Since 2003, the year in which the American Dietetic Association printed its position statement that highlighted the many advantages of a vegetarian diet, I have yet to meet even one dietician who uses this information as a basis for meal planning for her patients, despite its obviously being in the patients’ best interest. Maybe dieticians have not read their own position statement, which was reaffirmed and reprinted in 2009. More than once, I have visited a patient, one or two days out of surgery in which the colon and rectum were removed, and witnessed the physician and dietician allowing or even directing the patient to eat hot dogs. It is easy to see why we continue to think that eating meat is healthy.
I personally know many pediatricians who continue to provide the nutritional guidance that milk and dairy products are healthy—I am sure this applies to the vast majority of pediatricians. Not only do they allow their young patients to consume milk, but they most likely promote its use for their own family members. This occurs despite the fact that the American Pediatric Association has recently stated that milk and dairy products should not be given to children, as they are a recognized source of allergens and contaminants, such as hormones, antibiotics, and pesticides. Dairy products also cause colic and chronic constipation. Additionally, some studies have now linked milk consumption to children’s developing type I diabetes.147
With health professionals continuing to advocate the consumption of meat and dairy products, true wellness for us and for our planet will be impossible to achieve. This brings light to the fact that we have a system of suppressed information and a misplaced trust in individuals and institutions that provide inaccurate and misleading information. All this needs to change in order for progress to occur.
The mismanagement of information or outright ignorance of reality regarding our food choices and the toll that it takes on our environment is the reason why we are at the point we are today. Still, one simple illustration has yet to be made: have you actually raised a cow on your own property? Not too many of us can say that they have. If you have and really understood what you were doing and your full spectrum of options for food, I do not believe you would ever continue the practice. Why? Because that cow would drink forty times more water than you do, eat thousands of dollars worth of food that could have been used in one form or another for you, use all your land, and create urine, feces, and flatulence that is overwhelming. Then there is the killing process, which will consume additional water and energy, just to get a few parts of the cow to your table to eat, which is not healthy for you, despite the effort. Now, think about this on a scale of 70 billion animals in one year alone.
Another large reason for our current state is because of the education process imposed on us by the meat and dairy industry, with their massive multibillion-dollar advertising campaigns, lobbying, and political efforts. They infuse us with thoughts that their food is healthy for us, and of course, there is no mention of what they are doing behind the scenes to our planet. For every minute that we are exposed to a purported health benefit of an animal product, we should be equally exposed to the ill effects those same products have on us and our planet—how much water, land, energy, and resources it took and the pollution created to get it to you. And we should be equally enlightened to all the benefits of a plant-based diet for our health as well.
Misleading advertisements abound. The origin of our Food Pyramid was nearly a hundred years ago, with the USDA Food Guidelines in 1916, which promoted meat and dairy products at the center of every meal, in order to obtain the proper nutrition.148 These guidelines and subsequent Food Pyramid served—and still serve—as the Holy Grail for our country’s school systems and families with regard to food choices. Influenced heavily by the egg, milk, and meat producers, the USDA has misdirected the public without much challenge for all these years, by falsely promoting animal products as being necessary for good health. The USDA and Food Pyramid still promote meat and dairy items, with dairy as high as “five servings needed daily for teenagers and pregnant women,” despite the fact that milk and meat products are the largest sources of saturated fat and cholesterol in children’s diets, according to the National Institute of Child Health and Development.149
The USDA and its guidelines influence much of the world in terms of food choices, and it still dictates what 17 million food-stamp recipients can eat and what foods can be offered through the National School Lunch and Breakfast Program. No wonder animal products continue to be consumed; no wonder we are in the worst overall global health we have ever been in. A newer Food Pyramid, with suggested revisions established by the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, places animal products, such as meat, dairy, and fish in the proper location—off the pyramid entirely.150 Even so, the Dairy Council continues to heavily advertise with campaigns such as the milk mustache worn by recognized celebrities and announcing that milk is good for strong bones and preventing osteoporosis. Now, they even have one that declares milk will help you lose weight. Again, nowhere is there equal information for the consumer regarding the evidence that milk promotes various disease states, has unhealthy contaminants, is devoid of certain important nutrients, and that there is a heavy burden on our environment with every drop created.151
