Re-evaluating My Relationship With Meat and Dairy

I’m a 47 (48 this month… this week!) year old red blooded Welshman, and for as long as I can remember, I’ve had a love affair with my food. Meat and dairy products form two cornerstones to my diet. Furthermore, as a middle aged man, cooking and dining out is a keystone of my way of life. Preparing a meal isn’t really a chore anymore, its “me time”, or a task to be shared with my partner or my children – I enjoy cooking, and provided I’m in the right mood, it’s a task that brings enormous satisfaction in terms of the preparation, the process and, best of all the eating.

But I’m in a quandary, and that quandary is whether its morally correct to continue my lifelong eating habits, and by that I mean meat and dairy…. Anything derived from animal agriculture. Why would this be so hard? It’s because I love meat and I love dairy.

How did I get to this point – in answering that, it might be easier to start by telling you what are not the reasons for me re-evaluating my eating habits.

Its NOT animal welfare. I’m an animal lover and I’ve never been interested in hunting and killing animals for my own consumption. I’m like the vast majority of carnivorous human beings, I prefer the slaughter and butchery of the animals I eat to be undertaken by other, preferably out of sight.

Its NOT for healthy eating… at least directly. All my life I’ve been an active and athletic person and I’ve passed through the various phases of awareness and interest in the link between fuel (food) and performance. As a young and indestructible man I believed I could eat what I want and by shear bloody-mindedness I could function at whatever sporting pursuit I pursued without noticeable detriment. A little older and wiser, I grew to better understand that there was a correlation between food and health and made token gestures in terms of short term changes, but never lived by them. As I’ve approached middle age, its become obvious to me that the high-mileage machine that is my body will not tolerate the misuse and abuse of previous years if I want my limbs to perform some sort of physical function beyond transporting me about my home and place of work.

So, with animal welfare and healthy eating discounted as reasons to consider ditching meet and dairy, we must have narrowed the possible causation for this reflective debate.

For as much as I can remember, it started by my incidental attendance of a conference in Exeter. My manger had forgotten we had a meeting at our head office, I’d driven the 120 miles from home to our Exeter head office and my manager wasn’t at his desk when I arrived. Luckily, he was at Exeter Chief’s Rugby Ground, Sandy Park for a Climate Conference and Exhibition. I totted along and after our short meeting I sat in on a lecture by a scientist from the Exeter based MetOffice who was speaking out the content of the soon to be published IPCC Report on climate change. The speaker wasn’t permitted to say too much about its content ahead if its publication, so he talked bluntly and brutally about the reality of the desperate situation we find ourselves in. Little of what he said was new to me, but in a society where we receive most of our information online and as a result have become highly suspicious of the reliability of that information, hearing the words first hand from a climate expert, justifying his explanation with research and evidence, I felt changed at the end of his speech.

Within a week I was researching electric and hybrid cars and within a month I’d traded in my diesel saloon and bought a hybrid. I also started to learn to ride a motorcycle, believing that a key part of our likely future transportation methods will be by electric motorbikes (which are awesome by the way) and four months later I owned a petrol motorbike, a step on my journey to an electric bike and an interim means of lower carbon transport for journeys made on my own wherever possible.

Around this time, my industry, housing refurbishment was being challenged by the UK’s government plans to decarbonise the UK by 2050, prompted by the declaration of a climate emergency, and I found myself researching ways to deliver a service to our clients that permitted them to amend their building stock to become “Nett-Carbon-Zero”. A concept was identified and my career was re-energised in parallel with my personal passion to do all I can do in the fight against humanity’s greatest threat CO2…….

Then I discovered the reality – CO2 from transport, generation, manufacture and domestic heating and hot water is not humanity’s greatest threat. It’s the damage caused by our global dependency on animal agriculture.

My sixteen year old son Euan and I were chatting one evening while cooking dinner when he told me that his vegan friend Sophia had recommended to him that he watch the Netflix documentary “Cowspiracy”. After-dinner viewing options for my three teenage sons and I are always protracted negotiations and I was keen to find something that would less likely cause my angst riddled son to retire to his bedroom and spend some time with me, so I happily agreed to Cowspiracy being that evening’s viewing. We ate dinner, my three sons and I and settled down to be an informative documentary film.

