Bellying up to environmentalism

[vaalea]

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/11/15/AR2009111502210.html

Bellying up to environmentalism
By James E. McWilliams
Monday, November 16, 2009

I gave a talk in South Texas recently on the environmental virtues of
a vegetarian diet. As you might imagine, the reception was chilly. In
fact, the only applause came during the Q&A period when a member of
the audience said that my lecture made him want to go out and eat even
more meat. "Plus," he added, "what I eat is my business -- it's
personal."

I've been writing about food and agriculture for more than a decade.
Until that evening, however, I'd never actively thought about this
most basic culinary question: Is eating personal?

We know more than we've ever known about the innards of the global
food system. We understand that food can both nourish and kill. We
know that its production can both destroy and enhance our environment.
We know that farming touches every aspect of our lives -- the air we
breathe, the water we drink, and the soil we need.

So it's hard to avoid concluding that eating cannot be personal. What
I eat influences you. What you eat influences me. Our diets are
deeply, intimately and necessarily political.

This realization changes everything for those who avoid meat. As a
vegetarian I've always felt the perverse need to apologize for my
dietary choice. It inconveniences people. It smacks of self-
righteousness. It makes us pariahs at dinner parties. But the more I
learn about the negative impact of meat production, the more I feel
that it's the consumers of meat who should be making apologies.

Here's why: The livestock industry as a result of its reliance on corn
and soy-based feed accounts for over half the synthetic fertilizer
used in the United States, contributing more than any other sector to
marine dead zones. It consumes 70 percent of the water in the American
West -- water so heavily subsidized that if irrigation supports were
removed, ground beef would cost $35 a pound. Livestock accounts for at
least 21 percent of greenhouse-gas emissions globally -- more than all
forms of transportation combined. Domestic animals -- most of them
healthy -- consume about 70 percent of all the antibiotics produced.
Undigested antibiotics leach from manure into freshwater systems and
impair the sex organs of fish.

It takes a gallon of gasoline to produce a pound of conventional beef.
If all the grain fed to animals went to people, you could feed China
and India. That's just a start.

Meat that's raised according to "alternative" standards (about 1
percent of meat in the United States) might be a better choice but not
nearly as much so as its privileged consumers would have us believe.
"Free-range chickens" theoretically have access to the outdoors. But
many "free-range" chickens never see the light of day because they
cannot make it through the crowded shed to the aperture leading to a
patch of cement.

"Grass-fed" beef produces four times the methane -- a greenhouse gas
21 times as powerful as carbon dioxide -- of grain-fed cows, and many
grass-fed cows are raised on heavily fertilized and irrigated grass.
Pastured pigs are still typically mutilated, fed commercial feed and
prevented from rooting -- their most basic instinct besides sex.

Issues of animal welfare are equally implicated in all forms of meat
production. Domestic animals suffer immensely, feel pain and may even
be cognizant of the fate that awaits them. In an egg factory, male
chicks (economically worthless) are summarily run through a grinder.
Pigs are castrated without anesthesia, crated, tail-docked and nose-
ringed. Milk cows are repeatedly impregnated through artificial
insemination, confined to milking stalls and milked to yield 15 times
the amount of milk they would produce under normal conditions. When
calves are removed from their mothers at birth, the mothers mourn
their loss with heart-rending moans.

Then comes the slaughterhouse, an operation that's left with millions
of pounds of carcasses -- deadstock -- that are incinerated or dumped
in landfills. (Rendering plants have taken a nose dive since mad cow
disease.)

Now, if someone told you that a particular corporation was trashing
the air, water and soil; causing more global warming than the
transportation industry; consuming massive amounts of fossil fuel;
unleashing the cruelest sort of suffering on innocent and sentient
beings; failing to recycle its waste; and clogging our arteries in the
process, how would you react? Would you say, "Hey, that's personal?"
Probably not. It's more likely that you'd frame the matter as a dire
political issue in need of a dire political response.

Vegetarianism is not only the most powerful political response we can
make to industrialized food. It's a necessary prerequisite to
reforming it. To quit eating meat is to dismantle the global food
apparatus at its foundation.

Agribusiness has been vilified of late by muckraking journalists,
activist filmmakers and sustainable-food advocates. We know that
something has to be done to save our food from corporate interests.
But I wonder -- are we ready to do what must be done? Sure, we've been
inundated with ideas: eat local, vote with your fork, buy organic,
support fair trade, etc. But these proposals all lack something that
every successful environmental movement has always placed at its core:
genuine sacrifice.

Until we make that leap, until we create a culinary culture in which
the meat-eaters must do the apologizing, the current proposals will be
nothing more than gestures that turn the fork into an empty symbol
rather than a real tool for environmental change.

James E. McWilliams, an associate professor of history at Texas State
University at San Marcos and a recent fellow in the agrarian studies
program at Yale University, is most recently the author of "Just
Food."