Meat

Hello to you from the past, again.

Right now I am cooking on a camp, like I said last week. Because of this, I want to talk to you about food.
More specifically, I want to talk to you about meat.
And still more specifically, I want to talk to you about the effects of eating meat on the world.

First of all, how much do people eat meat?

In the USA, an average person eats 27 kg of beef, 21 kg of pork and 44 kg of chicken every year. In the EU the same numbers are 11, 32 and 21. In South Africa 13, 5, and 32, though to my knowledge most of Africa hardly eats any beef or pork at all.

Then emissions.

37% of all human methane emissions are from livestock.
Total GHG emissions attributable to livestock products is 32 564 CO2e a year, 51% of all human GHG emissions.
(I got these numbers here. They're from 2009)

However, Wikipedia tells me that according to a recent FAO estimate, it's only 14,5%. So I don't know. They both to agree that a previous (2004, I think), estimate was 18%

Not only do raising animals produce greenhouse gasses, it reduces the absorption of them out of the air. Because the world eats so much meat, there isn't enough grassland to feed it all, which means you have to cut down forest to make up space for all the cows. This is bad especially when it comes to rainforests, because they suck in enormous amounts of CO2, and when you cut it down (or burn), plant some small grasses on it, and stick the area with cows, it stops absorbing greenhouse gasses and starts emitting them. And actually apparently just cutting down forests emits green house gases, not only stops to absorb them.

Animals also need huge amounts of water. To produce 1 kg of beef, you need about 17 000 litres of water (says, yes, Wikipedia). To produce the same amount of soy beans, you need about 2500. And for example potatoes take still a lot less. Admittedly there's not much protein in potatoes, though.

And then, of course, there's the thing about being able to feed so much more people by just eating the stuff you grow instead of eating things that eat the things that you grow.  I found a page that said it would be possible to feed 800 million people with all the grain that is used to feed livestock in the USA alone. Though article is from 1997, so I'm not sure if that still applies. Also producing the stuff animals eat take even more water and resources and space, which means more forest cut into fields, which means less plants to suck up the CO2 stuck in the atmosphere.
Producing meat is simply a very inefficient way to use all the space on this planet.

On top of all this, according to The Guardian (there's also a good table of how much water it takes to produce all kinds of foods on that page. Apparently chocolate takes even more water than beef), people throw away half of all the food produced. A lot of it before it even gets to the shops. That's not just meat, but food in general, so I'm getting a little off topic, but still.

Also, apparently eating meat increases risk of cancer.
Though it seems to me that quite literally everything increases the risk of cancer.

I wanted to make a neat post, give a list of numbers of how much eating meat burdens the planet, but it's surprisingly difficult to find numbers in the internet. Or then the numbers I find are contradicting.

Ok, here's the point: the world would be so much better off if people didn't eat meat. Or at least ate it a little less. Or a lot less. There are a lot of people who don't eat any meat at all, and they're fine. The human race would be just fine with less.

~matu