When I first read Ingrid Newkirk’s article “You can’t be a meat-eating environmentalist” (CT, April 20), I naturally assumed that, being Earth Week, surely someone would call her out on her polarized “meat-eating or environmentally-conscious” position.
The next day, I read such a response from Erin Rockwell in “Anti-agriculture claims need further examination” (CT, April 21), but I found myself sinking into disappointment the further I got in her column. It seems to me that both sides currently highlighted in the debate about livestock production are missing the point.
The fact is that raising livestock under the industrial model, whether with the abuses vilified by Newkirk or just “business as usual” as Rockwell described, is both unhealthy and unsustainable, not just for us but for the animals and the environment.
Let’s start with the animals themselves. In her column, Rockwell argues that the waste of resources argument made by Newkirk is false because livestock feed is of a quality too low for human consumption, not just feed corn but also cottonseed hulls, distiller’s and brewer’s grains, and soybean meal.
What’s not being addressed, however, is the fact that ruminants like cattle are designed to eat grass, and feeding them grain instead of grass destroys the microbial population in their gut and can lead to serious health problems.
In addition, housing them in feedlots creates conditions in which diseases can develop and spread rapidly, necessitating regular use of antibiotics that the scientific community has not thoroughly tested for effects on human health.
In contrast, raising livestock on pasture and allowing them to pursue natural diets allows the animals to maintain healthy biological functions. The question we should be asking is not under what conditions can we mass produce livestock for consumption, but should we be mass-producing in any way that so radically alters their natural states?
Tied directly to this are concerns of environmental health, the most important of which are water quality and soil fertility (There are admittedly many other concerns, but for the sake of brevity I’ll focus on these two.).
Water is, after all, an increasingly scarce resource, and soil is the foundation for all our food, whether we eat crops directly or feed them to the animals we eat.
One of the major problems with industrial livestock production is the absence of a closed-loop system. Instead of raising cattle on pasture, where they can graze and leave their droppings, returning nutrients to the soil and out of the water supply — ultimately improving the health of the whole system — the industrial model will ship feed corn from Iowa to a feedlot operation in Texas, leaving a massive manure lagoon to pose health risks through leaching into groundwater instead of those excess nutrients going back to the soil from which they came (And yes, there are strict standards for manure lagoon safety, but the fact is that as many of these lagoons age and their liners begin to deteriorate, farmers already in debt for all their equipment, patented seeds and chemical inputs can’t afford to fix them.).
Finally, we can talk about how industrial animal products affect human health. While it’s true that meat and other animal products provide proteins and fats that we need for a wholesome diet, not all meat is created equal.
Grass-finished beef has 50 percent lower saturated fat, three times as much vitamin E, and up to five times more conjugated linoleic acid (CLA, an omega-3 fatty acid) than industrial beef.
Many studies have shown that CLA can significantly reduce incidence of cancer, and many other studies have shown that over-consumption of beef (assumed to be industrial, since it’s been the only easily available option for so long) increases risks of cancer and heart disease.
Pastured eggs also contain significantly higher levels of omega-threes then their industrial counterparts. The logical conclusion, one that has been reached by many in the scientific community, is that eating grass-finished beef and dairy and free-range pastured eggs can help improve human health.
This overview of an alternative system is, regrettably, extremely brief and missing many important facets that would require much more space than I have here, but the issues I’ve covered should serve to highlight some of the flaws in relying solely on a framework of industrial agriculture when making arguments.
Granted, this closed-loop, sustainable system isn’t something that can be implemented across the board anytime soon. However, it is not only a viable option, but as more and more people become aware of the possibilities and benefits of such a system, it is becoming a reality in places around the world, including here in the U.S.
It seems to me that both Newkirk’s and Rockwell’s positions suffer from a lack of exposure to ideas about agriculture that fall outside the currently dominant industrial paradigm. Maybe it’s time to look past our preconceptions and have an informed debate about the future of our food system.