find that half of all purchased food in the US is wasted. The disappearance figure is what is thought to have been produced minus what is thought to have been sold in the US or exported. Now divide that figure by the population of the US and make it official by printing it in a government publication. Repeat that answer often enough and people start to believe it.

Bittman apparently thinks eating eggs and dairy are an added self indulgence.

He is totally out of line asserting that 30 grams of protein from vegetable sources is enough for anybody. Lumping vegetable and animal protein together, getting 110 grams, then saying it is too much, is irresponsible. The National Research Council recommendations are the work of a large committee that by its mandate must take many factors into account including average income and a number of probabilities that have nothing to do with nutrition. Its recommendation for animal protein is closer to 40 grams. Inflating that figure by adding protein of vegetable origin may cause shock, awe and guilt to the unwary reader. Your body is not impressed. It makes limited use of vegetable protein. Growth, reproduction and tissue repair are sadly inhibited when forced to rely on vegetable protein. The immune system is especially vulnerable. Those of us who grow our own animal products and are able to provide ourselves and families with all the animal protein they wish to eat do consistently report less illness.

What can be done? There’s no simple answer. Better waste management, for one. Eliminating subsidies would also help; the United Nations estimates that they account for 31 percent of global farm income. Improved farming practices would help, too. Mark W. Rosegrant, director of environment and production technology at the nonprofit International Food Policy Research Institute, says, “There should be investment in livestock breeding and management, to reduce the footprint needed to produce any given level of meat.”

The above statement is valid although it does not advance the discussion. Hopefully Rosegrant looks forward to local food production, the only way in which the meat “footprint” can be sustainably managed.

Then there’s technology. Israel and Korea are among the countries experimenting with using animal waste to generate electricity. Some of the biggest hog operations in the United States are working, with some success, to turn manure into fuel.

Where is this argument headed? Shall we stick with confined swine feeding so as to capture more methane?

Longer term, it no longer seems lunacy to believe in the possibility of “meat without feet” — meat produced in vitro, by growing animal cells in a super-rich nutrient environment before being further manipulated into burgers and steaks.

GMO to the max.

Another suggestion is a return to grazing beef, a very real alternative as long as you accept the psychologically difficult and politically unpopular notion of eating less of it. That’s because grazing could never produce as many cattle as feedlots do. Still, said Michael Pollan, author of the recent book “In Defense of Food,” “In places where you can’t grow grain, fattening cows on grass is always going to make more sense.”

Raising cows completely on grass is a perfectly reasonable thing to do. Whenever this is suggested you find people gloomily stating that of course this means you can’t have as much meat. Yet the acreage now devoted to lawns exceeds that of all US grazing land. A puzzled African visitor once asked, “Please explain to me about lawns. You water the lawn, cut the lawn, you throw away the grass, then you do that again next week. What is the reason for this?”  Those naysayers need to get their heads outside the box. There are also vast areas of grassy and brushy municipal land serving as verges for highways and airports. Besides cattle, sheep and goats could prosper on these. This is already the norm in other countries.

Note that Pollan, in granting some marginal land to grazing animals, goes along with the assumption that grain is what farmers should really be producing. I’ll come to that.

But pigs and chickens, which convert grain to meat far more efficiently than beef, are increasingly the meats of choice for producers, accounting for 70 percent of total meat production, with industrialized systems producing half that pork and three-quarters of the chicken.

The belief that cattle are poor converters of feed has been printed and reprinted for so many decades that to now correct this fallacy may take an act of God. Hopefully, God is becoming impatient with this relentless distortion of reality so often used to bash the animal which may be his best gift. For now, let’s try common sense.

So let’s try comparing the rate at which pigs and chickens convert grass to meat compared to the cow’s conversion. Pigs and chickens will disappoint you. In fact, pretty soon they will die. Give the grass, its natural food, to a cow and she competes superbly. The dairy cow is an incredibly efficient converter. She can eat grass and through the action of rumen bacteria break it down and covert it from something we cannot eat (grass) into milk, a perfect food. No industrialized system can equal this.  

Once, these animals were raised locally (even many New Yorkers remember the pigs of Secaucus), reducing transportation costs and allowing their manure to be spread on nearby fields. Now hog production facilities that resemble prisons more than farms are hundreds of miles from major population centers, and their manure “lagoons” pollute streams and groundwater. (In Iowa alone, hog factories and farms produce more than 50 million tons of excrement annually.)

