Roody

I've been enjoying Mark Bittman's new diet and recipe book, Food Matters: A Guide to Conscious Eating. Here's an excerpt that I thought would be interesting to carfree and carlight folks:

Foofy

Nothing new, though always interesting to think about.

The thing about beef is that it tastes so freaking good!

Roody

What was new (to me) was the direct comparison of meat consumption to driving. I thought this might mean something to carfree and carlight people. Maybe carfree/light isn't the only way (or even the best way) to lighten one's burden on the planet.

I love beef too. Mark Bittman is not a vegetarian, and some of the recipes in the book call for meat. He's more "meatlight."

gerv 

I was greatly influenced many years ago by Francis Moor Lappé 's " . At the time the concept of a vegetable based diet being more sustainable was a powerful idea. Although I am not a vegetarian, I have always managed to eat meat no more than 2-3 times a week (and occasionally less...) and have a large number of meals that I prepare that are meatless. I would credit this book for many of the meat-free meals I have enjoyed over the years.

Roody's linking of meat-free and carfree is an interesting one... many here ride bikes because it is a great way to transport yourself if you live on a small planet.

rockmom

As if my family weren't weird enough being car free, we're vegetarian too. Car light and meat light are probably more attainable goals for most people. But I swear that we are a happy, productive family despite being quirky.

poormanbiking

I could give up my car way before I could give up meat, my opinion.

wahoonc

I never have been meat heavy in my diet. Red meat once a week, sometimes less often, chicken, poultry and fish. Meatless days 2-3 times a week. I am a huge pasta fan, so that is a good filler with a nice veggie based sauce.

Aaron

cerewa

If you're going to eat meat, consider eating locally grown pastured / chemical free type meat. Much less environmental impact.

I normally don't eat meat, but the local chemical free meat in Haiti was pretty good, and then my friend gave me some meat that was new-in-package, taken from the grocery store dumpster one day before the sell-by date, and it was oh-so-good.

Back to pretty much being a vegetarian these days though.

Robert C

Roody, we actually agree on a lot of things (e.g. something needs to happen to break Americas auto dependency and culture). However, I was reading the excerpt and, very simply, he makes the mistake of giving numbers that are easily checked.

It is about 2,780 miles from New York to Los Angeles. a Gasguzzler gets less than18 mpg. So, 13.5 * 18 = 243. this is a bit shy of the 1,380 that one would need to drive, "more than halfway from New York to Los Angeles." Further, the best rater energy efficient car, the Toyota Prius gets 51city, 48hwy. I will give the author credit for having a very light foot and say that he can eek 55mpg out of it. So, 55 * 13.5 = 742.5. still a bit short of the 1,380 that one would need to drive, "more than halfway from New York to Los Angeles," and no where near the 11,120 distance that would have covered making, "the drive back and forth twice."

When I see such huge errors in a book about the things I do know, I am left wondering about the authors accuracy in the areas where they are telling me something I do not know.

stu842

That's definitely cool

My mom has quite the opposite mentality. She is very anti-conservation. She gets upset with me if I turn off lights and/or space heaters in unoccupied rooms. Oh well...

If I ever said I were becoming a vegetarian, all hell would break loose.

Machka 

Of course some people make a living by raising cattle. Rowan and I live on 1200 acres, some of which is an orchard, and some of which is devoted to pasture for a herd of cattle raised for meat (Black Angus). Rowan is employed by the people who own the orchard to work with the apples and plums. One of his co-workers works with the ornamental trees ... and the cattle. He might not have a full-time job if it weren't for the cattle.

I've been on farms and have cycled past numerous farms, but I've never lived right in the midst of a herd of cattle before. It's interesting watching them all in action, and what really goes on out there.

Yes, a vehicle is used to feed them once or twice a day ... a small tractor takes a large round bail of hay out to them (hay, not corn). Did you know that cattle are just like cats when they hear the can opener in the kitchen? They hear that little tractor, and they all come running. Other than that, on a daily basis, they're just left to fend for themselves in a huge pasture. And the water they drink is rain water collected in dams in various places around the property.

As far as land use goes, I'd much, much rather look at a green pasture dotted with black cows than city buildings. The pasture is producing oxygen because of all the grass and clover, etc. The cows are producing fertilizer to aid in the production of grass and clover, etc. It's a cyclic process.

As far as chemical fertilizers and pesticides go ... I suppose some might be used in the process of growing the hay, but you don't want the cows consuming much in the way of chemicals.

