Meat Guzzling Nation

I just read an amazing article my brother emailed me this morning: Rethinking the Meat-Guzzler. Stop what you're doing right now and read that. If not right now, sometime in the near future.

I stopped eating meat twelve years ago. Something I had been thinking about for some time solidified when I noticed a vein in the chicken breast I was eating. Since my declaration of vegetarianism, my brother, and sister (for a period of time) followed suit. Consequently, my family started eating less meat, and my mother, concerned for our nourishment, became an amazing vegetarian cook. The range of eating habits and food origin discussions at our dinner table keep our family meals pleasantly dynamic and political - a relative visiting from out of town recently accused us of of "politicizing" dinner.

Overtime I have reached vegetarian highs and lows regarding the controversial consumption of dairy, seafood and leather goods. The intensity of my argument hitting a peak when I was taking a particular class on the subject matter, or reading an influential book. What a devout vegetarian would call lows were, to me, frustration with the alternatives on the market. Finding my own balance, I consume the occasional dairy, eggs and fish.

In my early days of vegetarianism, before sustainability was a part of my vocabulary, I took a sharpie to every product in our home, labeling them "good" if they were animal friendly and "bad" for animal testing. Lucky for me I had patient and supportive parents.

Pages from finishing Michael Pollan's The Omnivores Dilemma and am feeling wary about eating store bought eggs labeled as free range . Never before have I felt more compelled to buy as locally as possible, grow what I can and try to know as much as possible about my food. Each book published about our food system seems to deliver a new aspect of transparency, and awareness seems to be the first step towards progress.

Bringing it back to the article, I found the following points to be particularly interesting (disturbing, alarming, etc...) :

• According the the Brazilian government, 1,250 square miles of rain forest were cleared for grazing and cropland in the five month period between September 2007 and January 2008
• The world's total meat supply was 71 million tons in 1961. In 2007, it was estimated to be 284 million tons. Per capita consumption has more than doubled over that period. (In the developing world, it rose twice as fast, doubling in the last 20 years.)
• At about 5 percent of the world's population, we "process" (that is, grow and kill) nearly 10 billion animals a year, more than 15 percent of the world's total
• According to the United Nation's Food and Agriculture Organization, which also estimates that livestock production generates nearly a fifth of the world's greenhouse gases — more than transportation.
• Though some 800 million people on the planet now suffer from hunger or malnutrition the majority of corn and soy grown in the world feeds cattle, pigs and chickens
• According to the EPA, agriculture in the United States — much of which now serves the demand for meat — contributes to nearly three-quarters of all water-quality problems in the nation's rivers and streams
• Americans are downing close to 200 pounds of meat, poultry and fish per capita per year
• Mark Bittman, who wrote this, is not a vegetarian