The Future is (Somewhat) Meatless
Published by Joel January 28th, 2008 in Fitness, Food, Meat. Share ThisTwo interesting pieces came on my radar this weekend. I’m not about to give up meat entirely, but it has become less and less of my diet of late, and after my birthday early next month, I’m probably going to end up cutting it out almost entirely for a couple of months while I work to get my weight down under 200. (And calorie counting, etc. I’m not just cutting meat out because I think that’ll make me instantly slimmer.)
The first, from the Times, a piece by Mark Bittman about the high cost of meat production:
Americans eat about the same amount of meat as we have for some time, about eight ounces a day, roughly twice the global average. At about 5 percent of the world’s population, we “process” (that is, grow and kill) nearly 10 billion animals a year, more than 15 percent of the world’s total.Growing meat (it’s hard to use the word “raising” when applied to animals in factory farms) uses so many resources that it’s a challenge to enumerate them all. But consider: an estimated 30 percent of the earth’s ice-free land is directly or indirectly involved in livestock production, according to the United Nation’s Food and Agriculture Organization, which also estimates that livestock production generates nearly a fifth of the world’s greenhouse gases — more than transportation.
The second, this profile in the Wall Street Journal of Kansas City tight-end Tony Gonzalez, who has gone from a high-meat diet to a vegan one:
Three weeks later, he walked into the weight room at the Chiefs’ training facility and got a shock. The 100-pound dumbbells he used to easily throw around felt like lead weights. “I was scared out of my mind,” he says. Standing on the scale, he learned he’d lost 10 pounds.Mr. Gonzalez considered scrapping the diet altogether and returning to the Chiefs’ standard gut-busting menu. First, though, he called Mr. Campbell, who put him in touch with Jon Hinds, himself a vegan and the former strength coach for the Los Angeles Clippers basketball team. Mr. Hinds suggested plant foods with more protein.
You’ll have to pry the steak and burgers out of my cold, dead hands!
I remember seeing an article in one of the London papers last summer about genetically engineering cows to produce little to no methane in an effort to be more friendly to the environment.
It is a shame to think about how inefficient cows are at processing their food. Other animals like deer and buffalo are much better suited to processing the food found naturally. The downside is they don’t get fat and the meat can be pretty tough.
You can totally do this man. We eat way more poultry in our house now than we used to. Although how bad is tons of chicken poo for the environment…
I was confused by the Gonzales article when I first read it. It seems to be saying that he did well on a vegan diet, but then there’s this paragraph:
“Mr. Gonzalez joined a handful of elite athletes who have put the vegan diet to the test, either for their health or because they oppose using animals as food. But he was the first pro-football superstar to try. And the first to fail.”
So it was a failure? Or just the early steps? Huh?
Also, nice to see the little shout-out to Mac Danzig: WAR DANZIG! For those that didn’t watch The Ultimate Fighter: Hughes vs. Serra, he was colorful, vegan and crazy.
Pete beat me to it. If I have to reduce the world’s population by a few million to keep my beef producing land, by god I’ll go on a genocidal tear that will make Idi Amin and Pol Pot look like nursery school kids.
Ok, maybe not, but I’m going to have a steak for lunch in protest.
Jemaleddin: Keep reading. He failed at first because he didn’t have the right mix of protein.
I wonder if countries with meat-rich diets correspond to higher rates of obesity? Meat is much more calorie dense than other foods, thus eating significantly more meat could result in a population that is more *ahem* “meaty”.
I have heard that another reason that meat is core to a bodybuilding/fitness diet like a football player’s is because it is high in testosterone. Particularly red meat. Higher levels of testosterone help grow bigger muscles, etc. The benefit to fitness is not just from the high protein content of meat but also for the hormones meat contains, though many people would probably not consider this a “benefit”.
I have been a vegetarian since around 1994. I am not going to bore you with the reasons for this but let me just say that they are 3 main reasons to do it and even if you choose just one you usually end up being concerned with all 3 (environment, personal health, & cruelty). Anyway, I started hitting the gym about 4 years ago and if you do eat right and make sure you are getting plenty of protein form varied sources you aren’t going to get weaker. I have been steadily increasing the amount of weight I lift since I started. I’m going to be 42 years old in may and I seriously feel better than I did in my 30’s and I am pretty sure that diet has a lot to do with that.
Good luck to you if you try it. Personally, I can’t go without meat or fish based protein for more than 48 hours without getting stabby. Seriously.
Such a quick read … Michael Pollan’s new bestseller, In Defense of Food. It responds to everything in this post and in the comments. I’m on my knees, begging, please read.
Sometimes statistics are quoted as if they mean something, when they don’t.
It’s only natural that we’d average twice the meat a day over the rest of the globe. Much of the globe is not as well off fiscally, and as Bittman’s article notes, nearly a billion people are starving or malnourished . Meat costs more money than beans, rice, bread.
And JB, I would imagine that a population that consumes more meat does so because they can afford to, having “spare money”, something that also lends itself toward leisure, free time, and other extravagances. This would lead to a more meaty population whether or not meat, itself, had anything to do with the ‘meaty’ outcome.
My other problem with the statistics is they seem to mislead, as if they are saying we’re responsible for consuming a sixth of the world’s meat. Bittman’s part makes it sound as if American’s are global resource consuming gluttons. It may be so, but his numbers don’t support it.
Note, he states “roughly twice” the global average. Roughly twice means, “not twice”. If it were less than 4oz, he would say more than twice, so it’s more than 4oz a day.
Note, the 4oz average is derived by figuring in the nearly billion people not getting almost any meat at all, so the actual intake for the average person who eats is more like 5% or more.
Regardless of the shady numbers, we eat 75k tons of meat a day, while the rest of the globe eats 825k tons per day, if you use 4% as the global average, which we know is a conservative estimate.
This means we consume less than 9% of the meat on the globe.
The article then states we process MORE than 15% of the meat pie. This indicates that 2/5 of the meat we process feeds the global community. This doesn’t include the other 85% of the meat that the rest of the globe process and consumes without the help of fat Americans.
This also means that since nearly half of the meat we process feeds the globe, I’m not going to feel guilty about rainforests being torn down for feeding livestock.
If Americans are responsible for that, it would only be because our government paid farms subsidies to not grow food.