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My wife, who had been a vegetarian in college, and my 10-year-old daughter
enthusiastically converted as well. I was a reluctant vegetarian. I still missed pot roast the way my mother made
it, turkey during the holidays, hamburgers, seafood and fried chicken. But I
simply could not sleep knowing what I knew: that the American meat-
centered diet, which I had wholeheartedly embraced, is environmentally
irresponsible, morally wrong and socially unsustainable.
What is so wrong with eating meat? First, in the U.S. we are eating more meat
than ever (over 200 pounds per person annually), and this encourages industrial
streamlining of the process by which animals are raised for slaughter. This in
turn has led to unethical and inhumane living conditions for cows, calves, pigs
and chickens, and dangerous working conditions for employees.
Hog factory farms confine animals in stalls with eight square feet of floor
space per animal in metal buildings. "60 Minutes" correspondent Morley Safer
reported that hogs "see no sun in their limited lives, with no hay to lie on, no
mud to roll in. The sows live in tiny cages, so narrow they cannot even turn
around." The floors are slatted metal, through which feces and urine fall. Bon
voyage, Piggie Park barbecue.
According to Caitlin Winans, former director of the Coalition to Reform Animal
Factories, "From an animal welfare perspective, most chicken meat and eggs are
among the worst food choices you can make. The way most chickens are raised in
confined animal feeding operations is even more inhumane than how other farm
animals are raised. "Additionally, the USDA doesn't even include poultry in the Humane Methods of
Slaughter Act, leaving literally billions of farm animals a year to die in an
unnecessarily cruel way." Ciao, Chick-Fil-A.
Raising animals for meat has a surprisingly large environmental impact.
Producing 8 ounces of beef can require up to 6,000 gallons of water. Livestock
is responsible for about 18 percent of greenhouse gases (which is more than
transportation). As much as 80 percent of the grain grown in this country is fed to livestock,
and grazing takes up as much as 26 percent of the land on Earth not covered by
ice.
Environmental consequences of industrial hog farming include air pollution from
ammonia, odor problems, the presence of pathogens, development of antibiotic
resistance and disposal of heavy metals from waste lagoons. Livestock waste also pollutes waterways. Spills from hog sewage lagoons are not
uncommon. Ten million fish were killed and more than 350,000 acres of salt
marshes were closed to shell fishing in 1995 after 25 million gallons of animal
waste spilled from an 8-acre waste pit into North Carolina's New
River. There is a direct human impact as well - injuries to workers in hog processing
plants.
New York Times columnist Bob Herbert wrote about the largest pork processing
facility in the world, the Smithfield Packing Co. in Smithfield, N.C.:
"It's a case study in both the butchering of hogs [some 32,000 are slaughtered
there each day] and the systematic exploitation of vulnerable workers. More than
5,500 men and women work at Smithfield, most of them Latino or black, and nearly
all of them undereducated and poor." He quotes worker Edward Morrison: "You have to work fast because that machine is
shooting those hogs out at you constantly. You can end up with all this blood
dripping down on you, all these feces and stuff just hanging off of you. It's a
terrible environment."
Bob Herbert concludes, "The defiance, greed and misplaced humanity of the
merchants of misery at the apex of the Smithfield power structure are matters
consumers might keep in mind as they bite into that next sizzling, succulent
morsel of Smithfield pork."
DAN ABEL is an associate professor of marine science at Coastal Carolina
University and director of the CCU Campus and Community Sustainability
Initiative.
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