We publish below the second part of the post about veganism which reports an article from The Economist magazine in Italian translation.
La meat is hungry for land
Even on the subject of the environmental impact of the food industry, vegans and vegetarians have an advantage. Growing plant foods requires less land than it does to produce meat. Animals don't turn all the energy they consume into calories for their muscles. They need some of that energy to stay alive. If this caloric use is a necessity for the animals, from the point of view of food production it is a waste. This waste means that you need more land per calorie produced if you process beef (over a square foot per calorie) than broccoli (10 sq cm per calorie). Undoubtedly, many pastures are on land that would not necessarily be suitable for agriculture. However, FAO estimates that livestock farming occupies about 80% of all agricultural land and produces only 18% of the world's calories.
Alon Shepon and colleagues at the Weizmann Institute have examined this aspect in terms of opportunity cost (ie the cost deriving from the failure to exploit an opportunity granted to an economic entity is an indicator of loss or waste). Choosing to produce a gram of protein by feeding a laying hen, rather than obtaining the equivalent from plants, has an opportunity cost of 40%. Getting the gram of protein from beef represents a 96% opportunity cost. These scholars argue that if America stopped paying these opportunity costs and got its protein from plants in the first place, it could increase its food supply by a third or eliminate all losses from food waste.
Terrifying CO2 emissions
This hunger for land causes livestock farming to change the climatic context: freeing land for grazing animals creates greenhouse gases. In addition to this, the bacteria in the digestive systems of ruminants produce methane, a rather potent greenhouse gas. Once it comes out of cattle, mainly through belching, not, as commonly thought through flatulence, this methane gas contributes to global warming. FAO calculates that cattle generate up to two-thirds of greenhouse gases from livestock and are the world's fifth largest source of methane emissions. If cows were a country, the herds scattered across the Earth would be the third largest emitter of greenhouse gases on the planet.
Springmann and his colleagues calculated that in 2050, in a world dominated by veganism, greenhouse gas emissions from agriculture would be 70% lower compared to the current world; in a world of “global healthy eating” they would be 29% lower. The benefits are not all due only to the smaller number of cattle; but a large part of them do. Cattle farming produces seven times more emissions per ton of protein than pig or poultry farms, 12 times more than soybeans and 30 times more than wheat. Giving up meat yields many of the benefits of choosing vegan.
Feeding on other animals also makes a lot of difference. In environmental terms, obtaining proteins from insects – very efficient converters – could be almost indistinguishable from veganism.
Animal suffering is it moral?
With the exception of insects, one of the main motivations of many vegans and vegetarians is the belief that killing and eating animals is wrong. Vegans also abstain from milk and eggs because they see a lot of exploitation, death and suffering in them (the honey issue remains a point of contention).
In dairy herds, calves are typically taken from their dams within 24 hours of their birth, compared to 9 months to 1 year for natural suckling. Male calves are killed or raised for meat production. In industrial egg production, male chicks are killed and simply discarded on their first day of life. The death toll is immense. Over 50 billion farm animals are killed each year to make feed products.
#MooToo
The best-known proponent of the animal cause is Peter Singer, a philosopher at Princeton University. Singer argues that viewing the needs and interests of humans as superior to those of other animals is a nefarious bias, analogous to viewing men as superior to women or whites as superior to people of color. A prejudice that is based on an arbitrary distinction between two groups, one of which has the power to suppress the needs of the other. The Princeton philosopher wrote:
“What we must do is include nonhuman animals in the sphere of our moral consideration and cease to view their lives as expendable for whatever futile purpose we happen to have. If we consider it wrong to inflict a certain amount of pain on a child for no good reason, we must consider it equally wrong to inflict the same amount of pain on a horse for no good reason. The animal that kills with the least reason to kill is the human animal".
What matters, says Singer, is not the species to which a being belongs, but its capacity for suffering. If an animal suffers as much as a person, then things that would be unacceptable for a person – such as killing and eating it or pinning it in a cage – are unacceptable if done to the animal. "In suffering," writes Singer, "animals are our equals."
This moral point would seem to depend on an empirical consideration; to what extent and in what way do animals suffer? The brains of animals contain areas clearly analogous to those related to consciousness, perception, and emotion in humans. What differentiates their suffering from that of a human is a matter of goat wool. Surely animals feel pain and both humans and animals can express preferences and, it would seem, opinions about the preferences of others. This has some moral relevance.
No more farm animals?
Would it be better for suffering animals not to exist at all? A vegan world would not need cows, happy or sad. The bovoid genus Bos Linnaeus currently has 1,5 billion specimens. Should these lives be valued less than the lives of the wild animals that would restock their overgrown pastures when this genus has disappeared? When it comes to wildlife, people tend to abhor population crashes; why do things get different when it comes to pets?
Singer's plan to grant legal rights to animals will be a difficult, if not impossible, road ahead. Neither the courts nor the legislators seem to be very interested. Reducing cruelty to animals, however, is a more viable avenue, both through legislation – the use of cages for battery hens has been abolished in the European Union since 2013 – and with the action of consumers, who prefer free-range eggs, products certified as cruelty-free and with transparent origins. This second alternative, however, is not accepted by vegans.
… and without meat?
While biology is not destiny, humans, like their relatives, the chimpanzees, evolved as omnivores; the proof is in the teeth and gut. If people's diets are otherwise restricted, such as starchy, then meat helps. As evidenced by the growing consumption of meat around the world, many people in most cultures really like to eat it; the vast majority will do so for a while yet, at least as long as the possibility exists. The big exception is India, where about 30% of the population, for religious reasons, has a vegetarian lifestyle.
None of this makes veganism, full or part-time, and the spread of plant foods an irrelevant phenomenon. A mix of ethical concerns, innovative cuisine like that of Warsaw's Krowarzywa, plant-based products more widely available in supermarkets are all things that could see the rich world reach the peak of meat consumption and descend on the other side of the dish. If so, and particularly if reducing red meat consumption is part of this process, there are likely to be substantial health and happiness benefits.
And if the world improves standards in running meat farms, some of these benefits may well be shared with the animals themselves.
