Do You Eat Meat?

I grew up in Brooklyn and Long Island, eating meat three meals a day, bacon and eggs for breakfast, ham and cheese sandwich for lunch and, say, pot roast or meatloaf for dinner. It never occurred to me that there was an alternative until I went to college and settled down with a hippie chick from Manhattan who was a vegetarian and a GREAT cook. She never told me I was a vegetarian and I never gave it much thought beyond how delicious the meals she prepared were. But when I was traveling through Asia-- and especially Afghanistan-- I noticed all the meat eaters getting deathly sick and me becoming like the caregiver for half the hippie trail kids in Kabul. A lengthy stay in Goa, where I learned about how human-hog recycling worked-- i.e., the sewage "system" (humans eat them and they eat the sewage and we eat them some more)-- made me a vegan for decades.

As I mentioned a few times lately, I'm reading Thom Hartmann's newest book, Threshold. I want to quote a couple of short paragraphs that stuck with me the other day:

[W]hile there are more than six billion humans, there are more than twenty billion livestock mammals (pigs, cows, goats, sheep) and about sixteen billion chickens in the world, over 99 percent of them grown by humans as food for humans. The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) in a 2007 report noted that 37 percent of the world's total methane production (and 9 percent of all CO2 and 65 percent of all nitrous oxide emissions) comes from our livestock. Because nitrous oxide is 296 times stronger than CO2, the combined greenhouse effect of our livestock worldwide is greater than the sum total of all our cars, trains, buses, trucks, ships, airplanes and jets.

A sudden and worldwide shift to vegetarianism (or even close to vegetarianism-- most indigenous societies historically have used meat as a flavoring rather than a staple, eating less than a fifth of the meat and dairy products Americans do) would have more impact on global warming than if every jet plane and car in the world were to fall silent forever.

University of Chicago research found that simply going vegetarian would reduce the average American's carbon footprint by over 1.5 tons of carbon per year: That's half again more than doubling the gas mileage of your car by moving from a big sedan to a small hybrid (which typically saves about a ton of carbon per year).

Hartmann then goes on to explain how methane concentrations in the atmosphere will eventually-- actually, fairly soon-- probably end most life, certainly human life-- on earth. And then there's all the solid polution. I was speaking with North Carolina Secretary of State Elaine Marshall about the problem the other day. She reminded me that in 2007 her state, the #2 hog producer (over 10 million annually) after Iowa, became the first in the nation to ban the construction or expansion of lagoons and sprayfields on hog farms-- the Swine Farm Environmental Performance Standards Act. Marshall, who is running against reactionary Republican Richard Burr for the U.S. Senate has a long career working for environmentally sound hog farming operations. "Locally," she told me on the phone, "I've been helping a North Carolina inventor who has patients and EPA approval for a hog-farm operation that produces no waste, but in this economy it's been difficult for him to get funding for a demonstration project." She also mentioned that she's been eating a lot more environmentally herself. In fact, more and more candidates have mentioned that to me than I've ever heard before. And you know what? It's the one thing each and every one of us can do on a personal, nonpolitical level to help save our planet.

Last week and old friend of mine, Cheri Shankar, wrote a very provocative piece for HuffPo, Can You Be A Meat-Eating Environmentalist?. She has the most environmentally advanced, green-friendly home I've ever been in. She's very sweet and doesn't like hectoring people but she's come to the conclusion that it's difficult to talk the talk without walking the walk.

Probably the best thing we can do for the planet is abstain from meat, fish, and dairy. Our food choices have the most profound impact of all. More than driving a hybrid, recycling, solar panel installation or LEED architecture. So for all of our efforts, our carbon footprint is huge, thanks to our diet full of hamburgers, steaks, bacon and chicken salads. The energy it takes to produce a pound of meat versus a pound of vegetables is mind boggling. Meat eating is a biggie! It matters ... a lot.

Last year my friend Phil took me to the screening on a groundbreaking movie that is mostly filmed, Bold Native; they're still working on it. I still haven't gotten it out of my mind. There's an incongruous, almost random 14 second clip from the movie at the top of this post. Here's the blurb from the Bold Native website:

Bold Native is a fiction feature film. Charlie Cranehill, an animal liberator wanted by the United States government for domestic terrorism, emerges from the underground to coordinate a nationwide action as his estranged CEO father tries to find him before the FBI does. The film simultaneously follows a young woman who works for an animal welfare organization fighting within the system to establish more humane treatment of farmed animals. From abolitionists to welfarists, Bold Native takes on the issue of modern animal use and exploitation from several angles within the context of a road movie adventure story.

The filmmakers’ background in documentary informed the creative approach to Bold Native. Self-financed and shot with a four person team in real-world locations, sometimes using real activists, lawyers, and formerly imprisoned animal liberators, the film weaves an intricate tale of one of the most important issues facing America and the world morally and ecologically-- the impact and consequences of industrialized animal use. And with a character who faces prosecution and potential lifetime imprisonment under the recently passed Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act (AETA) for property crimes currently considered terrorism, the film also illuminates the danger of corporate interests influencing the law in a post-9/11 world.

Meet Casanova and Sonny: