Fields of Meat

Or, Cows Are Obsessed with Public Perception

A short post today, mostly just to share an article: Plant Based Meats Do More to Address Climate Change Than Green Buildings or Zero-Emission Cars. I'll share excerpts in a minute. I still haven't made a personal change in line with what it advocates (see also: Cheeseburger Ethics by Eric Schwitzgebel, which I shared with context and commentary in You Belong to a Herd). I nevertheless find it compelling evidence that should be shared. It's a change I can definitely get on board with if widely implemented and can even see myself a secondary adapter leading the way (though not quite yet).

For a little more context--a bit of my background information when I encountered the article--I want to reshare something I threw into the middle of A Glossary of Enchantment. It was a bit of a tangent from the rest of the post, but it is fascinating and peripherally related. I'm interested in both the details of all the ways we use our land and that the largest portion by far goes to cows.

Here's How America Uses Its Land

Agricultural land takes up about a fifth of the country.

Yet the actual land area used to grow the food Americans eat is much smaller . . . Most cropland is used for livestock feed . . .

More than one-third of U.S. land is used for pasture—by far the largest land-use type in the contiguous 48 states. . . .

There’s a single, major occupant on all this land: cows. Between pastures and cropland used to produce feed, 41 percent of U.S. land in the contiguous states revolves around livestock.

Click, obviously, on the image for a larger version of it and on the title of the article for other images and additional information.

And InspiroBot had just generated a perfect accompanying image for me when I came across that data.

https://inspirobot.me/share?iuid=082/aXm5809xjU.jpg

Cows are obsessed with public perception

Without further ado, here's the data from the new (to me) article:

Plant Based Meats Do More to Address Climate Change Than Green Buildings or Zero-Emission Cars

For each dollar, investment in improving and scaling up the production of meat and dairy alternatives resulted in three times more greenhouse gas reductions compared with investment in green cement technology, seven times more than green buildings and 11 times more than zero-emission cars. . . . 

Meat and dairy production uses 83 percent of farmland and causes 60 percent of agriculture’s greenhouse gas emissions, but provides only 18 percent of calories and 37 percent of protein. Moving human diets from meat to plants means less forest is destroyed for pasture and fodder growing and fewer emissions of the potent greenhouse gas methane produced by cattle and sheep. . . . 

Scientists have concluded that avoiding meat and dairy products is the single biggest way to reduce your environmental impact on the planet and that large cuts in meat consumption in rich nations are essential to ending the climate crisis. The Project Drawdown group, which assesses climate solutions, places plant-based diets in the top three of almost 100 options. . . . 

A move towards plant-based meats could also help alleviate food crises. “You are cutting out the ‘middleman’, whether it’s a cow, a pig, or a chicken. It’s just mathematics: if instead of feeding all of these crops to animals, and then eating the animals, you just use the crops directly for human consumption, you need fewer crops overall and therefore alleviate the constraints on the system.”

I've never been a big meat eater and have always enjoyed plant-based proteins, so I say bring it on. I'm ready.

As a follow-up, I want to share a snippet of Feed, by M.T. Anderson (which I've mentioned before in Prophetic? and you can read in full here. This is not what "plant-based meats," but it's such a stark, vivid description that it's always stuck with me.

Our feeds caught a banner from a farm that invited visitors, where you could walk around and see everything grow, so we swerved for there and landed. There weren’t many other people there that day, so we were almost alone while we walked around.

It was real peaceful. We walked along holding hands, and our elbows rubbed, too. Violet wasn’t wearing sleeves, so I could see the little frowns made by her elbows.

It smelled like the country. It was a filet mignon farm, all of it, and the tissue spread for miles around the paths where we were walking. It was like these huge hedges of red all around us, with these beautiful marble patterns running through them. They had these tubes, they were bringing the tissue blood, and we could see the blood running around, up and down. It was really interesting. I like to see how things are made, and to understand where they come from.

It was a perfect afternoon. They had made part of it into a steak maze, for tourists, and we split up in the steak maze and tried to see who could get to the center first. We were like running around corners and peeking and diving, and there were these mirrors set up to confuse you, so you’d see all these nonexistent beef hallways. We were big laughing and we’d run into each other and growl and back away. There were other tourists in the steak maze, too, and they thought we were cute. . . . 

Later, we went and climbed up an observation tower over the farm. It was getting to be sunset, so it was meg pretty.

We were sitting side by side, with our legs swinging on the wall of the tower, and the Clouds™ were all turning pink in front of us. We could see all these miles of filet mignon from where we were sitting, and some places where the genetic coding had gone wrong and there, in the middle of the beef, the tissue had formed a horn or an eye or a heart blinking up at the sunset, which was this brag red, and which hit on all those miles of muscle and made it flex and quiver, with all these shudders running across the top of it, and birds were flying over, crying kind of sad, maybe seagulls looking for garbage, and the whole thing, with the beef, and the birds, and the sky, it all glowed like there was a light inside it, which it was time to show us now.

Bring on the fields of meat.