I’m not a conspiracist, nor am I an especially suspicious person fearful that the establishment and all its workings would do harm to us in order to protect its position and privileges, but I am mindful of how history has proven that corporates and industries have grown rich on products which the masses consumed in vast volumes, and when it has emerged that their wares are dangerous, toxic, poisonous and destructive, that they’ve protected their position and set out on campaigns to prevent us learning. The greatest example would be the tobacco industry, which provided consumers with the products which the public wanted, yet when the dangers of smoking became more and more apparent, the key players used their accumulated wealth and influence to discredit all information that was produced to make consumers aware. Tobacco firms lobbied governments, created elaborate mis-information campaigns and encouraged the blissfully unaware to think of the anti-tobacco lobby as cranks, crazies and misfits.

We wouldn’t be fooled ever again…. Would we?

When we were told about the damage which we were inflicting on environment we live in, we were alert and ready to listen and be watchful for information that was credible and be ready to question the sources of information which might have been created by parties interested in perpetuating climate destruction for their own ends and profits. No we were not. We accepted the mis-information with an unfathomable willingness and with obvious parallels to our selected-blindness to the dangers of tobacco .

So if we allowed ourselves to be misled over tobacco, and then the climate, surely we wont let ourselves be led up the path ever again…. Right?

Before we go any further, stop and think for a moment of the scale of the meat and dairy industry and all of it’s supply chain partners that participate in the production, processing, and sale of meat and dairy products. Land owners, feed manufacturers, farming equipment manufacturers, the farmers, the pharmaceuticals that produce the drugs fed to animals required for mass farming, the meat processing plants, the transportation sector, processed food producers, supermarkets selling food, and big-brand businesses serving our food (think burgers and fried chicken).

Surely, if meat and dairy were a real danger to our health, they wouldn’t do what the tobacco industry did and try to suppress information about the dangers of meat and dairy? Surely they’d hold up their hands and halt the production of any of their products that damaged your health, let you learn about, even possibly tell you about it on their packaging – like cigarette warning packaging – and let you choose for yourself? Hold that thought.

In 2014 The World Health Organization classified Red Meat as a Group 2A carcogen and Processed Meat (any meat that’s been transformed through salting, curing, fermentation, smoking or other process to enhance flavour or improve preservation) as a Group 1 carcegen – that’s up there with tobacco and asbestos.

Stop for a moment. Are you that woman or man in the 1930’s that heard for the first time that cigarettes and tobacco caused cancer, and laughed it off as ridiculous? The tobacco lobby told that generation that smoking made them stronger and that the science was phoney. The meat and dairy industry today are telling you that protein in meat and milk based products provides you with essential proteins for a strong and healthy body. Surely, the human body can’t survive on plant based diet alone and build muscle mass required to function let alone excel for athletic ambitions and pursuits. The biggest and strongest land mammals on the earth like elephants and rhino all eat meat right?

But I said that my reason for re-evaluating my eating habits wasn’t health, well it wasn’t/isn’t. I started thinking about this whole issue for matters relating to climate change. So what is animal agriculture doing to the planet?

Well, one of the conclusions I’ve drawn is that all animal agriculture is farming on an ‘intensive’ scale, and the only thing we should be doing to our planet that is ‘intensive’ is caring for it. Creating meat for human consumption requires a huge amount of resource. The produce one pound in weight of plate ready meat, we use 2,500 gallons of water. So while you and I were fitting low water shower heads in our homes, and installing water butts in our garden, when we ate our next burger (one pattie) we effectively used 660 gallons of water.

