Tag Archives: meat production

Sound the alarm for the rainforest

Posted on by

Fire! Sound the alarm!

Yes, sound the alarm. It’s even worse than we thought. Scientists warn that the situation in the Amazon rainforest is, “worse than we realize. The rainforest’s climate is changing fast and in alarming ways.” Someone should sound the alarm before it’s too late!

According to scientists, the Amazon as a whole is now actually really warming the global climate. Not long ago, the Amazon was one of the best protections against global warming, but we’ve ruined that now and the Amazon has started to flip.

Animal agriculture and meat consumption are widely blamed by scientists and environmentalists worldwide for causing deforestation and fires across the region. Brazil is now the world’s largest exporter of meat. The rainforest is burned down to clear land to raise cattle and cattle feed. Simply put, the meat we consume is burning up our future on this beautiful planet. If this continues, large parts of the Amazon could permanently become drier savannah lands in only 15 years. The earth would lose a friend, and the many animals who live there will lose their lives.

Tropical forests such as the Amazon are very humid and under natural conditions they rarely burn – unlike many forests in the western USA where fire is a natural part of the forest’s life cycle.

After intense fires in the Amazon captured global attention in 2019, fires again raged throughout the region in 2020. According to an analysis of satellite data from NASA’s Amazon dashboard, the 2020 fire season was actually more severe by some key measures. The fires in the Brazilian Amazon were up by 13% this year, making 2020 the worst fire season in the area in a decade. At the start of last October, there were a staggering 28,892 active fires active in the Brazilian Amazon

The fires are so bad the astronauts can seed them from space. But there’s a way you can help put out the fires. Meat production is very sensitive to consumer demands. Brazil will stop exporting meat when people stop eating it. Every time someone orders a veggie burger, the demand for meat on the world market goes down a little, and every little counts.

Meat consumption continues to rise

Posted on by

Grilled meatAmericans are eating even more burgers, chicken fingers and bacon, and the trend could say a lot about our health, the environment and, of course, the farm animals.

American consumption of red meat and poultry per capita is forecast to hit 222.2 pounds per person in 2018, up from 216.9 pounds in 2017 and 210.2 pounds in 1998, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. That’s the highest amount of meat consumption within the last 50 years. Production of both red meat and poultry will increase in 2018, at the same time the U.S. economy is growing and Americans have more money to spend on food. Read more

The Forgotten Casualties of Meat – Slaughterhouse workers

Posted on by

slaughterhouse-workerThere’s at least 150,000 of them in America alone. Many authorities consider them to have the worst job in America and few can stand to stick at this job for more than a year. They suffer badly, both physically and emotionally, and by many measures they have the most dangerous job in America. Almost no one speaks up for them. Even fewer stand up for them. They’re slaughterhouse workers. Read more

Please don’t eat the bunnies

Posted on by

RabbitsIt breaks our heart. Cute and harmless bunny rabbits are not meant for dinner. Yet it’s part of the latest trend where they’re being served at a number of America’s top restaurants.

Part of the heartbreak is that rabbit farms are not required to follow the Humane Slaughter Act. Rabbits are classified as “non-amenable” animals, a designation that removes them from humane slaughter regulations.  Recently, Last Chance for Animals, a Los Angeles based animal advocacy group, conducted an investigation of Pel Freez, the nation’s largest rabbit processing plant, located in Rogers, Arkansas. We’ll skip the gory details but it’s as bad as we’ve heard about anywhere.

While clearly rabbit slaughter is bad for these cute critters, it’s none too good for us either. Consider that as with other meat, rabbit has artery-clogging saturated fat, cholesterol, and produces cancer-causing heterocyclic amines when cooked, while lacking any fiber or health-promoting phytonutrients.

We haven’t yet seen any rabbit-meat substitutes as there are with beef, chicken and fish, but that shouldn’t stop us from finding better things to eat. Given the creative abilities of the nations top chefs, we’re sure they can come up with something inspired by their humanity. Let’s hope they give it a try.

We’re Eating Too Much Meat!

Posted on by

Global Meat ProductionThe world is eating too much meat, and that’s bad news for the earth’s forests, arable land, and scarce water. That’s the conclusion of a report released this week by the Washington-based Worldwatch Institute.

Global production of meat hit a new high of 308.5 million tons last year, up 1.4 percent, according to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), the report says. “In response to growing purchasing power, urbanization, and changing diets, meat production has expanded more than fourfold over just the last fifty years says the new report, entitled “Peak Meat Production Strains Land and Water Resources.” Read more

Going Veg is a Climate Must!

