Did you know that what you eat directly impacts the environment (and not just your tummy)?
During a lecture by David Pimentel, professor of ecology and agricultural sciences at Cornell University, and Bruce Monger, who teaches Oceanography also at Cornell, on the implication of our food choices in the environment (for the T. Colin Campbell Center for Nutrition Studies), the following bits of data were shared:
1Humans are consuming more than what they require, straining available resources. They point out that the reduction of human consumption could help prevent diseases and save on energy consumption. Particularly, if humans were vegan—that is, if they were on a 100-percent whole-food plant-based diet, the reduction of wasted energy could be at 50 percent.
“Very few appreciate that the average person consumes 2,200 pounds of food per year. To translate that into calories, the average American is consuming 3,800 calories per day, and we should be eating 2,500 calories per day,” said Pimentel.
He added: “Related to this fact of energy consumption, we suggest that, if you were a vegetarian, this would reduce the total energy inputs in our food system by about a third. For vegans, who don’t eat any milk and eggs, the energy consumption would be reduced by about 50 percent compared to the conventional consumption by people in the United States.”
2We are wasting precious water. Pimentel also pointed out that a large portion of the world food shortages humans face today is due to loss of croplands. To illustrate, a loaf of bread that weighs one pound requires 250 gallons of water to produce—for the wheat used in that loaf of bread. In comparison, one pound of beef requires 5,000 gallons of water—for the grains and hay that the cow consumes in order to produce that one pound of beef.
3 Fertilizers are pollutants. The heavily promoted industrial-grade nitrogen fertilizer is polluting our oceans. Monger said: “That fertilizer is primarily nitrogen, in the case of the oceans; in lakes, it’s typically phosphorus. It stimulates exceptionally strong growth of algae, which creates an exceptionally large biomass in the surface water. These algae eventually die and usually sink into coastal waters, typically near river outflows. Bacteria consume that dead algae for food, and they consume the oxygen in the water along with it.
“The more nutrients you dump in the ocean from land, the more algae and the more bacteria consume oxygen until the oxygen in the water falls to near zero. These are called hypoxic conditions, and when they go all the way to zero, they are called anoxic conditions. Any fish you can think of—they all need oxygen. When a region’s oxygen is down to zero, organisms can’t inhabit it, and they die. This is what oceanographers call a dead zone—an area of very low or zero oxygen where nothing that uses oxygen for growth can live,” Monger said.
4The meat industry is subsidized, with dire consequences. Monger noted, “We use taxpayer money to subsidize the farm industry to produce cheap cows, which gives people an incentive to eat meat.” He then suggested: “If we stopped the subsidies and let the price of meat rise to its real cost, many people would naturally switch from a meat-based diet to a plant-based diet to save money. According to the World Trade Organization, the subsidies we provide to our farm industries… violate trade practices and they need to stop. That would be a good starting point for pulling people away from this meat-based diet and switching them to something more economical and far better for the environment.”
5We have exhausted our marine resources. A 2003 paper in Nature published by Myers and Worm shows the 90-percent decline of the top predators in the ocean, “the really valuable fish that everybody like—tuna, swordfish,” Monger noted.
“Since the early ’90s the total number of fish caught globally has leveled out. The ramification is that we’ve maxed out the ocean. About 85–90 million metric tons of fish are pulled from the ocean every year, and that hasn’t increased since the late ’90s. It has leveled off not because we’ve decided to be really proactive and be kind to the ocean and not fish anymore. It’s leveled off because we can’t get any more fish out of the ocean,” said Monger.
He also stressed that another indication of stress in the ocean and on fish populations is the average tropic level of the average fish catch of the global fishery. Monger explained that because there aren’t very many of them remaining, “they are starting to fish for lower and lower tropic-level fish that have less value per pound, such as sardines or anchovies and shrimp. The implication is that we’re scraping the bottom of the barrel for the last remaining crummy fish that we’re still willing to eat. It’s another indication that we’ve maxed out the ocean and we’re fishing them well beyond their sustainable levels.”