According to a 2006 report by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the UN, what we eat is actually more important that what or how much we drive. It states that animal-based agriculture causes approximately 18% of greenhouse gas emissions, which lead to global warming, an amount greater than that caused by all forms of transportation on the planet combined (about 13.5%).
According to Dr. Richard Schwartz, over 70% of the grain grown in the United States is channeled to livestock. The land use practices of the meat industry generally lead to overuse of fuel and water, degrade the land and pollute the water around it, contributing to additional environmental and health problems.
Furthermore, Dr. Schwartz claims that an animal-based diet uses energy very inefficiently. It requires 78 calories of fossil fuel for each calorie of protein obtained from feedlot-produced beef, but only 2 calories of fossil fuel to produce a calorie of protein from soybeans. Grains and beans require only 2 - 5% as much fossil fuel as beef. The energy needed to produce a pound of grain-fed beef is equivalent to one gallon of gasoline.
2 comments:
I have always heard that "eating lower on the food chain" was much more energy efficient. I have to wonder, though, how much of this is actually just based on how the US and the world addresses our food production. I cannot imagine that dumping large amounts of petroleum based fertilizer is very energy efficient, but it's how big ag companies focus on providing our produce. Was anything mentioned in the study about this topic?
It is true that eating lower on the food chain is more efficient. It does not necessarily have to do with petroleum usage. Rather, approximately 60% of the energy consumed by an organism is used during life processes. This energy is not "available" to the next trophic level. Nearly 90% is unavailable to the next trophic level due to various reasons, including incomplete digestion, some food is not eaten and most energy in the food becomes heat/entropy. According to Jared Diamond, it takes around 10 pounds of vegetables edible to humans to produce one pound of pork (2005).
Post a Comment