Posted on by

City under waterThe latest global warming research makes clearer than ever that there’s no fixing a climate change catastrophe without a worldwide switch to a vegetarian diet. Don’t look for alternatives to save us, such as grass-fed beef which is actually worse.  Nothing else can be substituted for going veg, and even the most optimistic forecast of technological improvements both on the farm and in industry won’t be enough. What’s more, it really needs to happen now!

Scientists from the Department of Energy and Environment at Chalmers University of Technology, in Gothenburg, Sweden, publishing their analysis in the journal Climate Change, show how going veg on a global scale is “crucial” even for a more modest goal of just limiting the global temperature rise to 2C.

This latest research really shouldn’t come as a surprise. After all, it turns out that, according to a UN report, livestock and meat production cause the emission of more greenhouse gasses than all the cars, trucks, trains, boats, ships and air planes in the whole world put together. In fact a study by scientists from the World Bank and the World Watch Institute show that livestock causes more global warming than all other causes in the world put together!

While most in the environmental community have chosen to remain comfortably unaware of meat’s overwhelming impact on climate, we are happy to report that this has now begun to change. In fact the world‘s foremost leader in both the national and international movement to prevent the impending climate crisis, Vice President Al Gore, has now gone vegan in recognition of meat’s role in causing the many environmental threats now facing humanity.

The good news is that if you want to have a major impact on climate change, you don’t have to wait for international treaties, congressional legislation or industrial reforms. The biggest part of the answer resides squarely on your dinner plate when you have a veg meal. Not yet veg? No problem, we’re here to help with our free classes and our books and other publications.

Global Hunger – the Veg Solution

Posted on by

African children eatingIt’s official. The world’s population now stands at 7 Billion. Over a billion people are living with chronic hunger and malnutrition, and rising food prices are challenging the household budgets of the other 6 billion. What many people don’t know is that it is meat consumption in the developed world, and rapidly rising meat consumption in the developing world, that are the prime driving forces behind rising food prices and global hunger. For years this went unrecognized by even economists and policymakers. However, this has now started to change.

Starvation kills, and it hurts to have to go to bed malnourished and hungry. Hunger and malnutrition are some of the most serious problems facing humanity and it’s getting worse. Global hunger is at an all time high, with about 1 billion people in the world going to bed each night still hungry. In the next year, over 10 million people will actually starve to death. Even worse, it is the children who are the most vulnerable. Read more

Making Mincemeat Out of Rainforests

Posted on by

Fire, Fire Burning bright, how much of the Amazon will be destroyed tonight? OK, I’m not much of poet in case you didn’t know it. But there’s an ecological disaster brewing in the Amazon and raising livestock for meat is the primary cause.

There has been a catastrophic clearing of the Amazonian and Central American rainforests, which has largely been done to create grazing land so that cattle can be raised for export. According to the Center for International Forestry Research, beef exports have accel­erated the destruction of the Amazon rainforest. The total area destroyed increased from 102.5 million acres in 1990 to 145 million acres in 2000. In only 10 years, an area twice the size of Portugal was destroyed, almost all of it to clear pasture for cattle. David Kaimowitz, Director of the Center for International Forestry Research, says, “Cattle ranchers are making mincemeat out of Brazil’s rain forests.” To make matters worse half of the Central American rainforest has been destroyed as well to raise meat.

Recently, the Amazon has also seen a rise in soy production, with farm animals raised in Europe as its largest customer. It’s important note that, according to the Nature Conservancy, 80% of the world’s soy production is used for farm animal feed, so even the soy production is primarily meat driven.

The rainforest is home to a large number of animals and plants, including many rare and endangered species, that are being destroyed by cattle ranching. Almost as bad is the fact that tropical rainforest land cleared for pasture is very susceptible to soil erosion, given the special nature of rainforest soil and the special climate in tropical regions.

According to National Geographic, scientists fear that an additional 20 percent of the trees in the Amazon will be lost over the next two decades. If that happens, the forest’s ecology will begin to unravel. Intact, the Amazon produces half its own rainfall through the moisture it releases into the atmosphere. Eliminate enough of that rain through clearing, and the remaining trees dry out and die.

With attention focused so much on global warming, it’s easy to forget other ecological crises that are related to meat consumption. The environmental effects of raising meat are many and include water pollution, soil erosion, as well global warming and ecological destruction. As world meat consumption continues to rise, and the damage to the environment rises with it, the value of a vegetarian diet in sustaining the planet becomes ever more clear.