Climate Change and Meat Consumption

JohnnySensible (31 comments)

I was remembering this quote earlier today as I sat with a lactose intolerant Chinese friend – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lactose_intolerance – who had just purchased a very cheesy & piggy pizza.

So I searched back & found where I had posted it in the Forum before – so that I could share it once again here –

From “So Shall We Reap” – by Colin Tudge – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colin_Tudge

+ [The] food chain we have now is not designed to feed people. In line with the modern cure-all—the allegedly free global market — it is designed to produce the maximum amount of cash in the shortest time. Stated thus, our approach to our most important material endeavour seems unbelievably crass—but that is how things are nonetheless. The global free market might be good for some things (perhaps we get better computers and warships that way) but for farming, and hence for humanity as a whole, it is disastrous. The simplistic business rules that may (or may not) apply to other enterprises are fatal to Enlightened Agriculture and so, since we depend on agriculture absolutely, they are proving fatal for us.

When cash rules, sound biology goes to the wall and common sense and humanity are for wimps. The goal must be to maximize whatever is most expensive — which means livestock. So now we feed well over half the staples that could be feeding us, to cattle, pigs, and poultry. So instead of helping us to feed ourselves, our animals compete with us.

By 2050, on present trends, the world’s livestock will consume enough to feed four billion people—equal to the total population of the early 1970s, when the United Nations held its first international conference to discuss the world’s food crisis.

That livestock will mostly be consumed by people already weighed down with too much saturated fat—for the moment mostly in the west, but increasingly in India and China. The poor will remain poor. So will most farmers. The traders and their shareholders will grow rich. For this, forests are felled and the last of the world’s fresh water is squandered—for example on the soya of Brazil, grown to feed the cattle of Europe and now their biggest agricultural earner. +

JohnnySensible (31 comments)

There is sane & insane capitalism.

The SAD diet is quickly spreading new diseases into Asian cities – the growing number of McDonalds / Pizza Huts / K.F.C.’s etc. will maim & prematurely kill a lot of people – this is “quiet” insane capitalist aggression against Asia coming mainly from the US.

Dairy products are the most damaging.

http://www.godairyfree.org/20070111812/News/Nutrition-Headlines/Dairy-Intolerance-in-China.html

Dairy Intolerance in China

Foods Matter, January 2007 – As part of a group of UK Nuffield farm scholars Emma Hockridge travelled to China last July to try to gain a better knowledge of Chinese farming practices. Her report appeared in the July/September Food Magazine and we thought that FM readers would be particularly interested in her comments on the dairy industry and lactose intolerance.

‘Dairy farming may seem out of place in a country where lactose intolerance is very common, but government officials who led our visit skipped over this point (along with many others) telling us that such dietary intolerance only affects around 10% of the population. Although there are no official figures, studies have indicated that lactose intolerance affects around 30% of Chinese children, and a study of Chinese adults showed that 92.3% suffered from some level of lactose malabsorption.

Despite this there is a huge push to encourage Chinese people to drink more milk. It is advertised as important for good health, the government funds milk-rounds to schools and the state-run television has aired programs on the benefits of milk drinking. Many of the world’s top dairy companies have entered China as a result of seeing the huge potential market of 1.3 billion inhabitants – though many of these companies find it hard to find reliable and hygienic supplies of raw milk in China itself. Animal welfare is not an important issue in China. When cage sizes of EU battery hens were explained one government representative said, “in China we could use this to raise cattle”.

Such attitudes were in force at the region’s largest dairy farm where a herd of 3,000 Friesian cattle (the average UK herd is around 90 cows) was kept on concrete floors in 90% humidity and in temperatures of 34ºC, shackled to short chains. It was not surprising that we saw widespread evidence of lameness and mastitis.’