Political vegetarians advocate a meat- or animal-free diet for the social good. These people believe that by eating a vegetarian diet they are increasing the amount of food available for humans, and that this is a good thing, i.e., that it will prevent starvation.
These people believe that every time you eat a steak, chicken leg, or any other animal product, you are depriving starving people of food.
These people also believe that raising animals causes global warming and causes the majority of agriculture-related pollution, and that adoption of a vegetarian diet based on grains would thus simultaneously feed the starving millions of people and create an ecological paradise.
Unfortunately, as Lierre Keith points out in The Vegetarian Myth
, these people lack crucial information. First, they don’t understand the animals. They calculate the amount of grain you must feed to, for instance, a steer, to produce a pound of beefsteak—some say 4.8 pounds—then conclude this wastes resources since we could send that grain to starving people somewhere (more on that later). In a startling non-sequitor, they then conclude that eating beef causes people to starve.
What they miss, Keith points out by quoting Rodney Heithschmidt and Jerry Stuth:
“[H]umankind has historically fostered and relied upon livestock grazing for a substantial portion of its livelihood because it is the only process capable of converting the energy in grassland vegetation into an energy source directly consumable by humans.”
In other words, as Ms. Keith notes:
“Nineteen billion metric tons of vegetation are produced by plants in grasslands and savannas, and we can’t eat them. Humans and ruminants are not naturally in competition for the same meal: This is where the political vegetarians have gone wrong.”
Put otherwise, if we stop raising and eating ruminants, we would in that be refusing to produce food for humans from grass.
Of course, cattle don’t have a natural adaptation to a diet of corn or grains in general. Ruminants display exquisite adaptation to a diet of grass, leaves, and other plant matter indigestible to humans. It doesn’t matter how many pounds of grass it takes to grow a pound of beef, because we can’t eat grass directly. The problem with our food system lies not in omnivory, but in forcing animals to eat diets to which they are not adapted.
Now let’s say we implemented the vegetarian plan. We take all the livestock off grain, and continue to raise the grain. Then we send it to the people starving wherever. Shall we pat ourselves on the back for our benevolence?
No. The moment you dump free grain into an environment of hungry people, you have destroyed the local farm economy and created an unsustainable economy.
No farmer can compete with giveaways. If you give food en masse to a population, the increase in supply and unbeatable price will drive prices down to nothing and put local farmers out of business.
As Ms. Keith puts it, “It may seem counterintuitive, but the last place to put cheap food is near chronically hungry people.” She quotes Lyle Vandyke, the former Canadian Minister of Agriculture:
“Consider a farmer in Ghana who used to be able to make a living growing rice. Several years ago, Ghana was able to feed [itself] and export their surplus. Now, it imports rice. From where? Developed countries. Why? Because it’s cheaper. Even if it costs the rice producer in the developed world much more to produce the rice, he doesn’t have to make a profit from his crop. The government pays him [subsidies] to grow it, so he can sell it more cheaply to Ghana than the farmer in Ghana can. And that farmer in Ghana? He can’t feed his family any more.”
And quoting Oxfam: “Exporters can offer US surpluses for sale at prices around half the cost of production; destroying local agriculture and creating a captive market in the process.”
On top of that, as Daniel Quinn has pointed out, if you give a population an amount of food that could not be produced in the local ecology, this will cause the population to grow to numbers unsupportable by local food production. Increasing grain production, and increasing the availability of grain for human food, will simply increase the human population.
As I wrote in The Garden of Eating:
“Vegetarians assert we should stop eating meat to increase the supply of food for humans. In the mid-1990s, U.S. livestock consumed 130 tons of grain annually, enough to feed about 400 million people. Food supply experts Russell Hopfenberg, Ph.D., of Duke University (Durham, North Carolina), and David Pimentel, Ph.D., of Cornell University (Ithaca, New York) explain why the vegetarian idea is misguided: ‘Certainly there would be even more human food available if dependence on livestock was decreased. However, because human population is a function of food availability, the resulting increase in available human food would induce a commensurate rise in population. This population increase would ultimately exacerbate the starvation and malnutrition predicament.’[1]”
Political/environmental vegetarians often make claims about the productivity of vegetarian agriculture as oppose to animal husbandry. For example, the British group Vegfam claims that a 10 acre farm can support 60 people growing soybeans, 24 people growing wheat, 10 people growing corn, and only two producing cattle. Keith responds:
“ Set aside the fact that a diet of soy, wheat, or corn will result in massive malnutrition—along with fun stuff like kwashiorkor, pellagra, retardation, blindness—and ultimately death. The figure of two [for] cattle might be true if you assume grain feeding, though I can’t make the math come out.”
She then points to Joel Salatin’s Polyface farm as a refutation of the assumptions in the Vegfam calculations. On ten acres of land, Salatin’s grass-based husbandry produces:
3000 eggs
1000 broilers
80 stewing hens
2000 pounds of beef
2500 pounds of pork
100 turkeys
50 rabbits
This would support at least 9 people for a year, and as Keith points out, “in full health,” since people can live on a diet composed solely of the foods above, whereas none of the foods proposed by Vegfam form a complete diet.
In addition, Salatin’s farm produces a few inches of topsoil per year whereas monocultures proposed by Vegfam destroy topsoil.
Keith also addresses claims that livestock consume too much water. She goes through the figures, showing that vegetarian claims don’t hold water, and more importantly, that animals don’t either:
“But most importantly, animals aren’t ever-expanding water balloons. For a steer, almost all of that water will be returned in the form of urine and feces laden with nutrients and bacteria, value-added as it were, to the land that needs it. For a dairy animal, there’s also milk.”
In other words, animals aren’t consuming and destroying water, they are part of nature’s water-flow cycle, essential to fertilization of the land. Vegetarians appear ignorant of this. I liked this passage Ms. Keith penned:
“The political vegetarians, however noble their intentions, are planning a planetary diet in compete ignorance of where food comes from. Advocates like Peter Singer and John Robbins want us to grow annual grains and no animals at all. Set aside the topsoil, water, climate, and typography [sic, I think she meant topography] problems. What is going to fertilize that grain? Peter, John: what is going to feed your food? Vegetarians, like everyone else in an urban industrial culture, have no concept that plants need to eat, that soil is alive and hungry. They seem shocked when I ask them what will feed their food. Do plants eat? Their expressions say. They don’t just … happen? There was a time when I didn’t know either, so I’m patient. But eventually the question has to be answered: fossil fuel, or manure?”
Ms. Keith addresses all of the other claims made by political vegetarians against animal husbandry, like that it uses more fuel than monoculture or causes global warming. In fact raising animals on grass is more fuel efficient than raising row crops, and monoculture of row crops has a net effect of releasing carbon into the atmosphere whereas raising ruminants on pasture has the net effect of sequestering carbon. Get a copy for your favorite political vegetarian.
Notes:
1. Hopfenberg R. Pimentel D. Human population numbers as a function of food supply. Environment, Development, and Sustainability 2001;3:1-15.
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