SubscribeFrom a climate perspective, beef is in a class by itself. It takes a lot of energy and other natural resources to produce cattle feed, manage the animals’ manure (a major emitter of methane, a potent GHG), get the livestock to market, slaughter the animals, process and package the meat, dispose of the greater part of the carcass that won’t be human food, market the retail cuts, transport them home from the store, refrigerate them until dinner time, and then cook the beef.- Here's a sobering NYT article by Mark Bittman (who's veggie-friendly enough to have written a vegetarian cookbook, but isn't a vegetarian himself and is far from a vegetarian activist). The whole thing is worth reading, but here's an excerpt:
Tally the GHG emissions associated with all of those activities, Sonesson says, and you’ll find it’s the global-warming equivalent to spewing 19 kilograms of carbon dioxide for every kg of beef served. Swine are more environmentally friendly. It only takes about 4.25 kg of CO2 to produce and fry each kg of pork. At the other end of the spectrum are veggies. The climate costs associated with growing, marketing, peeling and boiling up a kg of potatoes, by contrast, is just 280 grams...
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. ...Finally, I'd like to second nanojath's observation that objective, comprehensive research about the questions you're asking just doesn't exist. It's admirable that you're looking for research that carefully avoids a slant in the direction of either vegetarian/vegan activists or the meat industry, but everyone in the world has some kind of slant. Vegetarians (like me) and vegans have an obvious bias. Meat-eaters can't help but have an urge to defend their behavior as ethical. Moreover, anyone who's writing for a general audience (rather than writing for vegetarians/vegans or trying to convert people into vegetarians/vegans) has a bias toward assuring their readers that meat-eating isn't so terrible. No one is trustworthy, and we can't figure out the best way to live with razor-sharp precision. At best we can only make rough guesses about how to best choose among the different imperfect options that the modern world presents to us.
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. ...
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. 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.
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. ...
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.”
Things are also horrible for the human workers and anyone unfortunate enough to live near a leather tannery (all poor people, you can rest assured). An animal's skin will decompose if it's not treated with a nasty stew of toxic chemicals. An animal's skin is natural, sure, but once it's turned into something that won't decompose, it's an eco-disaster many times greater than creating a synthetic leather. Turning an animal's skin into leather requires massive amounts of energy and toxic chemicals such as formaldehyde, coal-tar derivatives, and various dyes and finishes, some of them cyanide-based. And most leather is chrome-tanned. Tannery effluent also contains large amounts of pollutants, such as salt, lime sludge, sulfides, and acids.Here are some EPA regulatory and background documents about the Leather tanning process.
Of course, the process of tanning stabilizes the collagen or protein fibers in skins so that they actually stop biodegrading -- otherwise, your leather shoes would rot right off your feet.
Like every other industry, tanneries have shifted their operations from developed to undeveloped nations, where labor is cheap and environmental regulations are lax. PETA's investigation into India's tanneries found workers in just hideous conditions, forced to breath and touch the entire gamut of toxins, all of which were then dumped into rivers for nearby villagers to drink. You can watch a video that Pamela Anderson narrated for us here; the tanneries are about two thirds into the video.
In New Scientist magazine, a lawyer for China's Centre for Legal Assistance to Pollution Victims describes conditions on one river poisoned by waste from a nearby tannery: "A few years ago, villagers could swim in the river. Now they get blisters on their hands and feet from touching the water. ... When you stand close to the river you can smell rotting flesh because the leather factory dumps its sewage, made up of animal skin and meat, untreated into the river."
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posted by downing street memo at 11:51 AM on October 12