It's Time To Get Hip About Meat!
BOOK REVIEW
It's Time to Get Hip About Meat!
"Diet for a New America by John Robbins," Viking Press, 1987, $16.70 paper.
by Matthew Kopka
The Smiths were right--meat is murder, and it's killing us all. In "Diet for a New America," John Robbins marshals an extraordinary amount of evidence about the meat industry and its practices in a most persuasive manner--the effect on the reader grows from amazement to revulsion, and then to the kind of anger that makes for activism. Everyone I know who's read the book (that makes five of us) has given up meat.
The book' s most telling insight may be just how closely allied meat production is with all our destructive environmental practices; from waste of our natural resources to pollution, to abuse of both humans and animals--all are implicated in the way we bring food to our tables. And Robbins, carefully documenting literally thousands of sources, goes a long way toward proving his assertion that reducing our meat consumption is the single most potent gesture we can make on behalf of the environment.
Fifty-six percent of this country's arable land, Robbins notes, is devoted to beef production--not meat in general, just beef. Yet you can grow 20,000 pounds of potatoes (to take one fairly nutritive alternative) in the space required to raise every 165 pounds of dead cow. If this sounds like an outlandish number of potatoes, bear in mind that it requires 16 pounds of soybeans and other grains to produce a single pound of marketable beef. With 38,000 children dying of malnutrition daily, and 20 million to die this year, raising so much grain just to fatten cows begins to look pretty unconscionable.
Sharp readers will insist that we have enough food anyway, that mismanagement and spoilage are the real causes of world hunger. This has been sadly true until now, but with the human population scheduled to triple in the next century, food production worldwide will have to be radically reorganized or starvation may simply become the norm.
Part of the lunacy of meat making derives from the very circuitous process by which it becomes food. Growing grain is one thing--preparing the soil; planting, raising, cutting and shipping the crop. Success at any one of these stages requires a good deal of Ma Nature's benevolence, of machinery, of energy and person-power to begin with. But grazing those cows, feeding them (amazing things!), killing them, cutting, shipping and packaging their parts--these require vast additional quantities of land, fossil fuel, labor, and water--another commodity that becomes more precious with each passing day. The author traces these processes with assiduous care through each mind-boggling step of the way, revealing mismanagement, cruelty, criminal neglect, and the substance and health risks both workers and consumers face as a result.
Robbins shows for example, how it requires 78 calories of fossil fuel to obtain a calorie of protein from beef--an incredible expenditure of one kind of energy to obtain a very small amount of another. Yet it requires just two calories of fossil fuel to obtain that same calorie of energy from soybeans, a much more ecological trade-off. Similarly, it requires 25 gallons of water to produce a pound of wheat, and 2,500 gallons--including rainfall, irrigation and slops, to produce a single pound of meat. That's 625 gallons per quarter pounder! If humans converted en masse to vegetarianism, Robbins shows, our petroleum reserves might be expected to last us another 260 years, instead of just 13 as is presently forecast. No one is holding their breath, of course, but the comparison is nonetheless striking.
It's probably fair to ask what difference any of us can make. But consider this: we import 300 million pounds of meat from Central and South America yearly, according to Robbins--that's over 36 billion possible potatoes, by my count. Yet those countries don't begin to adequately feed their own--fully 75% of Central and Latin American children are undernourished. (There is a certain grim symmetry in the way both meat and people are butchered on our behalf in some of these places.) You might just decide you don't want any part of such craziness, whatever effect your decision is going to make. But, consider, too, that the meat industry is already scrambling to figure out how to deal with changes in our meat-eating habits, and that if markets for Argentine or Guatemalan beef dry up, farmers will begin using their lands to grow other products.
The percentage of fat in our diet--largely from meat, but from milk and eggs as well--has more than doubled since 1900. Our eating habits derive in good part from a campaign carried out by the dairy and meat interests, often aided by our government, also well-documented by Robbins.
But we need to unlearn those habits, and quick. Meat, as Robbins overwhelmingly proves, is not good for your heart, endurance, or posterity. It has now been clearly linked to strokes, various cancers, diabetes, heart disease, hypoglycemia, hypertension, and asthma, as well as a host of more minor ills. (The simplest test of these links is also the most persuasive; people in countries that eat less meat suffer fewer of these ailments).
For every culture, eating has held something of the sacred. In a "fast food culture," on the other hand, there is conveniently little time to think about what (or whom) we're putting inside us. While you may feel you're a tough customer, long since hardened to the fact that some dumb brute has got to die in order to make you attractive to the likes of Cybil Sheperd and other "Real People," this book will surprise you; the manner in which chickens, cows, and our intelligent and sociable friends the pigs travel from hoof to plate; what goes in and comes out of them (chickens' own excrement is often part of their feed) will certainly turn your stomach; and one day it just might find you Iiberating old M(a)cDonald's.
Calmly, and keeping the inspirational hokum to a moderate level, Robbins, who walked away from the Baskin-Robbins ice cream fortune to devote himself to his cause, lays it all out. Ignore the appeal to outmoded (even contradictory, given the book's insistence on our global interdependence) patriotic virtues in both the title and red, white and blue jacket design, and give it a look. It's a book you can browse to good effect, and it might not just change your life, but save it (and others) too. You sort your trash; you take your stuff to the recycling plant--it's time to get hip about meat
While you may fee! you're a tough customer, long since hardened to the fact that some dumb brute has got to die In order to make you attractive...this book will surprise you; the manner In which chickens, cows, and our Intelligent and sociable friends the pigs travel from hoof to plate, what goes In and comes out of them...will certainly turn your stomach; and one day it just might find you liberating old M(a)cDonald's.