From: abulsari@abo.fi (Abhay Bulsari VT)
Subject: Environmental reasons, Part 2
Organization: Abo Akademi University
Date: Tue, 17 Nov 1992 11:31:15 GMT

Continued from Part 1

%% The American diet %%

   Some shifts in American dining are  already apparent.  Fresh  fruit
and vegetable sales are climbing.  Many restaurants  feature  meatless
selections, and there's a  booming trade  in  vegetarian and  low-meat
cookbooks.   Also,  airlines report growing  numbers  of  requests for
vegetarian meals.  But Americans  are not yet fat-shunning herbivores.
While beef  consumption per person has declined slowly  since 1976 and
per-capita egg consumption peaked  decades ago, poultry  has more than
taken up the slack.
   Americans  have  been jumping from one  animal product to  another,
eating  fewer  burgers  and more chicken nuggets, fewer eggs  and more
turkey.  Annual  consumption of red meat and poultry together is at an
all-time  high of 178 pounds per person, up from about  137  pounds in
1955.  Last year, Americans each ate about 65 pounds of beef and veal,
63  pounds of poultry, and 49 pounds of  pork, plus 139 eggs and dairy
products made from 70  gallons of  milk.   For a  family of four, that
works out to half a steer, a whole pig, and a hundred chickens a year.
   Churning  out  those quantities  of animal  products takes all  the
ingenuity agriculturalists can muster.  Consequently, modern  meat and
egg production bears  little resemblance to the family farm idyll that
still colors the imagination  of  most Americans.  In the U.S., animal
foods are produced in concentrated agroindustries,  not  cow  barns or
chicken coops.
   In fact, animal farms are as much factories  as farms.  Of all farm
animals in industrial countries, only cattle spend most of their lives
in  daylight.  Broiler chickens live exclusively in gigantic, darkened
sheds where  thousands of birds are fed carefully  measured rations of
grain.   Eggs come from similar installations, where  hens are crowded
into  stacked cages,  eating  from  one conveyor belt  and laying onto
another.   Pork  comes from  warehouse-size  sheds  built over  sewage
canals that sluice away manure.
   Beef cattle graze a year before ranchers truck them to vast outdoor
feedlots  to be "finished" for slaughter.  Their last months are spent
gorging on rich rations of corn, sorghum, and soybean meal that fatten
them  for slaughter.  Dairy cows, unlike other  farm animals, continue
to  live something  not  unlike the  old-fashioned  farm  life,  often
grazing outdoors part of each  day.   However, they, too, are sent  to
slaughter  when  their  milk  production  falls  off, and  their  male
offspring -- useless in  the milk  business, except for a few breeding
bulls -- usually become veal calves or "baby beef."
   Regardless of animal type, though, modern meat production  involves
intensive use  -- and often misuse -- of grain crops, water resources,
energy, and grazing areas.   In  addition, animal agriculture produces
surprisingly large amounts of  air  and  water pollution.  Taken as  a
whole, livestock rearing  is the  most ecologically damaging  part  of
American agriculture.

%% Staff of livestock life %%

   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.
   Were  all  of  that  grain consumed  directly by humans,  it  would
nourish  five  times as many people  as it does after being  converted
into meat, milk, and  eggs, according to  the  Iowa-based Council  for
Agricultural Science and Technology, a nonprofit research group.
   Such calculations don't  mean  that if  Americans  ate  less  meat,
hungry people would be fed.  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.
   The more  immediate problem  with  raising  animals on grain is the
wate of resources.  The effectiveness with  which animals turns grains
such  as corn  into  food products  varies  enormously.   Nearly seven
pounds of corn and  soy are  needed to  put  one  pound  of  boneless,
trimmed  pork  on the table in the  U.S.  Cattle  require less  -- 4.8
pounds of grain and soy per pound of meat -- because unlike pigs, they
eat grass most  of  their lives.  American chickens eat  2.8 pounds of
feed per pound of meat, and egg layers do better at 2.6 pounds.  Dairy
cows  are the  most efficient,  using  just 0.1  pounds of  grain  and
soybean meal to  provide a pound (about a pint) of milk, because  most
of their nutrition comes from grass.

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