greenstorm | Open My Mouth (Reply)

scratchdaddy made an entry on the whole meat/environmental issue, so of course I had to respond:

I really wanna comment on this.

A bunch of people are trying to get backyard chickens ok'd in Vancouver-- currently they're prohibited in a bylaw (here but not in New York City, hah). Factory farms (ironically) and the spca are holding out against it -- poor chickens might be treated cruelly, they say, because people might get in over their heads.

Chickens are a fantastic source of local protein in vancouver, as are eggs, if raised in this way-- chickens convert scrap food that is both uncompostable (meat, bread, cooked things) or veggies &c that you don't feel like composting into eggs and meat. You do have to supplement your scraps in most cases (many people buy a lot of processed food and so don't have a whole lot of leftovers) with a little bought chicken food or grain, but that's not an enormous issue environmentally-- especially when you count the benefits of keeping that mass out of the landfill, and add the potential for some sort of you-give-me-scraps-I-give-you-eggs arrangement with neighbors (laying chickens can give an egg a day per chicken in good conditions, so you get a lot of eggs pretty quickly).

OTOH, factory farming eggs and meat creates a waste issue-- animals kept that densely produce more waste bedding than farms can accept, especially when it's full of antibiotics used to keep animals in such close quarters.

The animals-eat-grain-we-could-feed-starving-people-with bogeyman is just that-- the world produces enough calories of food that everyone could have a comfortable diet if there were no distribution issues but it doesn't pay in our current economic system to feed everyone, and so we don't.

As for more notes on our meat-centric diet being unsustainable, again with the factory farming of anything (pigs, cows) being awful for the environment and so unsustainable, but do look in more depth into rangeland and tundra farming if you have the time -- reindeer herding, cattle ranching, and pig raising that's married to local food-production industry (apple pulp from cider and juice pressing, whey from cheesemaking, etc) uses either land that cannot produce vegetable crops because the ecosystem is too delicate to be ploughed up for agriculture (this happens more as you go north and/or up onto thin soil at altitude) or resources that would become an active waste problem if not 'recycled' into meat animals.

Many of these things, pigs and chickens especially, are easier and more efficient to do locally than raising protein in legume form (except potentially for beans), again especially in limited space or in more northern/high altitude places. And the more local you are, the more oil you save for transportation (and the more you avoid grain-feeding animals, the more oil you save too, as conventional agriculture uses a LOT of oil). So it's a good solution all around.

Having said all that, it is ridiculous to see people eating meat at three meals per day, sometimes doubling up (bacon and egg sandwich for breakfast, meat sandwich for lunch, hamburger with bacon on it for dinner) especially given the amount of veggies they generally eat in the same day.

Sourcing food and looking at local conditions really is important though! Don't support one-size-fits-all answers. :)