This paragraph does not advance the argument against meat unless you accept it as a given that animals must live in prisons and cannot be raised locally. Animals do produce excrement just as does every other creature from caterpillars to elephants. Collecting it in lagoons and dumping it in waterways is obscene. Animals on pasture enrich the ground for future generations. Their excrement is the indispensable key to sustainability.

These problems originated here, but are no longer limited to the United States. While the domestic demand for meat has leveled off, the industrial production of livestock is growing more than twice as fast as land-based methods, according to the United Nations.

Industrial production of meat (in CAFOs) is only growing because it is profitable. It is profitable because it is subsidized by you and me. The feed is directly subsidized and the resulting pollution gets a de facto subsidy by becoming our problem, not that of the polluter. All over the US and the world people like you and me are perfectly willing to raise animals locally. We are prevented by a network of laws and regulations specifically designed to prevent us from doing so. With these forces in place to prevent us, to then assert that animals cannot be produced locally is more than specious. It is evidence of profound ignorance of animal husbandry, nutrition and human nature.

Perhaps the best hope for change lies in consumers’ becoming aware of the true costs of industrial meat production. “When you look at environmental problems in the U.S.,” says Professor Eshel, “nearly all of them have their source in food production and in particular meat production. And factory farming is ‘optimal’ only as long as degrading waterways is free. If dumping this stuff becomes costly — even if it simply carries a non-zero price tag — the entire structure of food production will change dramatically.”

In Europe polluters must bear the burden of preventing pollution and of cleaning up after it and are liable for resulting health damage. Our laws protect the health of the polluter at the expense of the health of the consumer. Telling us to “Just say no” to meat in order to prevent environmental damage is not a program which has prevented much pregnancy or drug use.

Eshel, the geophysicist, is again quoted, now asserting that nearly all environmental problems have their source in food production. My daughter Sally, an active campaigner for environmental causes, found this claim especially outrageous: “What about offshore garbage dumping? What about suburbs, the ultimate in inefficient living? Draining the Colorado River to water lawns? RV’s? Dumping e-waste in poor countries? Let’s not forget the unregulated degradation from extracting tar sands.” All of these generators of environmental damage could be retrofitted to be pollution neutral, given the will to do so. All are optional behaviors, goods and services not critical to survival.

Food is not optional. Food security and sustainability require big new thinking and the courage to test theory against reality. Meat will find a major place in this new paradigm because it is part of the circle of sustainability.

Animal welfare may not yet be a major concern, but as the horrors of raising meat in confinement become known, more animal lovers may start to react. And would the world not be a better place were some of the grain we use to grow meat directed instead to feed our fellow human beings?

Animal rearing and slaughtering practices when practiced out of the public eye lead inevitably to sickening excess. When these practices are exposed, revulsion against meat is understandable and it is hoped will lead to reforms.

But here Professor Eshel joins Bittman in the Land of Sweet Assumptions. If I work for a lower wage does this mean there will be more money for others? Neither does this brand of selflessness provide for better grain distribution. If grain today or in that future hour when vegetarians have rid the world of animals is to be distributed equitably, then somebody has to be totally in charge. This has a name: Totalitarianism. You take the crop or the land itself away from its owners and distribute the food according to the need you see. Remember the communist credo? “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.” It did not work out happily in Russia or in China. I am a cradle liberal but I know cow poop when I step in it. Wasn’t it Winston Churchill who said, “Democracy is the worst form of government there is except for all the others.”? Let’s stick with democracy.  The feel-good idea that dedicating more land to crops will make it possible for “us” to pass out morsels to “them” is not a long term answer to survival. So far, with the best will in the world, it has not even been seen to work well in a national disaster.

OK, equitable food distribution is a worthy goal. Let us supply the food pantries as generously as we can. Then let us strengthen our local communities with locally grown food in integrated production, plant and animals crops side by side. This was the Jeffersonian ideal and with a certain amount of bickering and snorting it has kept the human race vigorous and inventive in every time and clime unless somebody comes in and forcibly takes over.

