A VEGETARIAN DIET IS AN EARTH-FRIENDLY DIET

There are many ways to soften your impact on the environment. Using less water in your household, recycling, reducing your consumption of all material goods, driving less, and using less electricity are some of them. But it is most likely that your diet has the greatest impact. Animal agriculture has devastating effects on deforestation, water use, petroleum use, pollution, and perhaps even the ozone layer.

To a certain extent, all agriculture is destructive to the environment. But certain practices are more so than others. Organic agriculture is kinder to the earth than traditional farming methods. And the production of animal foods is much more destructive than the production of plant foods.

The 1971 publication of Frances Moore Lappe's ground breaking work, Diet for a Small Planet, forever changed the way many of us look at protein and diet. Through painstaking research, Lappe exposed the inefficiency of feeding a growing population with a diet based on animal foods. She dubbed beef cattle a "protein factory in reverse." That's because cattle-and other food animals-actually consume more protein than they provide. A steer consumes seven pounds of protein in the form of grain and soybeans to produce just one pound of beef protein. In the process, six pounds of high-quality protein ends up wasted. It clearly would make more sense for us to eat the grain directly.

But there is much more at stake here than wasted grain. Large amounts of land, water, and fuel are used for the production of the grain that is fed to farm animals, as well as for the animals' direct use. In return, those animals give us relatively small amounts of meat and protein. This has far-reaching consequences on the environment.

Land and Forests

We have limited resources to grow food for our rapidly expanding global population, which has more than doubled since 1950, from 2.5 billion to more than 5 billion. It is expected to double again to reach more than 10 billion within fifty years. It is absolutely crucial that we use land in the most efficient ways possible to produce food. Right now, we don't. When farmland is devoted to grazing animals and growing their food, the system is very inefficient. Let's assume that the average person consumes 2,500 calories per day: one acre of land will support seven people if it is used to grow grains and beans for human consumption; it will support less than one person if that same acre is given over to producing milk and meat. You can see that using land for animal foods is an impractical way to feed large populations.

This inefficient use of land is directly related to forest destruction throughout the world, as it increases the demand for more farmland. The overgrazing of livestock also destroys land, turning it into desert, creating a constant need for new, arable land. One way to create new land for farming is to clear forests for grazing or for growing feed. Agriculture accounts for almost 90 percent of the nearly 30 million acres of forestland destroyed each year. In Latin America, more than 50 million acres of tropical rain forest have been converted to cattle pasture. Since 1960, more than one-third of the forest in Central America has been destroyed to create pastureland for cattle.

The destruction of the rain forest has consequences that may be more devastating than we will ever realize. For one thing, when tropical rain forest is lost, many species of plants become extinct. At least half of all known species are native to the rain forest, and we are currently losing one hundred species per day. At the present rate of rain forest destruction we can expect that 15 percent of all the earth's species will be extinct by the year 2000. Although we've only identified about 1 percent of all the plant species living in the rain forest, approximately 25 percent of all prescription drugs come from those plants.

The government's National Cancer Institute devotes resources to screening thousands and thousands of plants for potential anticancer activity. Think of all the plant species being destroyed at this moment that have not yet been studied and that may have powerful medicinal properties we will never know about. Are we destroying species that may hold the cure for cancer or AIDS-all for the sake of a hamburger? The National Accounting Office maintains that more plant species are eliminated or threatened by livestock grazing than by any other single factor.

Water

More than one-third of all the water used in the United States is used to irrigate land just to grow food. The amount of water used to produce food for direct human consumption is a drop in the bucket compared with the amount used to produce food for a farm animal. For example, it takes just twenty-four gallons of water to produce a pound of potatoes; it takes more than two thousand gallons to produce a pound of beef when you calculate what is needed to grow feed for the steer. Water is perhaps the earth's most precious resource-and is likely to become very scarce. Changing to a vegetarian diet can decrease your water consumption more dramatically than anything else you can do.

Fuel

According to the Worldwatch Institute, it takes about forty-eight gallons of gasoline to produce the red meat and poultry typically eaten each year by an American. More than one-third of all raw materials used, including fossil fuels like petroleum, are devoted to the production of animal foods. Fuel is used in a myriad of ways in farming-to run farm machinery as well as to support highly mechanized factory farms, which require artificial heating, lighting, and cooling. It stands to reason that when we switch from a meat-based diet to a plant-based one, we decrease the amount of food that has to be grown and the amount of fuel needed to feed people.

Beef production is the most devastating in terms of land, water, and fuel use and the destruction of the world's forests. Pork, chicken, eggs, and dairy all require less of these resources than does beef. But they still are highly inefficient compared with the production of vegetable foods.

There is another side to the environmental effects of animal agriculture. Besides being wasteful, it is polluting. Agriculture accounts for 64 percent of all river pollution and 57 percent of all lake pollution. Animal excrement is one of the biggest pollutants from this industry. But processing of animal foods can also produce waste. It takes ten pounds of milk to produce one pound of cheese. The waste product in the process is whey. Whey is used extensively by the food industry as a food additive, but much of it is dumped into the sewage system and can end up in rivers, where it is a costly pollutant.

Animal agriculture also contributes to global warming. The two main sources of methane gas, one of the "greenhouse gases," are rice paddies and cattle. The world's cattle, sheep, and goats emit 70 to 80 million tons of methane per year, through manure and belching, amounting to as much as 30 percent of the total amount released into the atmosphere. The destruction of rain forests also contributes to global warming, since the burning of these forests releases copious amounts of carbon dioxide, another greenhouse gas, into the atmosphere.

Excerpt from The Vegetarian Way by Virginia Messina, MPH, RD and Mark Messina, PhD