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Vegetarianism
The ethical and ecological arguments

By Roar Bjonnes

From India to Alaska, McDonald’s is selling double cheeseburgers by the billions. Now there’s mounting evidence that these whoppers are doing more than smearing grease on kids’ pants and clogging arteries. For many years, experts have warned us about health hazards caused by saturated fat from milk and meat. In fact, saturated fat has become the quiet killer of a culture addicted to life in the fast-food lane. But that’s not all. According to many researchers, our meat craze also contributes to the energy crisis, water shortages, topsoil depletion, world hunger, animal suffering and global deforestation.

The ethical argument

When I began eating less meat in 1972, my parents sincerely believed I would suffer from protein deficiency. I was more concerned about the protein wasted by cycling grain through livestock. After a year of dietary experimentation, I was finally convinced to become a non-carnivore after a terrifying walk through a slaughterhouse. The excursion was part of my education in agronomy. It was shocking to witness the paranoid herd of bulls and cows, hear the bovine wails, and see t he innocent animals enter the bloody killing-floors. This experience convinced m e that to consume meat is to be part of an industry of animal exploitation, unnecessary suffering and premature death. As Leo Tolstoy said, "While we ourselves are the living graves of murdered animals, how can we expect any ideal condition s on the earth?"

Just consider these facts:

• In the U.S., nine million living creatures are killed for meat each day.

• U.S. veal is so tender because calves are not allowed to take a single step. The veal’s whitish-pink color comes from calves force-fed an anemia-producing diet.

• The wingspan of an average leghorn chicken is 26 inches, but the average space these chickens are given in egg factories is only six inches.

• In a typical U.S. factory farm three 700-plus pound pigs are confined to a space the size of a twin bed.

• Over half the antibiotics produced in the U.S. are not used as medicines for people, but as feed additives to cure stressed and infected animals.

Yes, please give some thought to these sobering facts. Seductive ads from the meat and dairy industry will definitely not remind us, and neither will the ground beef in a Mc Donald hamburger or the mute, featherless chicken in the supermarket freezer.

John Robbins is no stranger to the business of factory-farming and cholesterol. He was heir to one of the largest ice cream franchises in the U.S. - the Baskin-Robbins company. But he declined to be part of the business as it was in discord with his lifestyle. Robbins, a vegan (a no animal byproduct diet), instead move d to a forest cabin with his wife. There he embarked upon a life of voluntary simplicity, contemplation and research. After three years, he published his findings in the Pulitzer Prize-nominated book Diet For A New America (Stillpoint, 1988). It became an instant best-seller, and was hailed as the world’s most comprehensive indictment against the meat industry.

Animal suffering was also the inspiration behind Robbins’ ground-breaking research on factory farming. "I felt an urge to respond to it," he says, "to unearth some of the causes, to expose some of the hidden ways in which we’re damaging our selves and the whole web of life." On his visits to these farms Robbins saw animals kept indoors under conditions that violate their instincts and frustrate the ir urges. Pigs were stacked in cages three high; the excrement of the ones above drops continuously on the ones below. He saw animals chained so tight at the neck that they could not lay down. "I’ve seen dairy cows treated with such contempt for their natures that they become so neurotic they have to be given tranquilizers to keep them from going berserk."

Throughout history there were many people who became vegetarians for ethical reasons, people like Gandhi, Tolstoy, George Bernard Shaw, Leonardo Da Vinci and Einstein. They felt it was unnecessary to eat animal flesh when other food sources were available. This sentiment also motivated Andrew Nicholson to become a vegetarian. Nicholson is a medical doctor and Director of Preventive Medicine at Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine in Washington DC. He lectures on vegetarianism and preventive medicine to physicians and nurses, hospital patients an d the general public. "It is not only unethical to kill animals," says Nicholson , "it also does not make any sense nutritionally." As a daily practitioner of meditation and yoga, Nicholson feels it is important that his source of food is as "sentient" (conducive to consciousness) as possible. It effects both our mind and body, he claims. The importance of purity and vitality of food was also appreciated by Pythagoras. Two thousand five hundred years ago, he said, "Only living, fresh foods can enable man to apprehend the truth."

The ecological argument

American actress Cybill Shepherd used to do beef commercials on TV. But when she got pregnant, she discovered that the breast milk of meat-eating mothers has higher pesticide residues than is allowed in cows’ milk. In fact, the pesticide contamination of breast milk is 35 times higher in meat-eating mothers than in vegetarians. This is a result of the vast amounts of pesticides used in today’s commercial agriculture. These pesticides first accumulate in grain and grasses, the n in cattle, pigs and poultry. Finally, these toxic substances end up in humans who consume meat.