Another reason we are at this point with our food choices is that there are subsidies paid to the meat, dairy, and fishing industries to help support them, regardless of demand. This economic assistance is quite disparate in the sense that there are no subsidies of a similar nature for plants grown directly for our consumption. So, although there are really no logical arguments for the continued use of animal products as food, our government has created a shield of sorts for the meat and dairy industries, particularly as it relates to normal economic or market fluctuations. In 1933, the USDA created the Commodities Credit Corporation (CCC) and began giving direct price supports to dairy production and de facto supports to the meat industry in the form of feed grain price assistance.152 This has allowed our government to keep the industry in an artificial sense of security and viability and immune to any downturns due to market pricing or demand. For instance, in 1998 USDA Secretary Dan Glickman bought up at least $250 million worth of beef, chicken, dairy, eggs, fish, lamb, and pork that could not be sold in an already flooded market.153 This kept an artificial money supply flowing back to the meat and dairy industry that helped to perpetuate production of their animal products without true market or public demand. These goods were destined to be dumped into public feeding troughs such as the National School Lunch Program.154
Subsidies are even created for the livestock industry for the use of water that promotes overuse of our water supply and without proper taxation. Water use has been cost-free with western cattle ranches that enjoyed access to streams and rivers that have now dried up altogether, due to overgrazing, soil erosion, desertification, and general overuse. The government has essentially encouraged pumping more and more water from underground aquifers, as well as further freshwater depletion, by creating tax deductions for sinking wells and purchasing drilling equipment. It has sponsored more than thirty-two irrigation projects in seventeen western states. In all, more than half the cost of providing irrigation facilities in the United States has been borne by the federal government, which has subsidized ranchers and farmers from public funds.155 As stated by Cornell University economist David Fields: “Reports by the Water Resources Council, Rand Corporation, and the General Accounting Office made it clear that irrigation water subsidies to livestock producers are economically counterproductive … current water use practices now threaten to undermine the economies of every state in the region.”156
One of the primary reasons we are seeing depletion of our oceans and its marine life is the irrational subsidies on a global basis that is given to the fishing industry. The global fishing industry is now receiving an estimated $34 billion annually, in the form of financial assistance, marketing support, modernization programs, storage infrastructure improvements, boat construction, and buy-back incen
tives, foreign access agreements, and massive tax exemptions.157 Total world subsidies for fuel alone are currently at $6 billion, which continues to support the industry’s overfishing methods.158 As stated recently by the World Trade Organization, “Eliminating capacity-enhancing fisheries subsidies is the largest single action that can be taken to address global overfishing.159 These subsidies create strong economic incentives to overfish.” As previously noted, 70 percent of the world’s fish species are either fully exploited or depleted, with areas of the ocean having become essentially wastelands and with ecosystems lost. Fishing fleets worldwide are estimated at 250 times more than what is needed to carry out sustainable fishing.160 Government subsidies have been linked to illegal, unreported, and unregulated fishing and provide the support for large, distant water fleets to fish around the world.161 Analysis of high-seas trawling, which the United Nations has called to be significantly restricted due to its destructiveness, has found that these fleets would not be profitable without the large subsidies they are handed. With elimination of all subsidies given to the global fishing industry, in combination with less demand by the consumer, the largest component of unnecessary destruction and depletion of our oceans would be eliminated.
There are so many more examples of this, where the meat, fishing, and dairy industries put pressure on the government to continue price supports and purchase programs, while false profit margins are used to fuel their massive advertisement campaigns, nutritional education of the general public and school systems, and political lobbying actions to ensure that benefits continue. This is an insidious cycle, which obviously needs to be broken to allow proper development of a national health and nutrition program, whereby growers of nutritious and sustainable organic food products, such as grains, fruits, and vegetables, are assisted for their efforts. Accompanying this, educational programs can then be implemented so that proper and accurate nutrition information is disseminated to the public and the school systems.
Importantly, another reason that we are at this serious point with global depletion from our unhealthy food choices is the issue of proper pricing. To date, there has been no accountability for a reflection of the true price of a particular food item, to get it from point A to point B. While I have addressed the clear global depletion that occurs with our choices of various animal products used for food, none of them carries the true cost of producing that item. What do I mean by “true cost”? Let’s take a closer look at that quarter-pound burger you bought for lunch.
You may have paid $3.39 for it. The true cost of the bun, condiments, and plant portions may have been around $0.30, and the quarter-pound of hamburger, as it is called, has a true cost of … what? It requires fifty-five square feet of rainforest to produce that much meat, so what is the cost of the rainforest loss and all the vegetation, oxygen, and carbon dioxide disruption, as well as the biodiversity lost with it, and why wasn’t that accounted for in the $3.39? In many cases, it requires over 1,200 gallons of water to produce just one-quarter pound of edible muscle tissue on a cow. If that water came from a source such as the Ogallala aquifer, which much of your meat does, it will never be replaced in our lifetime, so what is the real cost of that 1,200 gallons that you just used? These examples and questions raise the all-too-important issue that our environment and natural resources have been used as if there is no cost, when there obviously is.
