Meat: A Benign Extravagance

As a follow up to the previous essay I wrote on livestock I have some new statistics of note to mention that come from the book Meat: A Benign Extravagance by Simon Fairlie, which I have finally been able to get a copy of.   I feel like the title of the book is misleading because it doesn't seem to be endorsing meat or a meat diet at all.  I think maybe the title was chosen to provoke.  In the end Fairlie seems to say that we will have to dramatically reduce the animal products in our diet to make it more sustainable, but it does advocate keeping livestock as a part of a sustainable food system.

Of major note in the book are the estimates of land use required for production of different food products. There is a lot of information Simon Fairlie gives to support that a straight comparison of meat to vegetables or grain is not as simple as propaganda would lead us to believe. Taking into account that livestock can be grazed directly on pasture (that may not be suitable for grain or vegetable crops) instead of being fed grain or hay, the impact of meat production on human land use for food production in an ideal production system could be far less than the 10:1 ratio often given by vegetarians and vegans as the reason not to eat meat. Grain-fed beef is the least efficient meat in terms of land use, fitting the 10:1 ratio commonly stated as the ratio of land required for amount of food value offered for all meat. Taking into account the ability of pigs to live entirely off food waste and by-products (and the fact that they do in many parts of the world), the potential ratio for pork production is comparable or even lower than that for most vegetable and grain crops. Food waste cannot, in the same way, be fed directly to grain or vegetable crops to produce more food. Statistics are given in the book that estimate that were it legal in the UK to feed food waste to hogs, the waste would be able to supply pork amounting to one sixth of the country's entire meat consumption. Another interesting point is that meat is a more nutritious form of food, so the straight ratio of weight or volume of food cannot be compared directly, a fact most anti-meat advocates ignore. In other words, one must eat more grain and legumes to supply as much nutrients as offered by a comparable amount of meat (of course this varies depending on the meat and type of grain or legume).

Heritage Gloucestershire Old Spot pigs foraging in an apple orchard

 

Another enlightening statistic is the amount of land required for production of vegetable oils, which is about the same as that required for beef in terms of m2 per kilo produced. The amount of land required for butter production is half what is required for vegetable oil and lard is possibly even lower, since pork takes a third of the land to produce that beef does.

In analysis and comparison of different food systems the vegan organic permaculture system is the most efficient in terms of land use and sustainability, using nearly half the land of the livestock permaculture system. They both end up using an equal amount of arable land, but the livestock system uses additional marginal land that would not be suitable for crops.  And whereas the vegan system uses a tractor and biofuel, the livestock system uses draft animals for farm power.  These systems are more efficient than either organic vegan or an organic system with livestock (which is the least efficient), which are not integrated systems set up to recycle all waste and maximize sustainability. Though less efficient than other systems, the organic livestock system is still more sustainable than the chemical vegan or livestock systems. Conventional agriculture is able to feed about twice as many people on a comparable amount of land, but given that it isn't sustainable in the long term, it should not be considered a viable option. Fairlie refers to the Global Opponents of Organic Farming (GOOFs), who advocate the conventional route over the organic, claiming organic agriculture won't be able to feed the ever-growing human population because it uses too much land.

The Road to Serfdom

If you haven't heard of it, The Road to Serfdom is an essay by economist Friedrich A. Hayek and it was first published in 1944. It is Hayek's warning against the potential of centrally planned economies to be easily taken over by dictators and oligarchies.  Hayek felt that the free market could do a much better job in shaping society for the best than any government.  He is often thought of as a sort of nemesis of the economist John Maynard Keynes, whose theories were based in using government to influence and direct the economy. It's been a long road for me to understanding how this essay has been used by the Right as propaganda to influence public opinion about the Obama administration's handling of the economic crisis of recent years.

A couple years ago, I heard an irate teenager in the diner of the conservative bible belt town where I live “educating” a few elderly women about what was being perpetrated by the Obama administration. I listened in with astonishment as the boy told these women, who had been alive since before WWII, about how the world worked. He said that Obama was a socialist and that socialism was one step away from dictatorship. The elderly women listened politely, but though they were probably conservative too, seemed to look with knowing pity on the kid. They probably weren't as politically minded as he was, but a lifetime of experience had made them wise enough to be skeptical. I didn't understand where the kid's logic was coming from, but he sounded like someone who had just been made aware of some great “truth” by an idol, and by the ignorance of the kid's claims, I figured it had to have been a conservative pundit, likely someone like Glenn Beck.

Months later I was listening to a Planet Money podcast where Hayek was compared to Keynes in light of the battle going on in Washington about how to best go about solving the country's economic problems. They mentioned The Road to Serfdom, so wanting to better understand the views of Hayek, I looked up the essay and read it. What I was immediately struck by was how dated it was. It was obviously written at the height of the Nazi regime and would have served well as anti-Nazi propaganda, but was likely meant to be something different. Democratic countries with leanings towards socialist policies,in other words, countries that had government control of certain sectors of the economy, were compared and likened to the Nazi regime. He predicted that these governments were only steps away from authoritarian regimes like the Nazis. The reason the essay seems dated to me is that history has shown his predictions to be wrong.