Grazing cattle, whether it’s cows, sheep, pigs or hens is an intensive use of another scarce resource, which is land. If someone talks to you about deforestation, your mind jumps to trees being cut down for palm oil, and while that is correct, much greater volumes of forest is being removed for soya bean production, for the creation of food for livestock in farming. Its been calculated that 91% of the Amazon Rainforest’s destruction is directly attributable to animal agriculture. The seven billion humans on the earth today consume twenty one billion pounds of food daily, while cows (not accounting for pigs, sheep and other livestock) consume 135 billion pounds of food daily. So the reality is that the dramatic increase in the human population on the earth isn’t the problem, feeding the population isn’t the problem, but feeding the growing population a meat and dairy diet is not sustainable.

In all of this, its easy to think that if the world’s population switched to a plant based diet, it is likely to increase our need for swathes of land for crop production, but that is not the case. One and half acres of land is required to produce just 170 kg of meat, while that same area of land can produce 16,783kg of plant based food. The variance in those two numbers is so huge it’s implausible to consider continuing in this fashion. Imagine an industrialised production process, such as car manufacturing, and consider that the inputs into the process could be changed to achieve that sort of enhancement in terms of efficiency, what business wouldn’t make that chance?

 So we’ve talked about the excessive use of water and land resources in animal agriculture, but climate change is driven by CO2 - right? Well lets agree that CO2 is a major contributor to the climate emergency, we now know that animal agriculture account for 51% of the global production of CO2 annually, and that’s not the key message! Livestock is responsible for 65% of all human-related emissions of nitrous oxide – a greenhouse gas with 296 times the global warming potential of carbon dioxide, and which stays in the atmosphere for 150 years.

There’s your new enemy ladies and gentleman – learn its name: N2O or Nitrous Oxide – also known as “laughing gas”. Who’s laughing now?

Let’s turn our attention to fish consumption, but before we leave the land let us think about the impact that land based farming is having on our waterways and oceans. Animal agriculture is the leading cause of ocean dead zones and water pollution. The widespread use of pesticides, herbicides and chemical fertilizers used in the production of feed crops often interferes with the reproductive systems of animals on our land, and in our waterways and oceans. A farm with 2,500 dairy cows produces the same amount of waste as a city of 411,000 people, the processing of that waste results in contaminates reaching our oceans in vast quantities. All of this means that even before we start concerning ourselves that we’re over fishing our oceans, we have to accept that we have been poisoning them for as long as we’ve been farming meat on an industrial scale, resulting in our seas and oceans being in distress.

In truth, our “farming” practices at sea are no less wasteful and inefficient that those we’ve adopted on land. It might not be surprising to learn than 90-100 million tons of fish are pulled from our oceans each year, but to source that amount of food as many as 2.7 trillion animals are pulled from the ocean in the same period. At this rate of inefficient over exploitation, we could see fishless oceans by 2048.

Perhaps the solution in terms of fish might be commercial fish farming as we grown to know it, and its apparent that all our ill habits of land farming have already found their way into our commercial fish farming sector. The intensity of farming of fish is so acute that the process is only feasible commercially when large amounts of antibiotics are fed daily to fish to prevent disease and infection passing from fish to fish in such close quarters.

The use of antibiotics in all forms of farming has become so widespread that 80% of antibiotic sold in the US are for livestock. Its no great leap of imagination to understand that introducing that volume of antibiotic to the food chain, our food chain, is directly linked to recent reports human’s lack of response to essential antibiotic in treating common ailments. The World Health Organisation has said that globally, we are nearing a post-antibiotic are in medicine, meaning that the once heralded miracle drug, anti-biotic, is no longer of use to humans.

Our societies seem to be plagued by diseases and illnesses that are so large in proportion to the overall population, that we’re left scratching our heads thinking “there must be some underlaying cause for all of these new and expanding diseases”. Our media is full of reports about escalating numbers in terms of diabetes, dementia, ASD related conditions such as Autism and the like. Obesity, cardiovascular disease, excessive cholesterol and osteoporosis are all increasing at alarming rates and leaving a legacy of medical issues which no country’s health system is equipped to deal with.

In terms of diabetes, the key message has been to avoid sugars and carbohydrates but evidence has long since existed that neither of these are the primary cause of this disease, while a much larger body of evidence exists to prove that the consumption of meat and dairy fats has a much stronger link to the condition. Direct links has been established between a steady stream of fat and cholesterol and blood vessel dementia.

