Half of the world’s food production is used to feed animals for meat production.
ID: 107265 • Letter: H
Question
Half of the world’s food production is used to feed animals for meat production. Growing animals for meat in America is a business which benefits hugely from our public subsidies. They receive subsidized tax-free feed, inexpensive grazing on public lands, exemption from a whole range of environmental constraints, and very favorable tax treatment. These mechanisms produce relatively inexpensive meat for Americans, which is a popular notion. It has also led to a virtual epidemic of health concerns, as we have adopted a diet heavy in red meat. Comment on the economics of this arrangement, and suggest alternative approaches if appropriate.
Explanation / Answer
Americans eat more meat per person than any other people on earth.
At 200 pounds of meat per person per year, our high meat consumption is hurting our national health. Hundreds of clinical studies in the past several decades show that consumption of meat and dairy, especially at the high levels seen in this country, can cause cancer, diabetes, heart disease, and a host of other diseases. Thus, Americans have twice the obesity rate, twice the diabetes rate, and nearly three times the cancer rate as the rest of the world. Eating loads of meat isn’t the only reason people develop these diseases, but it’s a major factor.
American governments spend $38 billion each year to subsidize meat and dairy, but only 0.04% of that ($17 million) to subsidize fruits and vegetables.
The federal government’s Dietary Guidelines urge us to eat more fruits and vegetables and less cholesterol-rich food (that is, meat and dairy). Yet like a misguided parent giving a kid cotton candy for dinner, state and federal governments get it backwards by giving buckets of cash to animal agriculture while providing almost no help to those raising fruits and vegetables.
In a simple subsistence agricultural society, the number of actors, inputs, flows, processes, and outputs in a food supply chain might be relatively few because most producers and consumers of food are the same. In the modern U.S. food system, however, the food supply chain is extremely complex, and the delivery of a single type of food to a consumer involves many actors. Here, we describe a system that has experienced significant changes over the past 50 years, with multiple positive and negative effects on health, the environment, society, and the economy.
Food safety policy also has focused on managing the risks from pathogen contamination. Microbial contamination can originate on farms or food handlers and can be introduced as food is stored, transported, or processed. Regulations to prevent and control pathogen contamination began with the Pure Food and Drug Act of 190620 and were supplemented by a number of laws dealing with milk, shellfish, and restaurants , culminating in the 1938 Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act.21 Other important laws are the Federal Meat Inspection Act,22 the Poultry Products Inspection Act,23 and the Egg Products Inspection Act,24 administered by USDA's Food Safety and Inspection Service. In the 1960s, the Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Points (HACCP) risk-based approach to food safety was initiated, first for the U.S. space program but subsequently for the broader food supply. The HACCP's prevention-focused approach for pathogens and chemical and physical hazards has expanded voluntarily throughout many segments of the food industry. In response to significant outbreaks and concerns, HACCP-based regulations have been introduced, including the Food and Drug Administration's (FDA's) Low Acid Canned Foods regulations (1970), USDA's Pathogen Reduction/HACCP rule (1996), and FDA's HACCP regulations for seafood (1999) and juice (2001). The 2010 Food Safety Modernization Act25 (FSMA) extended this preventive strategy for food safety to foods not covered by HACCP regulations. Other important provisions of FSMA currently under consideration by FDA are first-time mandatory preventive controls at the farm level and stricter controls of imported foods. FSMA also placed more responsibility on food companies to record and report food safety issue.
Meat production contributes disproportionately to these problems, in part because feeding grain to livestock to produce meat--instead of feeding it directly to humans--involves a large energy loss, making animal agriculture more resource intensive than other forms of food production. The proliferation of factory-style animal agriculture creates environmental and public health concerns, including pollution from the high concentration of animal wastes and the extensive use of antibiotics, which may compromise their effectiveness in medical use. At the consumption end, animal fat is implicated in many of the chronic degenerative diseases that afflict industrial and newly industrializing societies, particularly cardiovascular disease and some cancers. In terms of human health, both affluent and poor countries could benefit from policies that more equitably distribute high-protein foods. The pesticides used heavily in industrial agriculture are associated with elevated cancer risks for workers and consumers and are coming under greater scrutiny for their links to endocrine disruption and reproductive dysfunction. In this article we outline the environmental and human health problems associated with current food production practices and discuss how these systems could be made more sustainable.
Developing a sustainable economy involves more than just a sustainable food system, and the food system involves more than just agriculture. However,because agriculture can have such profound effects on the environment, human health, and the social order, it is a critical part of any movement toward sustainability.Sustainable agriculture systems are based on relatively small, profitable farms that use fewer off-farm inputs, integrate animal and plant production where appropriate, maintain a higher biotic diversity, emphasize technologies that are appropriate to the scale of production, and make thetransition to renewable forms of energy. The average U.S. farm uses 3 kcal
of fossil energy in producing 1 kcal of food energy (in feedlot beef production, this ratio is 35:1), and this does not include the energy used to process and transport the food. Sustainable systems involve less reliance on chemical inputs and decreased emphasis on economic efficiencies that shunt environmental costs onto society. The health of both the environment and humans would be enhanced if more of our farms made the transition to sustainable systems of production. A more sustainable food system would involve closer connections between producer and consumer, meaning more direct marketing of foods to local consumers (through farmers markets, community-supported agriculture farms, farmer cooperatives, etc.). These localized marketing strategies mean shorter
distances from the farm to the dinner plate, and therefore less energy use for food transport.
We should not promote eating and shall encourage agriculture and thus consume more and more green nutritional foods.
Related Questions
Navigate
Integrity-first tutoring: explanations and feedback only — we do not complete graded work. Learn more.