To satisfy the hunger for meat in the industrialized world, millions of acres of forest have been cleared to create pastureland for grazing cattle. Since 1960, more than 25 percent of the forests of Central America have been clear-cut or burned. By the late 1970s, two-thirds of all agricultural land in Central America was taken up by cattle and other livestock. By the mid-1980s, these countries had 80 percent more cattle than twenty years before. Ironically, most of the meat produced there ends up on the dinner tables in the industrialized world, particularly the U.S.

The creation of this vast cattle kingdom has enriched the lives of a select few, pauperized much of the rural population, and spawned widespread social unrest and political upheaval. But the ecological costs are also enormous.

Only 2,000 years ago, the tropical rainforest belt covered five billion acres (two b hectares) of the earth and took up 12 percent of the earth’s land surface. In the last two centuries of European colonial expansion, half the tropical biomass has been destroyed to create pastures. Most of the forests of Central and La tin America have been destroyed to support the beef diets of people in Europe, the U.S. and Japan. Mexican ecologist Gabriel Quadri warns, "We are exporting the future of Mexico for the benefit of a few powerful cattle farmers."

Deforestation is, according to many ecologists, one of the main ecological disasters of our time. In India, according to P.R. Sarkar, deforestation has dried up many rivers. The solution, he says, is that all river systems should be "covered by dense forests." This would of course be much easier were we to shift to a vegetarian diet. Such a world-wide dietary shift would according to Robbins "save enough land to restore the forests and habitats for wild creatures." We would also have "enough land to save species from becoming extinct, to absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, to stabilize the climate, to give us oxygen, to stabilize our hydrological cycles, to prevent droughts and floods, and to conserve topsoil which is currently being eroded at an alarming rate."

Desertification is another destructive ecological problem caused by a meat-centered diet. According to Jeremy Rifkin, author of Beyond Beef (Dutton, 1992), there are four main reasons for desertification: over-grazing of livestock, over-cultivation of land, deforestation and improper irrigation. However, cattle product ion is the primary factor in all four causes. According to United Nations’ estimates, 29 percent of the earth’s landmass now suffers "slight, moderate or severe desertification." And, not surprisingly, the regions most affected by this are all the cattle-producing areas of the planet: the western half of the United States, Australia, Central and South America, and sub-Saharan Africa. Rifkin describes cattle as "hoofed locusts" that eat their way through 900 pounds of vegetation each month, strip the rangeland of native plants and compact the soil with the pressure of 24 pounds per square inch. Thus the soil is less able to hold the water from the spring melting of snow. This results in erosion and flooding. Seeds are washed away, and during hot summers the landscape becomes barren and dry.

Most people are aware that global warming may become the world’s most destructive environmental disaster. But the connection between a Big Mac hamburger and global warming is not so obvious. But here are some disturbing facts that should turn the most meat-loving environmentalist into a vegetarian:

• Much of the biomass (trees, grassland and agricultural waste) burned in the world today is in connection with cattle-ranching. The biomass burned in the Amazon rainforest alone amounts to about nine percent of the total worldwide contribution to global warming.

• Mechanized agriculture uses a sizable amount of fossil fuel. In the U.S., it takes the equivalent of one gallon (3.8 litres) of gasoline to produce a pound (.4 5 kg) of grain-fed beef. A family of four meat-eaters consumes 260 gallons (988 litres) of fossil fuel annually - producing as much carbon dioxide as the average car emits in six months.

• Petrochemical fertilizers, used to produce cattle-feed, emit nitrous oxide, another greenhouse gas. Nitrous oxide released from fertilizers accounts for six percent of the global warming effect.

• Cattle emit methane, a potent greenhouse gas. Methane is also emitted from peat bogs, rice paddies, and landfills. But the increase in the cattle and termite population and the burning of forests account for most of the recent increase in methane emissions. Methane emissions cause 18 percent of the global warming trend.

A meat-centered diet is also a poor way to utilize our resources. More and more scientists are therefore recommending a vegetarian diet to help solve some of the food shortages on the planet. It has been calculated, for example, that it takes sixteen times more grain to feed a meat-centered diet than it does to feed a purely vegetarian diet. If the consumption of beef in the United States was reduced with 10 percent, the amount of grain saved could feed 60 million people - more than the entire number that will die of malnutrition and starvation this year. There are of course also political, economic, and social reasons why food is not properly produced and distributed. But as Robbins says, "it definitely won’t reach them if we continue to cycle it through the livestock we eat."

Copyright The author 1999