Keeping livestock for a more sustainable food system

Have you ever traveled through the farm fields of the Midwest and wondered why there is nothing but corn and soybeans as far as the eye can see? I'm sure it's not a question many Americans ask themselves because, by and large, we've lost our ability and our need to make connections between our food and the earth it comes from. All those fields of corn and soybeans are part of the huge portion of the United States that's devoted to producing the meat and dairy products that dominate our diet.

But not all Americans eat so much meat and dairy. Many vegans and vegetarians are opposed to the eating of animal products for environmental and/or animal rights reasons. From the perspective of the animal rights activist, animal production is inhumane, while to the environmentalist it is an inefficient use of land. Eating lower on the food chain is thought to have much less impact on the planet because, given the amount of plant matter required to feed animals, it would be more efficient to eat the plants ourselves.

It's easy to see how anyone could come up with many arguments as to why in the 21^st century the industrial production of meat and other animal products could be considered cruel and unsustainable. It's estimated that livestock worldwide account for 20 percent of the total terrestrial animal biomass, a number that clearly illustrates our impact on life on the planet. Vast acreage is devoted to growing grain to feed livestock that are raised in inhumane conditions in factory farms and feedlots, all to provide a meat-based diet for those in affluent countries. As well, a UN report found that livestock are currently responsible for 18 percent of greenhouse gas emissions from human activity. Those consuming meat and animal products have little awareness of the lack of sustainability of and cruelty inherent to their food system.

Unfortunately, in arguments against animal agriculture often no distinction is made between the production of animals in factory farms and the more humane, small-scale keeping of livestock that has been the human norm for thousands of years. It is true that a vegetarian diet can require less land for a given population size, however, in terms of sustainability, there is evidence to support that making use of livestock in our food production system will be more sustainable over the long term. Livestock were raised sustainably for thousands of years before modern times, so it's obvious that livestock are not the problem; the number of them and the practices we use to raise them today are the problem. In the coming decades we will all have to find alternatives to fossil fuel if we are to survive. By doing away with livestock production we would be tossing out one of humanity's simplest and most valuable alternatives to fossil fuel and a vital means of lessening our impact on the planet.

Swallows in Nigeria

Swallows that summer in Europe spend their winters far away in parts of Africa. Migratory birds like swallows are in the unfortunate and vulnerable position of being dependent on not just one isolated habitat, but on large swathes of the earth for their survival. Though their habitat in countries like Great Britain may be improving because of the efforts of conservationists, in other stretches of habitat along their migration routes they are under threat. Recently I was listening to the BBCs Natural History Radio and was struck by how the story of these swallows illustrates the disparity and unfairness in resource distribution among humans in the world today and how this inequality threatens natural systems.

First of all you have the British who, seeing declining populations of the swallows in their region, discovered the source of the decline to be in the winter home of the birds. In Nigeria, a country rich in oil and also the location of many migratory roosts for the birds on their long trip to South Africa, the majority of the population is so poor that these tiny birds have become a food source. An Italian team of ornithologists found that the swallows were being caught and sold as food by poor people in the region where the birds have returned to roost for thousands of years. As many as 200,000 swallows are being captured and killed each year in one small area of Nigeria. This episode of Natural History Radio focused on the success story, how conservationists were able to stop local people from catching and selling the swallows.

The solution was ecotourism. When swallow enthusiasts traveled from the rich world to see and study the roosts of the swallows in Nigeria each would have to pay a tax, the proceeds of which would go to the local population. This would give the locals a reason to allow the birds to live, because the swallows would be more valuable to them alive than dead.

Learning from Nature

Humans have been able to create technology that would seem to our predecessors like magic. Yet when we look at the web a spider weaves, we might not grasp the full wonder of what this little creature is accomplishing. The forces of nature drive living things toward maximum efficiency. Nature fills niches by evolving technologies that optimize use of the energy provided by the sun or the earth. The spider for instance, is able to spin many different kinds of webs for different applications that are stronger than steel. The spider can assemble its super strong fibers from the simple ingredients in its food using a tiny fraction of the energy it would take to create a fiber from petroleum-derived plastic, and the material is completely biodegradable.  On the other hand, thanks to the abundance of fossil fuel, we humans of the modern industrial world develop technologies that are incredibly wasteful and will be with us for thousands of years. We have a lot to learn from nature about reducing waste, and about conserving and storing energy.

In Our Time from BBC radio did this great show about Macromolecules that talks to experts about the potential for using polymers based on those found in nature for creating more sustainable products. Usually the show is an eclectic mix of topics across many disciplines, but this episode seems to touch on many topics relevant to making our lives more sustainable. This is a fun little listen that teaches us that if we look to nature for guidance, we can learn to reduce our impact on the planet.