Reconsidering Animal vs. Plant-Based Diets – Part 1

or how to change the world on your plate

We hear it in the news, have friends who talk about it or read it in books and magazines: meat is bad for the environment. In this article, I want to give four reasons why animal products are a problem. In the next article, I want to explore four reasons why I think we should still eat animal products. Now if this sounds contradicting to you, just read through till the end… 🙂

What’s so bad about animal products?

1. The carbon footprint of livestock farming

In the climate change debate, we often hear claims that meat consumption has a high carbon footprint (=releasing CO2 or greenhouse gases into the atmosphere). According to the FAO, livestock farming accounts for 14.5% of global greenhouse gas emissions. But where do these greenhouse gases come from?

Livestock farming generally uses a lot of resources. Those include land (or soil), fertilizers, agricultural machinery, water etc. This is because in order to produce one kg of meat, milk or eggs, we need much more “input” than to produce one kg of plant food.

Meat is a carbon-intensive commodity. Photo by Annie Spratt

For example, to produce one kg of pork, 2.8 kg of food is needed. Producing one kg of beef requires up to 12 kg of grains. Added to this are large amounts of water that are needed to raise animals.

In order to produce all the food for animals, we need more agricultural machinery, which in turn uses more energy. Fertilizers applied to the fields emit nitrous oxide, a greenhouse gas 300 times more potent than CO2.

In summary, all these resources used to produce food for animals could simply be used to directly grow plants for human consumption, saving a lot of resources and energy. This is why meat, dairy and eggs have higher carbon footprints than plant-based foods.

2. Zooming in to the resource ‘land’

Tropical rainforests worldwide are threatened by deforestation. Photo by Chennawit Yulue

As I’ve described above, producing meat etc. uses much more land than producing fruits or vegetables. To feed our pigs, cows, hens and turkeys, we need to grow cereals, like wheat, barley or corn, and legumes, like soybean. These crops use a lot of land, often at the expense of rainforests and other pristine environments. Farming and grazing of livestock account for more than half of all deforestation. So, expressed very bluntly, when rainforests are destroyed in South America, it is mostly for growing and exporting soybean, which eventually feeds our hunger for animal products.

To aggravate matters even more, deforestation, or turning forests into arable land, is a major trigger of climate change. These changes in land-use are responsible for releasing 5900 million tons of CO2 equivalents per year. I talked more about deforestation here, and gave tips on how to prevent it in this post.

3. A question of global justice

When I say “our” hunger for meat, I’m speaking of the developed countries, since they consume much more meat than people in the developing world. According to the OECD-FAO Agricultural Outlook (2019), the yearly meat consumption in the EU is on average 70 kg, in the USA 100 kg and in Ethiopia 3 kg of meat per person.

This brings me to my next point: the justice issue.

It’s a very simple calculation. Knowing about the above-mentioned figures, and considering that yearly, more than 1000 million tons of food is fed to animals, it’s simply impossible for everyone to have such a diet.

If all people on Earth would want to eat the same amount of meat as Americans do, we would need twice as much grain to feed all the animals. Where could this possibly come from?!

But what weighs even more is the fact that all the crops grown to feed animals could actually be used to feed people. About 815 million people worldwide suffer from chronic undernourishment.

With the population on the rise, meat demand will rise, too. But our land resources are already depleted, not to mention energy, water and soil fertility.

There are enough resources to feed everyone on this planet. As Mahatma Gandhi put it very well,

“There is enough for everybody’s need, but not for everybody’s greed.

4. Pollution

Added to this is the environmental pollution from animal manure. If in one area, excessive numbers of animals are held (and their food is imported), too much manure ends up on the fields. Or, in other words, too many nutrients are concentrated in one area. These nutrients, like phosphorus and nitrogen, leak into the groundwater and contaminate our drinking water. Or else, they end up in rivers, lakes or seas, causing eutrophication and the starvation of the biological life in there.

Pig farming often concentrates in specific areas. Modern pig farms can hold up to 1 million of pigs! Photo by John Lambeth.

Such is the case in many areas where too much livestock is held. Many sources are polluted to the extent that their water is not drinkable any more. Or alternatively, companies spend millions on water treatments (in Germany alone, it is estimated that water purification could cost us over 700 million euros per year).

In spite of all these facts, I’m not a vegetarian myself. And very consciously so. If you are wondering how I can say this, stay with me until the second part of this series. I promise: next week, the riddle will be resolved! And I hope that I will be able to help you to make a more informed choice on how to truly eat sustainably.

Thank you so much for reading, and until next week!