“The most violent
weapon on earth is
the table fork.”
~ Mahatma Gandhi
-Recent food scares, from listeriosis in cold
cuts in Toronto to tainted milk in China,
remind us that unsafe food can have
tremendous negative impacts on individuals
and communities
- a growing number of people in Canada have
consequently turned to the consumption of
vegetarian meals as a potentially healthier,
safer, and more ethical alternative to meat
consumption
Food and Agriculture:
Food and our Health, Food and the Environment,
Food and Animals, Video: Meet your Meat, What to Eat?
Vegan: Someone who does not eat
animals or any animal products
(no meat, eggs, or dairy)
Vegetarian: Someone who does not
eat animals (no chicken or fish)
Food and our Health
Food and our Health
Less Meat = More Food
The earth can only provide so much food. While the
population is growing, the amount of land we have to
grow food on is shrinking.
The earth can sustain only 2 billion people on a meat
and dairy based diet...the population of the earth is
approaching 7 billion people.
-The vast majority of cereal crops grown in Canada
are directly fed to livestock, not people.
-Farm animals must be fed over 6 kilograms of crops
to produce one kilogram of meat for human
consumption.
-Enough food is grown to easily feed everyone on the
planet and alleviate high food prices. The problem is
that most of it goes to fattening farm animals
- Canadians and Americans consume almost 100
kilograms of meat, per person, per year. This involves
the killing of 10 billion animals annually.
Hog Farms : Communities Affected
- A survey conducted recently in the United States found that
people living downwind from hog farms in North Carolina -where such operations originated -- experienced more headaches,
runny noses, sore throats, excessive coughing and diarrhoea than
residents of a community without
hog factories.
“Lowered meat consumptions would yield significant
public health benefits, particularly a reduction in heart
disease, several cancers, and other chronic disease”
(Horrigan et al., 2002: 454)
Chicken contains as much artery-clogging cholesterol
as beef (100 mg in just 4 ounces), and a single egg has
twice as much cholesterol as a hamburger. Slaughter
machines contaminate bacteria-laden feces onto the dead
chicken so that up to 90% of all chicken sold has
Salmonella to some degree.
Growth hormones and unnatural milking schedules
cause dairy cows’ udders to become painful and so
heavy that they sometimes drag on the ground, resulting
in infections and overuse of antibiotics. Dairy products
are linked to allergies, heart disease, cancer, and other
diseases. The late Dr. Spock, North America’s leading
authority on child care, spoke out against feeding cow’s
milk to children, saying it can cause anemia, allergies,
and insulin-dependent diabetes...and a Harvard study
shows that milk and other dairy products cause
osteoporosis, rather than preventing it, since their highprotein content leaches calcium from the bones.
“There’s no reason to drink cow’s milk at any time in your life.
It was designed for calves, not humans, and we should all stop
drinking it today.”
~ Dr. Frank Oski, director pediatrics, Johns Hopkins University
Food and the
Environment
- Most of us are aware that our
cars, our coal-generated electric
power and our factories
adversely affect the
environment
- According to a 2006 report by
the United Nations Food and
Agriculture Organization
(FAO), our diets and,
specifically, the meat in them
cause more greenhouse gases
carbon dioxide (CO2), methane,
and nitrous oxide to spew into
the atmosphere than either
transportation or industry
- Scientific American Magazine,
February 2009
Less meat = more wilderness
In Canada, 3.5 acres (1.4 hectares) of land is
used to feed each person. Most of this land is
used for grazing or to grow feed crops. In
contrast, only a half acre (0.2 hectares) is
required to feed a vegetarian – seven times
less land!
If the world were to move towards a vegetarian diet, large areas could be
returned to wilderness. Unfortunately the opposite is still happening.
Witness the ongoing destruction of rainforests to graze cattle and grow
soy for animal feed.
Don’t all agricultural practices
harm the environment – why is
vegetarian better?
The shear scale of animal
agriculture is the main problem.
Pigs are confined by the millions
on huge factory farms where their
waste contaminates ground water.
Billions of chickens are housed in
similar conditions and herds of
cattle emit voluminous amounts of
methane. Vegetarian foods have a
much lighter footprint. You can
also go further by buying foods that
are locally-grown and organic.