 
Real prices of beef, pork and poultry have held steady, perhaps even decreased, for 40 years or more (in part because of grain subsidies), though we’re beginning to see them increase now. But many experts, including Tyler Cowen, a professor of economics at George Mason University, say they don’t believe meat prices will rise high enough to affect demand in the United States.

“I just don’t think we can count on market prices to reduce our meat consumption,” he said. “There may be a temporary spike in food prices, but it will almost certainly be reversed and then some. But if all the burden is put on eaters, that’s not a tragic state of affairs.”

Why is this economist taking satisfaction in reduced meat consumption?

If price spikes don’t change eating habits, perhaps the combination of deforestation, pollution, climate change, starvation, heart disease and animal cruelty will gradually encourage the simple daily act of eating more plants and fewer animals.

Starvation does have a way of changing eating habits. As for the rest of the litany, are you feeling guilty yet?

Mr. Rosegrant of the food policy research institute says he foresees “a stronger public relations campaign in the reduction of meat consumption — one like that around cigarettes — emphasizing personal health, compassion for animals, and doing good for the poor and the planet.”

Who is planning to mount this public relations assault? The campaign against cigarettes took fifty years and was based on incontrovertible scientific evidence. This is not to suggest that a publicity campaign based on untruths, half truths and soft headedness cannot sway public opinion and behavior. Indeed, that is how we get into most wars and conduct political campaigns. In this case the scientific evidence supports meat eating, also eating eggs and dairy. Eventually truth will prevail. Let us hope that it does not, as in the case of Galileo, take 400 years.

It wouldn’t surprise Professor Eshel if all of this had a real impact. “The good of people’s bodies and the good of the planet are more or less perfectly aligned,” he said.

Now the geophysicists feel qualified to tell us what to eat.

The United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization, in its detailed 2006 study of the impact of meat consumption on the planet, “Livestock’s Long Shadow,” made a similar point: “There are reasons for optimism that the conflicting demands for animal products and environmental services can be reconciled. Both demands are exerted by the same group of people ... the relatively affluent, middle- to high-income class, which is no longer confined to industrialized countries. ... This group of consumers is probably ready to use its growing voice to exert pressure for change and may be willing to absorb the inevitable price increases.”

There are ellipses in this paragraph so we don’t know what Eshel really said. But one thing is clear from other sources; the FAO was looking at the global effects of CAFO’s. We are left to guess what Eshel means by suggesting that the same people who exert pressure for change will be willing to absorb higher prices. The statement is journalistic fluff.

In fact, Americans are already buying more environmentally friendly products, choosing more sustainably produced meat, eggs and dairy. The number of farmers’ markets has more than doubled in the last 10 years or so, and it has escaped no one’s notice that the organic food market is growing fast. These all represent products that are more expensive but of higher quality.

Quite true. In fact, organic sales are the only segment of the food market which shows any growth not attributable to population increase.

If those trends continue, meat may become a treat rather than a routine. It won’t be uncommon, but just as surely as the S.U.V. will yield to the hybrid, the half-pound-a-day meat era will end.

Where is the cause and effect between farmers’ markets and decreased meat consumption? If we are willing to pay more for other local foods who is to say we will not pay more for local meat? If food costs more we will either pay more or eat less of it whether it is meat or tomatoes. What am I missing here?

I suppose these relentless attacks on meat eaters by persons who believe themselves to inhabit a higher moral plane may eventually discourage some people from eating meat. Their chief object is to be insulting.

Maybe that’s not such a big deal. “Who said people had to eat meat three times a day?” asked Mr. Pollan.

Who said they didn’t?

Pollan is a beautiful writer and impressive investigative reporter. He is accomplished at following a train of historical facts and even teasing apart ethical solecisms. Unfortunately when confronted with questions of science or medicine he backs off. Were it otherwise, he would be aware that the evidence against naturally saturated animal fat, cholesterol, and meat as a health risk is, quite simply, nonexistent

It takes a lot of evidence to overturn well entrenched positions and in this case the challenge is increased by the parallel difficulty of proving a negative. Those wishing to go where Pollan has not yet trodden might start with investigative reporter Gary Taubes’ March 30 ‘01 article in Science**. Taubs describes in rich detail the birth of the anti animal fat idea, which started as a quick political fix by Senator George McGovern designed to help out Lyndon Johnson’s War On Heart Disease. Soon dignified by the name, Lipid Hypothesis, the concept immediately began making so much money for medical people, researchers and food processors that the voices of doubt have been nearly smothered. Pollan and most living vegetarians were born too recently to recall these protests. While pondering this history consider some facts about which there can be no argument: our epidemic of heart disease and cancer is a 20^th Century and now 21^st Century phenomenon. It cannot logically be blamed on the foods upon which people relied for the preceding millennia back to the year Dot and have been eating in declining amounts since about the year the 1900.