And does this Mark person actually believe that there is no machinery used, no transportion involved, no feed/fertilizer and water consumed, etc., etc., for chicken, fish ... and fruit, vegetables, grains, etc.? Has he never set foot on a farm or orchard before? He sounds like he thinks chicken, fish, eggs, fruit, veggies, bread, etc. just magically appear in the grocery store. He should pop by for a visit ... he'd be re-writing that book!


I've got several shots of our neighbors, the Black Angus, in this set: https://www.flickr.com/photos/1430288...7619719051119/

wahoonc

Machaka,
I come from a farming family. There are many different ways of raising cattle. How do they "finish" the ones you have prior to slaughter? In the US it is in a feed lot where they are fed antibiotic laced feed, usually corn based. Corn in the US is a heavily genetically modified, fertilized and mechanically grown and harvested crop.

I do agree with Robert C that the numbers on mileage are way off whiche makes other things in the book suspect. There is no doubt that there are more cost effective ways of getting your protein other than beef, and a healthy diet does not need red meat 3 times a day 7 days a week.

Aaron

Machka 

I'm not sure how they "finish" them, but there is very little corn grown here, if any.

Personally I'm not a huge fan of meat of any sort (beef, pork, chicken, fish, etc.) ... I prefer a more vegetarian diet. But if the author of that book is going to come down hard on the beef industry, he also has to look at what's involved in the poultry and fishing industries. Frozen chickens and canned tuna don't just show up on grocery store shelves by magic with no vehicular involvement.

And he's also got to look at the "vegetarian". Our cows are fed once a day with a small tractor ... so we use whatever fuel that requires. But a farmer growing a crop of wheat is out there in a much larger machine for fertilizing, planting, watering (if irrigation is used), and harvesting. And then similar to the cows, the wheat is transported, and transported, and transported, until it finally shows up on the shelf of the local grocery store in the form of bread.

Or take apples for example. They don't just plant apple trees by hand and then several months later go out and pick by hand. The land gets cleared (chain saws & bulldozers), the trees get planted, they use machines to move the pruners up and down the rows of trees, and they use similar machines to move pickers up and down the rows of trees too. And then the apples get transported off to a sorting centre, and they get packaged up and distributed. The apples here go all over Australia, as well as Japan and the UK. Lots of transportation involved.

So when someone in the UK selects an apple in the shop ... using Mark Bittman's method of calculation, how cost effective is that apple? How much fuel went into getting that apple there?

You can go after beef, like it sounds Mark has done ... but you can go after just about everything you find in the grocery store the same way. Pick an item.

wahoonc

Machka,
The transportation of food across too many miles is one of the reasons I attempt to adhere to the 100 mile diet. Wheat is less resource intensive to grow than beef, ditto chickens and fish. Yes we have fish farms in NC as well as having a fishing industry along the coast. Anything can be abused, misused and overused.

The average meal in the US travels almost 1500 miles before you eat it. This has been brought on because of the huge factory farms that have all but run the small local farms out of business. It has also brought additional problems to the local level in the form of food poisoning that has to be tracked back across the entire continent. IMHO if people purchased food from local farms and processors, we would have more people employed and it would be limit food poisoning out breaks to a regional area.

I honestly don't believe that there is any one size fits all answer. But if it makes someone think about how wasteful a certain process can be and opens the door to an alternative method it certainly wouldn't hurt.

Aaron

angelo

I like Michael Pollan's philosophy: Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.

HandsomeRyan

Brian Dunning of Skeptoid.com does a great job of explaining why "buying local" isn't always better.

Read all about it @: https://skeptoid.com/episodes/4162

Whether you agree with him or not, it certainly offers some things to think about.

[off topic] The Skeptoid podcast covers all sorts of interesting topics and is one of my favorites, I highly recommend it! [/off topic]

rockmom

RobertC, I have not read Bittman's book. But I did read an article in Scientific American that compared different foods to equivalent miles driven. Here is the graphic that accompanied the article:



Here is the article. I took the image from the slide show to the left of the article.

wahoonc

He has some valid points, but you will have a hard time convincing me that shipping any product that can be produced effectively, efficiently and locally, across the country is a reasonable use of resources. There are extremes on both sides of the argument. Like flying fresh Maine Lobster to the UK or Tiger Shrimp from the Orient to the Eastern Seaboard of the US.