•
•
“A pound of meat requires 50 times as much water as an equivalent quantity of
wheat. The water that goes into the average 1000 pound steer could float a
destroyer” (Peter Singer).
70 beef barons, largely concentrated north of Lethbridge in an area known as
Feedlot Alley, manage more than one third of the province’s beef-cattle
production. As a result, just one feedlot may have as many as 25,000 cattle.
Less meat = less water use
In general it takes a lot more water for meat. Much of it goes to
irrigating feed crops. For example in developing countries it
takes 7,000 litres to produce only 100 grams of beef. By
comparison, it takes just 550 litres of water to produce enough
flour for a loaf of bread.
It takes:
-2500 gallons of
water to produce 1
pound of meat
-750 gallons of water
to produce 1 gallon
of milk
-Vegan choices save
1.3 million gallons of
water each year
A vegan could leave their
shower on 24 hours a day,
365 days a year, and couldn’t
waste as much water as
someone eating an animalbased diet
Factory Farms—Water Pollution
• Hog waste goes to open-air lagoons before it is sprayed
on the land. Beef factories aren’t much better. A 25,000head feedlot produces in excess of 50,000 tonnes of dung
a year. That, too, is just spread on land bases, which must
be sufficiently large to absorb the nutrients. Too small a
land base may be unable to use all the nutrients, causing
runoff and saturation.
• A 1998 federal study found half of 27 Alberta streams in
key agricultural production areas exceeded water
guidelines for nitrogen, phosphorus and disease-carrying
bacteria. According to a 1992 study, about 30 percent of
rural wells in Ontario were susceptible to contamination
with pathogens.
The growth of animal factories, aided by provincial
incentives, has created industrial-scale waste problems. A
farm producing 18,000 pigs a year can create as much
effluent as a town of almost 60,000 people without a wastetreatment system.
Even smaller amounts of
factory-farm runoff can
wreak havoc on the
environment—the
pesticides, antibiotics, and
powerful growth hormones
that are concentrated in
animal flesh are also found
in their feces, and these
chemicals can have
catastrophic effects on the
ecosystems surrounding
factory farms.
The pollution from animal factories is also
destroying the world’s oceans. In the middle
of the United States, streams and rivers carry
excrement from animal factories to the
Mississippi River, which then deposits the
waste in the Gulf of Mexico. The nitrogen
from animal feces—and from fertilizer, which
is primarily used to grow crops for farmed
animals—causes algae populations to
skyrocket, leaving little oxygen for other life
forms.
When 25 million gallons of hog
urine and feces spilled into a North
Carolina river in 1995, between 10
and 14 million fish died as an
immediate result. This spill was
twice as large in volume as the
Exxon-Valdez oil disaster.
Fish Farms...
...also contribute to water pollution—farmers cram
thousands of fish into tiny enclosures, and the
accumulation of feces and other waste means that
aquafarms are little more than open sewers. The
massive amounts of feces, fish carcasses, and
antibiotic-laced fish food that settle below fish
farm cages have actually caused the ocean floor to
rot in some areas, and the sludge of fish feces and
other debris can be toxic for already-strained
ocean ecosystems.
Bushmeat hunting and timber
exploitation are threatening
Cameroon’s shrinking forests.
If nothing is done soon many
species will become extinct in the
next few years.
A few thousand
commercial bushmeat
hunters supported by
the timber industry
infrastructure will
illegally shoot and
butcher more than
two billion dollars
worth of wildlife this
year, including as
many as 8,000
endangered great
apes.
People pay a premium to
eat more great apes each
year than are now kept in
all the zoos and
laboratories of the world. If
the slaughter continues at
its current pace, the
remaining wild apes in
Africa will be gone within
the next fifteen to fifty
years. With them will
vanish most of the
equatorial rain forest, and
the cultures of indigenous
people who have lived
there for millennia.
A vegetarian world
could be fed using
just 5% of the
Earth’s surface
versus the 30%
currently used for
meat production.
“The Startling Effects of Going Vegetarian for Just One Day”
By Kathy Freston, Huffington Post. Posted April 2, 2009.
