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Earth and Turf Day 2009
As Earth Day 2009 winds down, I'm at something of a loss for a blog entry, so I'm going to borrow from myself. Over on Facebook, one of my cousins solicited "opinions on Capitalism in the US, The Meat Industry today and/or Corporations today," so I'm going to share here my off-the-cuff response there, in which I focused on the meat industry. I promise that it ties into Earth Day, even though that wasn't my original intention:
The meat industry is bad for all sorts of reasons. I'm thinking specifically of cows, but it's true in varying degrees for other animals as well. There's the quality of life of the animals in confinement feeding operations, but even if one can't muster any sympathy for the animals, there's the effect that this kind of high-stress lifestyle has on the quality of the meat. Intimately tied up with this is the diet these animals are given: primarily soy and corn, which the animals did not evolve to consume. Cows are ruminants, and grass is their natural food. They fatten up more and faster on corn and soy, which is why it's done, but they're also less healthy as a result of their dietary issues (and the close confinement), which necessitates pumping the cows full of antibiotics. More to the point, their meat is less healthy. The beef most of us in the U.S. consume is high in omega-6 fatty acids (the ones that are bad for us) and relatively low in omega-3 fatty acids (the good ones). Cows raised on grass have the opposite fat profile.
The dominant paradigm of the feedlot for cows has other negative impacts. First, the concentration of animals means a concentration of manure. In lower quantites, manure is a great fertilizer, but in the quantities that build up on feedlots, it becomes a dangerous contaminant to the water supply. Second, the corn and soy diet is based on a form of agriculture that relies heavily on government subsidies on the one hand and that relies heavily on chemical fertilizers (petroleum based) as well as fossil fuels for planting, harvesting, and transport on the other. Thus, it's also bad for the environment.
Further, the net effect of all of this is to enrich agri-business companies while keeping farmers in a constant cycle of debt to subsidize expansion or else fail and be pushed out of farming. In other words, the few get wealthier at the expense of the many.