As we have seen, there is irreversible depletion with the production of the meat you just chose to eat. All of the resources on earth that comprise our various ecosystems and environment belong to earth and its inhabitants, collectively. As such, it is our duty to act as stewards, leaving the earth in similar or better shape when we pass it on to the next generation. Therefore, our resources should be viewed in a less narrow-minded perspective. These resources are not free and should have some form of an ecotax affixed. If such a tax existed, then it would affect your burger purchase in the following ways:
There would be a true cost established, whereby the retailer (in this case, McDonald’s, Burger King, Wendy’s, etc.) and producers would have to pay for the resources that were used in producing that burger—pay for the water used, pay for the rainforest destroyed, pay for the oxygen lost by the vegetation cut down or used, pay for the carbon dioxide it produced in the vegetation loss, and pay for the global-warming gases (methane, nitrous oxide, and carbon dioxide) produced in the raising and slaughtering of the cow needed. Because some of these things are irreplaceable in our lifetime, it would be difficult to estimate the true ecotax, but somewhere in the thousands of dollars would not be out of line for replacing a five-hundred-year-old section of Amazonian rainforest.
Once this ecotax is established and implemented, the obvious effect would be that the only thing that meat and dairy industries could afford to produce—or that you could afford to eat—would be the plant-based portion (lettuce, tomato, condiments, pickle, bun) of that quarter-pounder sandwich. This would set into motion the quickest recovery route to a healthy planet.
Finally, a very complex intertwining of psychological, social, political, and economic issues has been created by the factors mentioned above. These issues affect most individuals as they make food choices on a daily basis. As discussed, there are political and economic issues at play with corporate forces that affect policies, distortion of public information, and even pricing of food. From a psychological and social perspective, it is generally very difficult for most individuals to eat only plant-based foods, due to lack of availability and various constraints placed by parents and friends and within social groups. It becomes just too much of a hassle to ask your friend, colleague, or waiter to not have any animal products in or near the food you are eating. Also, it cannot be cooked in the same pan or touch the same area that meat, fish, or dairy has touched, and so on. Although quite true and consistent, you suddenly become the outcast.
Now that we have a better understanding of which factors led us to the point where we are today, it should be easier to identify calculated predictions as well as further exploring solutions. Production of meat and dairy is expected to double in the next ten years, rising from 229 million tons to 465 million tons.162 Our planet simply cannot sustain this because it cannot sustain our current levels of raising animals for food. There are two principal ways we can move forward with our food choices regarding animal products and global depletion. First, we can evolve to the point of not eating them by correcting the issues presented earlier in this chapter. Second, we can move forward with legal coercion, because, most likely, the first avenue is idealistic and with the potential of excessive delay. We will reach a point in time where legislation will be forced to enact sanctions that make it illegal to eat meat more than once a week and then, ultimately, at all. This may seem a radical thought at first, but when we reach the point of urgency, it will be one of the necessary corrective measures.
The end result is necessary to halt the global depletion that is currently out of control with our food choices. I call it the “K-Pax” theory. In the 2001 movie K-Pax, Kevin Spacey plays a visitor from another planet, one that is vastly more developed and advanced than Earth. There are many subtle references throughout the movie that indicate that his character and all individuals on his planet are vegetarians and do not eat any animal products. It is clearly implied that as a civilization evolves, it must become vegetarian in order to survive and become advanced. Although this was simply a movie, it is intellectually on target, which is why Einstein pondered the thought frequently and arrived at the very same conclusion: “Nothing will benefit human health and increase the chances for survival of life on earth as much as the evolution to a vegetarian diet.”
The first way of change through evolution involves correction of all the reasons of why we are here to begin with. Opening the pathways of communication regarding the reality of food choices would be a start. Those who have platforms in the media—celebrities, authors, talk show hosts, and politicians—all must assume a higher level of awarenes
s and then convey the realities to their audiences. Information regarding the benefits of a plant-based diet to our health and that of our planet must be made available to everyone and repeated on a daily basis in the media. Likewise, the ill effects to our health of consuming animal products and the devastating effects it has on our environment must be made available to the public and reinforced just as often. Only accurate, unbiased information must be free-flowing and disseminated to everyone.
There must be a balancing or equating of the reliance we place on health professionals with their level of knowledge regarding our food choices. In other words, if physicians or dieticians are to remain in a position of counseling other humans as to nutrition and food choices, then they must fully understand and be able to communicate the realities of such decisions. Physicians must be required to complete, in either graduate or post-graduate studies, courses on food choices as they relate to our health and the health of our planet. Similarly, dieticians must reread, fully understand, and be able to fully communicate portions of their own position statement on vegetarian diets and the health benefits to their patients. They must do the same with the ill effects that animal products have on our planet—anything less is malpractice. Blood-letting was a common practice for physicians in medieval times, but they would certainly lose their license if they performed that practice today. It is time to move forward with guidance with regard to unhealthy food practices as well.
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