Do you need or greed? It is your choice!
Need or Greed? It’s Your Choice | Let’s look at this problem from another point of view. If you had an acre of average quality land, and wanted to get the maximum amount of protein that you could use for human consumption out of it, what would you choose to do with it.
Do you need or greed? It is your choice!
That’s right vegetable sources of protein will give you many times more protein than even the best animal source (milk). And beef production is the worst possible use that you could put your land to being nearly twenty times less productive of usable protein than soya beans. So you’d be stupid to use your land for beef, wouldn’t you?
Stupid, that is, unless you were being coerced by economic pressure to produce beef. Which is precisely what happens. In Mexico, for example, Oxfam estimate that eighty per cent of the children in rural areas are undernourished, and yet the livestock are fed more grain than the whole population eats. What happens to the livestock?
Cheap Hamburgers!
They are exported, of course, to satisfy the developed nations’ craving for cheap hamburgers. If economic pressure can bring about this crazy state of affairs, it follows that we, the consumers (who are the ultimate source of all economic demand) can influence the way that our world goes about producing its food.
And while you’re chewing that over, here are some more facts that you ought to know:
• The average meat-eating Westerner munches his way throughone ton (about a thousand kilograms) of grain every year.“ Ninety-three per cent of this is eaten indirectly, in the form of meat and meat products. On the other hand, the average Indian consumes 180 kilograms of grain every year – the vast majority of it efficiently eaten as direct cereal products.
Do you need or greed? Wester world cut its meat consumption!
• Economists have calculated that if the Western world was to cut its meat consumption by just fifty per cent, each person doing So would release enough grain to keep two more people alive. who would otherwise starve.
• The meat industry has even begun to export this particular brand of economic lunacy to many third world countries, and British companies (no doubt using foreign aid funding) have recently sold complete intensive livestock systems to Zambia Zimbabwe.
Poor countries’ rights!
Kenya, Cameroon. Sudan Nigeria, and Bangladesh. Many of these countries don’t even have enough grain to feed their people. But our Western lifestyle has been sold so seductively to their governments who are eager to imitate their affluent neighbours, that the harsh economic realities don’t appear to have been taken into consideration.
Ninety-five per cent of the soya bean harvest – which is one of the greatest sources of protein in the world – is fed straight to animals. Only 1.5 percent of the crop is used directly by humans. This criminal wastage is almost impossible to comprehend.
Do you need or greed? Shouldnt be ignore easly!
It is not just in economic terms that the meat industry is trying to fiddle the books. In terms of energy use, animal food production is also unbelievably inefficient. Let’s compare the energy used in modern oat or potato production with that used in beef production. For every one calorie of fossil fuel expended, oats produce 2.47 food calories, and potatoes produce 2.18 calories. But beef only returns 0.03 of a calorie – it actually loses ninety-seven per cent of the energy that’s put in.
Our decesion!
Whenever we see those haunting, horrific images of starvation on television, it is tempting to blame it all on politics, on corrupt governments, or ignorant farmers, or on international finance.
But that is just running away from the problem. The inescapable reality is this. That every steak a Westerner consumes could have provided enough food for five people who don’t eat meat. That every baby who is brought up in our Western world to eat meat will consume five times as much of the planet’s food resources as a child who does not eat meat. It’s our decision.
