Something to Beef About ...the cow, the pig and the planet...

Lois M. Scheel

1992

Published in:

Northwest Technocrat Newsletter, Jul/Aug 1992, No. 106

Making ends MEAT--A global concern among experts

Are members of the bovine family, namely cows, inheriting more of the earth than they should in order to give us food?

There was a time when pork took top place on the meat agenda. Not only can we enjoy roasts, chops, steaks, soup and stew from this versatile animal, but its meat can be smoked to make ham and bacon; pickled pig's feet and head cheese were considered delicacies; lard, the fat of the hog, was at one time an important edible fat; its intestines make excellent sausage casings; its bristles are still used to make long-lasting paint brushes; pigskin, when tanned, makes beautiful leather accessories, including the American football; one of its major achievements is the use of its skin in providing a substitute skin for burn patients instead of the painful procedure of using the patient's own skin in the healing process; and the latest achievement is processing the pig's ears into hard chew gristle for dogs. Most of us have heard the expression regarding pigs: ``Everything is used but the squeal.''

The omnivorous pig also makes an excellent garbage disposal for vegetable and animal debris. Added to all these benefits of the American swine is its ability to reproduce more rapidly and mature earlier than any of the other common meat-producing animals.

The pig lost first place as a meat producing animal during the winning of the American West. Pigs just couldn't handle ``pig'' drives. When discovery was made of the resilience of the cattle over long, arduous journeys across country, cattle ranchers' taste buds changed accordingly. The push was on to convince others that beef is where it's at. And that push still thrives today. After all, the profit derived from raising and selling beef determines its use, even if it isn't all that good for our health or the health of the environment.

Perhaps more damage was done to the environment during the cattle drives of the last century than at any other time. An Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)-sponsored study describes this history of shame: ``The land was grazed so ruthlessly that native perennial grasses were virtually eliminated from vast areas and replaced by sagebrush, rabbitbrush, mesquite, and juniper. The exposed soil was quickly stripped from the land by wind and water--unchecked flood flows eroded unprotected stream banks--subsequently lowering water tables. Perennial streams became intermittent or dry during most of the year.''

By the late 1870's, travelers on their way across the plains could see dust clouds miles away caused by cattle drives from Texas to railheads at Dodge City and Kansas City. The plains were torn up; buffalo were annihilated; and the already disappearing Indian tribes were starved and herded onto reservations to make way for cattle.

Harold Dregne, professor of soil science at Texas Tech University, estimates that 10 percent of the arid west has been turned into desert by livestock. The U.S. Bureau of Land Management (BLM), which is responsible along with the U.S. Forest Service for overseeing public rangeland, reported last year that nearly 70 percent of its expansive holdings in the west were in unacceptable condition.

And now, every nation that can afford to sharpen its taste buds for meat, just as the United States has been doing for years. Imagine five billion people eating the way most Americans do! There would not be enough land to grow the grain to feed the animals, not just the cattle, but pork, turkey and chicken also.

In 1971 Frances Moore Lappe's book, Diet for a small Planet made the best seller list and boasted a million copies sold. She did an excellent job of chronicling the ratio of pounds of grain fed to cattle in relation to subsequent pounds of meat fed to people. Her recipes are nutritious and would certainly cut down on the waste of grain used to produce beef for human consumption. But how do you get everyone to follow these recipes? And even if you could, nutritional food preparationis expensive unless you grow your own garden. Even beans, the staple people could afford during the great depression, are a premium on today's market.

Mrs. Lappe made some interesting observations in her studies on our shrinking planet:

Due primarily to genetic seed improvements and the widespread use of both fertilizer and pesticides, the productivity of American farm land increased 50 percent between 1950 and 1971. But the American economic environment was not ready to receive the ``good news'' delivered by the breakthrough in the exploitation of our natural environment. Given the sharp inequalities in wealth here and abroad, it was impossible to sell profitably all of our newly enlarged foodresources. Thus the challenge confronting American agriculture soon became one of disposal, of how to get rid of it all. By far the easiest way to get rid of the problem of having ''too much'' was just not to grow the food at all. Farmers were paid 3.6 billion dollars to hold land out of production, but even so, crops reached record highs. An agricultural scientist at Purdue University had received a state grant to figure out some way to use up all that food in a nonfood manner. He was not successful, but the perfect solution was found elsewhere. The American steer.

An average steer was able to reduce 16 pounds of grain and soy to one pound of meat. (The statistics remain the same today.) The other 15 pounds were inaccessiblefor human consumption. They were either used by the animal to produce energy or to make some part of its own body that cannot be eaten, such as hair.

Livestock other than the steer are considerably more efficient (see chart): hogs consume six, turkeys four, and chickens three pounds of grain and soy to produce one pound of meat. Milk production by cows is much more efficient. In fact, less than one pound of grain is fed for every pint of milk produced.

An acre of cereals can produce five times more protein than an acre devoted to meat production; legumes (beans, peas, lentils) can produce ten times more; and leafy vegetables fifteen times more with some plantsin each category producing even more-- spinach, for example, producing up to 26 times more.

Imagine yourself sitting in a restaurant in front of an eight- ounce steak and then imagine the room filled with 45 to 50 people with empty bowls in front of them. For the ``feed cost'' of your steak (1971 prices), each of their bowls could be filled with a full cup of cooked cereal grains...

