One of the more memorable I Love Lucy episodes had Lucy doing a TV commercial to try a sell a product named Vitameatagegamin. An opinion piece in the New York Times made me think of that old episode, although I’m not quite sure why.
The article, entitled The Myth of Sustainable Meat by James E. McWilliams takes 11 paragraphs to conclude that we all need to be vegetarians, because there is no rational or sustainable way to continue to produce beef, chickens or pork without destroying the environment.
We have both vegetarians and vegans at work. The vegans seem to be a cult, while the vegetarians are apparently fairly normal people who just would rather not eat meat, or in some rare cases, they only eat fish or chicken, but not beef or pork.
Vegans won’t eat any products from animals, which in my mind, makes for a fairly dull diet. No milk, eggs, bacon or butter. Twigs and berries as a primary diet does not make me want to come to the dinner table.
Mr. McWilliams asserts that were we to raise all the cows in the United States on grass, it would require nearly 50% of all available land, and this wouldn’t count the land required to raise pigs or chickens in a like manner. He then goes on to state that even were we to raise our cows as naturally as possible, the mere act of slaughtering them breaks the natural cycle because we don’t allow the animal to live out its natural lifespan and feed all of itself back into the land from whence it took its nourishment.
I’ll admit that stockyards, whether for cows or pigs are not a pretty sight. There are several right along I-70 as you head through Nebraska, and if the wind is blowing right you’d swear you can see the paint on your car starting to blister.
We live 20 miles south of the Denver stockyards, but on a hot summer day, if the wind is right, you still get a whiff.
PETA has complained about how we raise animals for consumption for years. Having large numbers of cows in a small space creates a filthy mess for anyone around, including the cows. Raising chickens by the tens of thousands at a time, in a confined space they say, is cruel to the animal.
But, if Mr. McWilliams is correct, it is impossible for us to raise the numbers of animals required in a “natural” environment. It is also much, much more expensive, and would push the cost of feeding the country beyond what many people can afford to pay.
Mr. McWilliams seems to think the best answer is for us to just not eat meat. While I like my veggies as much as the next guy, or perhaps even more than some, I also like a good steak, or chop, or fried chicken leg to go with them. I would also propose that here in the United States, we don’t grow enough crops that could serve as a protein substitute for meat should it go missing from our diet.
Using our current industrial methods, Cows, chickens, pork and even in some areas farming fish can all be carried out pretty much year round. Growing vegetables however, is pretty much a seasonal thing. I don’t see too many crops being grown in Iowa in January, but I would bet that inside a nice warm barn somewhere, a lot of cows are snacking on a hunk of corn, with no clue that they are soon going to be turned into a big pile of rib-eye steaks and hamburger.
It’s all well and good to be high and mighty about sustainable production of animals, or whether or not a future pile of bacon had a good time before it became bacon; and quite another to actually feed the people.
The United States is a great country, but fully half of it is unsuitable for growing crops, mostly because of a lack of enough water. If we didn’t rely on animals for food, I believe we would have a lot more hungry people than we have now.
I don’t think we need to be intentionally cruel and inhumane to any other creature, but at the same time, I think we would be fools to not use the resources available to us in the best way we can.
If you want to be a vegetarian, or even a vegan, then more power to you. But I don’t think it is realistic to expect an entire planet of people to subsist without the use of animals in some fashion.