Eating green

"When most Americans sit down to dinner, they're only a bite away from unwittingly worsening the environment," says environmental researcher Alan Durning.

The main culprit, according to Durning, is right there on the plate, between the potato and the vegetables. It's tonight's pork chop, steak, or chicken breast.

"Livestock absorb much of the country's crop harvest along with vast quantities of energy and water. The unpaid ecological price of that meat is so hefty that Americans, if they aren't careful, could end up eating themselves out of planetary house and home."

What we need to do, says Durning, is to "put farm animals back in their place" by eating less meat, dairy, and eggs. We also need to cut back on highly packaged and processed foods.

Q: In choosing what we eat, how can we help the environment?

A: First, we need to reduce our consumption of grain-fed animal products; that is, meat, poultry, eggs, and dairy. Then, we need to reduce our consumption of highly processed and packaged foods. Both recommendations coincide with eating a healty diet.

Q: Are you saing that we should all be vegetarians?

A: No. From an environmental viewpoint, a vegetarian diet isn't necessary.

There's nothing anti-ecological about cows, pigs, and chickens. In most countries, they're used to turn plants that people can't eat into food that people can. Animals also allow crop rotation, which helps conserve soil. You can't rotate hay into your fields if you don't have animals to feed the hay to.

But American-style animal farms burden natur because they have outgrown their niche. Modern meat production involves intensive use--and often misuse--of grain, water, energy, and grazing areas. And animal agriculture produces surprisingly large amounts of air and water pollution.

In the U.S., most animals spend their lives in concentrated agro-industries, not cow barns or chicken coops. In fact, many animals farms are as much factories as farms. Taken as a whole, livestock rearing is the most ecologically damaging part of American agriculture.

Q: How do factory farms harm the environment?

A: Wherever you put a lot of animals close together, you end up with a lot of manure. Sewage is the biggest water pollution problem associated with animal agriculture.

The waste from stockyards, chicken factories, and other feeding facilities has to be moved, stored, and spread without allowing it into water supplies. Unless you have a pretty advanced sewage system--comparable to that of a midsized city--you're going to end up with real water pollution problems.

You also end up with air pollution. Thirty million tons of methane--a gas that contributes to global warming, or the 'greenhouse effect'--come from manure in sewage ponds or heaps, where there isn't enough oxygen for the manure of decompose aerobically. Spreading the manure over a pasture eliminates that methane.

Q: Do some meat damage the environment more than others?

A: Pork is the worst, followed by beef, then poultry. Eggs and dairy products are much less resource-intensive.

Q: Why is pork the worst?

A: Pigs just take more grain to add weight. Nearly seven pounds of corn and soy are needed to put one pound of boneless, trimmed pork on the table.

Cattle require less--4.8 pounds of grain and soy per pound of feed. Egg layers need 2.6 pounds to produce a pound of eegs--that's about eight eggs. Dairy cows need just three-tenths of a pound of grain and soybean meal to produce a pound--that's about a pint--of milk. Concentrate that milk into cheese, though, and the figure rises to three pounds of feed per pound of cheese.

Q: Why do pigs sop up so much grain?

A: Pigs aren't ruminants, which means that unlike sheep, cattle, and other animals with multiple stomachs, they can't convert grass to meat. In most parts of the world pigs survive by eating agricultural waste products. But in the U.S., they're fed grain and soy.

Q: Aren't cattle also fed grain?

A: Only for the last hundred days or so, while they're being fattened. For most of their lives they eat grass.

Even so, the steaks that are added to a steer's weight in the feedlot are not efficiently produced. You've got all kinds of resources being used to produce a few extra pounds of meat. Fattening up cattle in feedlots by feeding them grain is the most resource-intensive part of the entire agriculture industry.

Q: So is lower-=fat beef more environmentally friendly?

A: Yes, because, in general, the cattle have been fed less grain.

Q: Does that mean hamburger is better than steak, since it often comes from dairy cows that haven't been grain-fed?

A: You could certainly make the argument that hamburger that comes from dairy cows is a by-product of dairy production, and that it's better environmentally.

Q: Why is feeding grain so bad for the environment?

A: Feed grain is produced using large quantities of fertilizer in giant fields where you often have soil erosion and groundwater contamination. Nearly 40 percent of the world's grain production, and more than 70 percent of the U.S. production, is fed to livestock, according to the USDA.