Now, 21 years later, the above situation remains unchanged except to grow more intense as population increases and more nations turn to meat consumption for protein. Writing for World Watch, Alan B. Durning, senior researcher at World-watch Institute, studies the same situation as France Moor Lappe did earlier, only he emphasizes the effect our meat-centered diet has on the air and groundwater (May-June, 1991 issue, Fat Of The Land). Mr. Durning makes some interesting observations also:

When most Americans sit down to dinner, they're only a bite away from unwittingly worsening the environment. The overlooked offender lurking on their plates--between the potato and the vegetables--is tonight's steak, pork chop, or chicken breast. The unpaid ecological price of that meat is so hefty that Americans, if they aren't careful, could end up eating themselves out of planetary house or home.

Animal farms use mountains of grain. Nearly 40 percent of the world's total, and more than 70 percent of U.S. production, is fed to livestock, according to U.S. Department of Agriculture data. Last year, 162 million tons of grain, mostly corn but also sorghum, barley, oats, and wheat, were consumed by livestock. Millions of tons of protein-rich soybean meal rounded out the diet. No other country in the world can afford to feed so much grain to animals.

Worldwide, 630 million people are hungry today--because they're too poor to buy food, not because food is in short supply. Even if feed grains were given as food aid, hunger might persist because handouts can flood agricultural markets and discourage Third World farmers from planting crops.

American feed takes a lot of energy to grow--counting fuel for farm machinery and for making fertilizers and pesticides. David Pimentel, a specialist in agricultural energy use, estimates that 14,000 kilocalories are required to produce a pound of pork in the United States--equivalent to the energy in nearly half a gallon of gasoline.

Jim Oltjen, professor of animal science at the University of California, Davis, estimates that half of the grain and hay fed to American livestock grows on irrigated land. He calculates that it takes about 430 gallons of water to produce a pound of pork, 390 gallons for a pound of beef, and 375 gallons per pound of chicken. Thus the water used to supply Americans with meat comes to about 190 gallons per person per day, or twice what typical Americans use at home for all purposes.

The livestock industry uses half the territory of the continental United States for feed crops, pasture, and range. On the half of U.S. cropland growing animal feed and hay, soil continues eroding at a frightful pace despite recent progress in conservation. For each pound of red meat, poultry, eggs, and milk, farm fields lose about five pounds of prime dirt.

In Central America, beef exports to the United States have played a part in the tragedy of forest destruction. Costa Rica, for example, was once almost completely cloaked in tropical forest, holding within its small confines perhaps 5 percent of all plant and animal species on earth. By 1983, after two decades of explosive growth in the cattle industry, just 17 percent of the original forest remained. Throughout the period, Costa Rica was exporting between one-third and two-thirds of its beef, mostly to the United States, and it continues to export smaller quantities today. Producing a single Costa Rican hamburger involves the destruction of 55 square feet ofrain forest--an area about the size of a small kitchen. In clearing that single patch of wet lowland, the Costa Rican forest would also release as much as 165 pounds of the carbon it naturally stores into the atmosphere in the form of carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas, according to Sandra Brown, professor of forestry at the University of Illinois. That's as much carbon as the typical American car releases in a 20-day period...

Frances Moore Lappe found the answer to solving these problems in changing our diet as a first step to taking responsibility for the future. Shesuggested taking the profit out of life itself--food. She further suggested a list of organizations to join to participate in people-to-people development projects. She also listed magazines to read and films to watch. Mind you, this was 21 years ago, and the problem grows more severe.

Alan B. Durning puts his faith in people and nations to do the right thing. ``Personal decisions to eat foods lower on the food chain won't suffice without corresponding changes in governmental codes that allow the livestock industry to deplete and pollute resources without bearing the costs. What's needed is enough citizens demanding that lawmakers take aim at the ecological side-effects of meat production. If the global food system is not to destroy its ecological base, the onus will be on rich nations to shift from consumption of resource-intensive food stuffs toward modest fare.''

Both Lappe and Durning recognize our technological capability to produce enough food for all people. Lappe talked about abundance and how it was impossible to sell it all; she told how farmers were paid not to grow. Durning talks about the millions of people going hungry, not because food is in short supply, but because they are too poor to buy it. Both try to solve the problem of abundance with the same system that spawns inequities in the food chain. The elimination of money and the installation of a system of measurement would solve the problem of abundance. If we don't begin conserving our natural resources, abundance will decline to sufficient and gradually work its way on down to insufficient.

EDITOR'S COMMENTS:

Letters-to-the-editor of World Watch magazine varied following Alan Durning's article. One writer complained because Durning hadn't shown concern over the suffering of the animals on factory farms. (That is another horror story.)

A Texas writer, perhaps a cattle rancher, took Durning to task and labeled his approach to sustainable animal husbandry extreme and unreasonable, pointing out the advantages of beef in providing protein in our diet. He also pointed out the progress being made in soil erosion control and a preferred solution of making local food production possible rather than giving food away and increasing dependency. (In New York City, for instance, the poor could plant a garden in their window boxes, if they could afford the seed.)

Many beef cattle ranchers, like loggers in the Northwest, have never known anything else. This is how they make their living. Naturally they will defend over-grazing cattle for food, just as loggers defend clear-cutting the forests, regardless of damage to the health of the environment and the subsequent damage to our health.

Technocracy leads the way with its solution for eliminating the terrible waste of natural resources. The least common denominator of all goods and services is energy. Technocracy offers an Energy Accounting design that would not only measure production and consumption in accordance with human needs, creating a balance in distribution (see enclosed Information Brief), but it would also eliminate the need for money, which is a measure of nothing.