Mark Bittman, a food writer for The New York Times, has written a wonderful, unappetizing article about the miserable implications of industrial meat production. If you've got an extra fifteen minutes, check it out: Rethinking the Meat-Guzzler
Essentially, Bittman writes about the ways we disproportionately allocate resources to meat production, and he speculates on how it's all gonna catch up with us, and soon. The problem is worldwide but as with almost everything else I can think of, Westerners can take most of the blame since we insist on doing everything--including meat eating, apparently--to excess. Americans eat about four pounds of meat a week, though fifty years ago that average was three pounds. Furthermore, Bittman learned 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."So really, we're eating so much of the stuff that even cutting out a small amount--twenty percent isn't that much--would have a huge impact. And after charging through Michael Pollan's latest two books recently, it's pretty clear to me that the effects of a twenty percent reduction would be positive for the environment as well as for people's health. If everyone in America did that, we'd be eating twelve billion pounds less meat each year. Holy crap.
We could probably eat all the meat we wanted with minimal environmental impact if we made sure all of it was sustainably raised--though the problem there, of course, is that sustainable farms can't give us all we want if what we want is billions and billions of hamburgers and chicken wings. However, supporting small farmers will help them produce as much as they're able. If you haven't already done so, before oil prices drive the cost of industrial meat through the roof you might want to make friends with one of these farmers so you have a source of local, responsibly raised, and probably organic meat.