Aaron

gwd

You guys are writing like the animal feed is fungible, that it is what humans eat. In so far as the animals are eating stuff we could be eating, or eating food grown on land that could be cultivated for human food there is some problem. If the meat were produced differently, it would be more expensive and we'd naturally eat less. The antibiotic issues are a more immediate danger than the fuel issues. Our factory farms seem to be perfect environments for evolving antibiotic resistant bacteria. My sister used to eat only wild meat but recently has taken to raising her own beef. It would be difficult for me to do that living in the city but maybe some rabbits or hens would work.

Robert C

No, I would not be too happy to sit down to a meal of grass hay and alfalfa. That being said. I am slowly getting out of the live stock business.

My wife wanted to raise sheep with no "stuff" added, other than state mandated shots. What we found was that there is no market. I can no longer afford to subsidize the farm through outside income and it has never come close to breaking even. That is factoring out farm improvements and just considering the cost of feed (and no, there is no market for raw wool either, I have a quarter of a shipping container filled with the stuff).

A friend of mine tried the same with cattle. People speak through the market and there is no demand for any meat other than what you see on the market.

Where we are (Northern CA, think north of Mt. Shasta) there is no corn used. And yes, the grain and grass crops are harvested mechanically. To do otherwise would require a very different (and less comfortable) society. I have lived in countries where farm labor is manual. If the population of the US switched to these practices it would be an economic and environmental disaster.

Smallwheels

I eat a hamburger every day. My body works better on beef. Chicken doesn't work as well, even organically raised free range chicken doesn't work as well as beef.

I avoid wheat products because they cause inflammation in me. Wheat and type O blood don't work well together. Since quitting wheat my back and other joints hurt much less. Read "Eat Right 4 Your Type" to understand how different foods affect different blood types.

Buying locally can save energy usage if the purchaser uses a bicycle to retrieve the food. In the Scepticblog the rancher who only let people come to his farm to purchase the meat was causing more energy use than sending his meat to a distribution center. Since people used cars to get to his ranch there was more energy wasted.

Surely people burn calories to operate bicycles but cycling has many benefits beyond the calorie cost.

Roody

That's a good catch. I had wondered about the gasoline figures as I typed them into the post, but I didn't take the time to figure them out. However, I think the figures about the energy for meat production are probably accurate--at least they're in line with figures I've read from many other sources.

As Aaron mentioned, the corn is fed to cattle in the last 30 to 90 days of their lives. Since cattle cannot survive on corn, large amounts of antibiotics and other drugs are fed to them also. While still on the farm, cattle eat grass and hay (dried grass), but they're also fed varying amounts of other food, including animal meal, dried manure, food waste, drugs, hormones and other delectable goodies.

Mark Bittman doesn't just pick on beef and dairy. He also mentions the environmental problems involved in the production of food animals like poultry, swine and fish.

Remember, this is just one short excerpt from a long book. The main emphasis is on a healthier and more delicious diet, and there are lots of great recipes.

Roody

Mark Bittman makes this same point in Food Matters. There are a number of foods that are "greener" when produced in the industrial food model. There are also economies of scale that can make mass-produced food cheaper than local or organic food. And he points out that we might not at this point be able to feed the world exclusively with small-scale farming (although a lot of other writers disagree with this last point).

However, there do seem to be ecological advantages to mostly using local food. And of course there are tremendous advantages to local food in personal health and especially deliciousness.

Roody

I think Michael Pollan is the godfather of this small-scale/local-food movement. Francis Moore Lappe is one of the godmothers, and so is Marion Nestle.

It seems clear to me that industrial scale production of meat (as currently practiced) is no more sustainable than wide scale use of motor cars. Another similarity is that consumers of both meat and gasoline are not paying the full costs of the products. It's time that we grow up and realize that we just can't have everything we want at a cheap price.

T. Shandy

Before I get run out of town on a rail, I should first say that I support the concepts of car free (or light) and meat free (or light). I try to do these things myself. There are lots of good personal and societal reasons for doing so. I like Bittman (his "How to Cook Everything Vegetarian" is terrific).

That said, the analysis above is just nonsense. None of us will cancel out the effects of an SUV by not eating a cheeseburger. It just doesn't work that way. If (no sure bet) you could lower the amount of petroleum used by agriculture by eating less meat, what would happen? All other things being equal, it would lower the price of petroleum, making utilization of petroleum for other reasons more attractive. In other words, people would use the same oil elsewhere. This other use might have a more negative environmental impact and provide less societal good than production of food.

Eat less meat for animal welfare, or for personal health, or karma, or any of a number of other good reasons. But don't think that you're reducing world petroleum consumption, because you're not. You're just shifting demand somewhere else.