If everyone went vegetarian just for one day, the U.S. would save:
● 100 billion gallons of water, enough to supply all the homes in New
England for almost 4 months;
● 1.5 billion pounds of crops otherwise fed to livestock, enough to feed
the state of New Mexico for more than a year;
● 70 million gallons of gas -- enough to fuel all the cars of Canada and
Mexico combined with plenty to spare;
● 3 million acres of land, an area more than twice the size of Delaware;
● 33 tons of antibiotics.
If everyone went vegetarian just for one day, the U.S. would prevent:
● Greenhouse gas emissions equivalent to 1.2 million tons of CO2, as
much as produced by all of France;
● 3 million tons of soil erosion and $70 million in resulting economic
damages;
● 4.5 million tons of animal excrement;
● Almost 7 tons of ammonia emissions, a major air pollutant.
Researchers at the University of Chicago concluded that
switching from a standard American diet to a vegan diet is
more effective in the fight against global warming than
switching from a standard American car to a hybrid!
Meat’s Not Green
www.peta.org
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yys7RKlnqQ8
Food and
Animals
Food and Animals
Meet Your Meat
www.peta.org
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VIjanhKqVC4
What to Eat?
According to Environmental
Defence, if every American
skipped one meal of chicken per
week and substituted vegetarian
foods instead, the carbon dioxide
savings would be the same as
taking more than half a million
cars off of U.S. roads.
How do vegetarians get enough iron, protein,
calcium, etc?
Plant-based foods are loaded with nutrients and many include
ample protein, iron, calcium, vitamin D, Omega-3 fatty acids and
zinc. The options are endless and delicious!
What about fish – aren’t they OK
to eat?
Unfortunately not: the oceans are
becoming rapidly depleted of fish
species and coral reefs are being
destroyed beyond repair. Trawlers
continue to deploy massive drag nets
that damage the ocean floor and
threaten the existence of many nonfish species including seabirds,
dolphins and turtles.
Ocean-friendly alternatives to fish
include flax seed oil, and
breakfast cereals with flax, which
are an excellent source of Omega3. Also look for soymilk and
vegetarian spreads, which are
often fortified with Omega-3.
What about organic meat?
Although organic meat is better
than factory-farmed meat, it won’t
do much to reduce your carbon
footprint. Eating low on the food
chain (plant-based foods) greatly
minimizes land, energy and water
usage. And, plant-based foods are
definitely the more humane
choice.
“The question is not,
Can they reason? nor,
Can they talk? but,
Can they suffer?”
~ Jeremy Bentham, An Introduction to the Principles of Morals
& Legislation, 1789
What about the dietary needs of Polar Peoples?
Found in Most Grocery Stores in Canada....
Borrow a Vegetarian Cookbook from the Library!
Check out a Vegetarian Cooking Blog
Experiment! Have fun!
Embark on an exciting new food adventure!!
There are many resources in Toronto, such as
the Toronto Vegetarian Association
Our task must be to free ourselves from this
prison by widening our circle of compassion
to embrace all living creatures and the whole
of nature in its beauty. Nobody is able to
achieve this completely, but the striving for
such achievement is in itself a part of the
liberation and a foundation for inner security.
– Albert Einstein, 1950, New York Post, 28
November 1972
Sources and other Resources
Veg Climate Alliance - http://vegclimatealliance.org/category/resources/articles-resources/
Toronto Vegetarian Association - http://www.veg.ca
Johns Hopkins University - http://www.jhsph.edu/clf/programs/farming/index.html
Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations –
http://www.fao.org/ag/magazine/0612sp1.htm
Worldwatch Institute - http://www.worldwatch.org/programs/agriculture
The David Suzuki Foundation –
http://www.davidsuzuki.org/about_us/Dr_David_Suzuki/Article_Archives/weekly0116040
1.asp
“The Startling Effects of Going Vegetarian for Just One Day” –
http://www.alternet.org/environment/134650/the_startling_effects_of_going_vegetarian_for_just_one
_day/
People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals – www.peta.org
Videos: A Life Connected -Nonviolenceunited.org, Earthlings, Peaceable Kingdom