We’ve been led to believe that poultry, particularly chicken is much healthier for us than red meat, albeit we now know that the number one dietary source of cholesterol in the US is chicken, while men with prostate cancer who consumed high volumes of chicken had a four-fold increase of reoccurrence or progression of the disease.

So assume for the moment that we accept that meats and dairy diets are not suited to humans and that continuing this type of diet is unsustainable in terms of the future of our planet and our well-being. The conclusion is that the global population must move to a plant based diet (no meat, no dairy and no fish) – what would that look like and how would the world function?

Firstly, all current crop production set over for growing animal feed would be diverted to meeting human plant based diet requirements. All land currently used for grazing would either be used to grow crops or returned to it natural state returning vast areas of land to wildlife and for use in terms of recreation. Excessive water consumption associated with animal agriculture would be dramatically reduced thus lessening the severity of water shortages and droughts. Waste produced by animal husbandry which finds its way into our waterways and oceans would be dramatically reduced and advances in pest-resistant crops would end the need for pesticides which in-turn contaminate our streams, rivers and oceans. Without fishing on an industrial scale and contamination of our waterways the oceans fish stocks would recover and protect the future of multiple species and the environment that they exist in. Regrowth of forestry on a natural and assisted basis would dramatically increase the capacity of natural CO2 capture and the production of oxygen while the significant reduction in CO2 and the much more harmful N2O would vastly reduce the active damage being done on a daily basis.

All of these measures would sit alongside our other efforts to reduce CO2 production in the forms of transport, manufacturing, generation, heating etc. to produce an astounding increase in our ability to manage our resources better, and live in world which is cleaner, healthier and more sustainable.

Human health would take an enormous leap forward in terms of quality. Advances in medicine have served to prolong our lives but in a way which brings little by way of quality of life in the years which we’ve gained. Our autumnal years are plagued with diseases and conditions which we’ve come to accept as an inevitable partner to living a greater number of years. You’re likely to find yourself alive beyond the age of 70 years, but will you be living your life or merely existing, sustained by pills, potions, and machines and devices?

The alternative of switching to a plant based diet offers up a much greater standard of living, where food production is required on a much lesser scale in terms of natural resources such as land and water. Where the food in production is having a positive effect on the climate rather than an adverse effect. Our consumption of anti-biotics is dramatically reduced, limited only to essential use during illness and surgery rather than a continuous unconscious, unregulated supply through our food chain. Our conflicts with other species is near-to eliminated where we no longer feel the need to eradicate the predator in the form of the fox, the wolf, the bear and other creatures, and they can play their part in the control of other species which threaten crop production.

Removing fats and contaminates from our diet and sourcing our nutrition exclusively from plants can dramatically reduce obesity amongst our populations. Accepting the advice of the Whole Health Organisation that meat is a carcogen and therefore eliminating it from our food chain will massively reduce cancer illnesses. Reduced dementia, cardiovascular disease and osteoporosis will improve the quality of our lives in later life while all of these enhancements will make huge reductions, within a generation, on the burden of weight that is presently imposed on our healthcare systems.

As we battle against the climate crisis, thinking of ingenious ways to decarbonise our societies and buy ourselves enough time for our planet to recover sufficiently to support life for the generations to follow, are we missing the biggest and most simple change to our lifestyles that could make the difference in saving the earth. Is this information available and we’re choosing to ignore it or is the blindingly obvious solution being withheld from us or being ridiculed by those who have an interest in perpetuating the status-quo?

To finish, I’d like to ask you to consider the position of the active smoker in the 1930’s – you’ve just been told that smoking is horrifically bad for you – what choice are you going to make? When others around you are making the change – and they are, and will continue to do so – when are you going to give serious consideration to eradicating meat and dairy, improving your health and protecting your planet and the environment?

#animalagriculture #decarbonisation #climatecrisis #climateemergency #veganism #cowspiracy #plantbaseddiet