A number of recent writers have given us enlightening books on aspects of the house of smoke and mirrors which comprise the now orthodox nutritional belief system. The Weston A Price Foundation’s quarterly magazine Wise Traditions and their website www.westonaprice.org are easily accessible sources of valid nutritional information founded on outcomes rather than theory.

What’s that she said?

Meat animals need not be reared in prison-like confined housing. Instead of rejecting meat, buy meat from locally and humanely reared animals. It’s there.

Research appearing to show that meat causes cancer always gets a lot of press. None of these reports has withstood scrutiny. The cancer relationship turns out to be with polycyclic hydrocarbons formed when meat is overcooked or with chemicals in processed meats, or other factors, not with the meat itself. These corrections get little press coverage.

The relationship between animal fat of any kind and circulatory disease is chimerical and may safely be ignored.

Cattle and other animals are not by nature source points of pollution and should by no means be blamed for the evil results of confined feeding. There are more effective ways to end confined feeding than to avoid meat. For starters, make the feedlot owners pay for damages and clean-up.

The same goes for megalithic kill-a-minute slaughterhouses. We must demand a return to small community based slaughterhouses.

Cattle and other animals on pasture do not unbalance atmospheric CO2 or methane. There are fewer animals in existence now than in former centuries. As with heart disease, no fair blaming a current problem on normal metabolism and breathing that has not changed in thousands of years.

CAFOs are not, as their advocates argue, a necessary evil without which it is impossible to produce enough meat for everybody. Alternatives have not even been considered, let alone tried. Animals can and should be raised locally. To state this will make meat cost more is based on the assumption that subsidies will continue. Meat is cheap not because it is raised in factory farms but because the system is subsidized in a hundred ways. Either offer those subsidies to local growers so that they too can produce meat with the true cost concealed in subsidies that you already paid for in taxes. Or yes, pay the true price for the product.

Eating less meat or a vegetarian diet does not free up grain for the hungry. Aspiring vegetarians need to think about where this bit of unexamined lore is taking them.

Meat eaters are used to being talked down to. Fashionable food discussions maintain a mirthless tone.  Last week on a BBC program in which concepts similar to Bittman’s were under discussion, a women speaking in a tone I associate with a grade school principal shaking her finger and saying “You are all staying right here until we get to the bottom of this”, came out with it straight:  “People are going to have to learn to suffer!”

That’s not the way I see it. People who keep a cow and grow their own food don’t view this way of life as a penance. There are plenty of people in cities and towns who would delight in working a small farm if they had the opportunity. Depending on the crop or type of livestock, a small family working together can easily produce enough food for ten or 100 people who prefer do something else and buy their food.

But there is that word “work”. From infancy we are steeped in the notion that work is unpleasant, go buy our product and avoid work. Work up a sweat at a gym in costly clothing, not by grubbing about with a pitchfork. TV and movie role models are seen scaling mountains or shooting bad guys. They never dig their own weeds, certainly never maintain a milking schedule. Yet the amazing truth is that there remain thousands, perhaps millions of people who don’t mind admitting they love hard work on the land and with animals.

Endnote:

The assumption that more people can be fed on a given unit of land by growing plant products has been around for a long time and does not take into account the work involved in production. The issue is between agricultural productivity and agricultural efficiency. They are not the same thing. American farmland can be enormously productive if you have no need to count the cost of the inputs (fuel, chemicals, etc). The efficiency of a system means the ratio between the work or energy put into a system and the work or energy got out of it.

Using these criteria, a cow grazing on solar powered grass and producing milk and a yearly calf exceeds the efficiency of any system humans have devised. This was obvious beyond any need to explain or defend it until people moved off the land.