Food & environment I: animal products

In this first part dedicated to food, I will write about the effects to the environment of our diet with animal products. Please don’t stop reading now, thinking I am some extreme vegetarian trying to make everyone vegetarians. I just want to put scientific facts and evidence on a row to make people conscious of their choice to eat animal products.

For decades there have been numerous investigations wherever meat consumption is good or bad. Well, the truth is, human beings are omnivores. We need both vegetable and animal products. The problem is that nowadays our animal-product consumption is waaaaay too high. This is not only bad for the environment, but also for human health.

Livestock are releasing all day gases, with enormous quantities of methane, a greenhouse gas 20 times more harmful than CO2 . Additionally, their excrements and urine greatly contaminate the soil and water, making it useless.

Another point is that livestock need a lot of space. An example is that, for the livestock production for North America, they have cut more than 20 million hectares of tropical forest in Latin America. This has produced loss of biodiversity, deforestation, loss of soil.

The chart here below indicates the CO2 emissions and amount of land to produce just 1 Kg of various animal products.

	CO2 emissions (kg)	Amount of land (m²)
1 kg Cow meat	14-32	27-49
1 kg pork meat	4-10	9-12
1 kg chicken meat	3,7-7	8-10
1 kg eggs	4-5	4,5-6
1 kg milk	0,8-1,3	1-2

 Source: Livestock science128

Now, another huge problem about livestock is that their diet is mainly based on grains, which, in fact is, what we humans eat. To give you the real number: over 40% of worldwide production of grain is given to livestock.  And that while more than a billion people worldwide suffer from hunger daily…

The last point I want to write about is the overconsumption of meat. It is extremely costly to produce meat, as you have just seen with the facts I have presented. Nonetheless, we seem to be eating more meat as the years pass by.

Let me show you one last chart, of the WHO, about the medium consumption of meat per person per year:

Region	Meat (kg)
North America	123
Europe	74
South America	70
Central America	47
Asia	28
Africa	25

 Source: WHO 2007

There is absolutely NO need to consume so much meat! Because if you calculate it, it turns out a medium North American eats 330 grams of meat per day! More than 3 times as much as recommended (100 grams per day)

Excess of meat consumption (as well as egg and dairy products) are a big problem for human health. It is related with obesity, heart diseases, hypertension, diabetes and certain forms of cancer.

This has been a very summarized text about animal products consumption. But knowing myself, I have to stop writing now, or I will be able to write an entire book about it hahaha. Anyway, it’s worth dedicating more posts about this topic, which I will be publishing the following days.

Thanks for reading, and if you have anything to say don’t doubt to comment!