In average, a lot of us eat a lot of meat. There’s nothing wrong with eating meat in general, but there are a lot of things wrong the way it is done. How does a steak get on your plate? Well, from the supermarket probably. How does it get there? Well, from some butcher. But let’s start at the beginning.
For steaks one needs cows or pigs. Those are living beings, they need to be born, grow, be kept healthy and should be ensured to have a relatively happy life before making someone’s dinner. In theory this sounds not too bad (if you can live with the fact that another living being is killed so you can enjoy it). The growing up part is the one we will focus on now. In order to grow, any living being needs food and water. Of course, cows eat grass. Just that there isn’t always grass. So how can we help that? Dried grass, hay for example.
BUT: if you feed your cow off grass and hay, it’ll take a quite long time for it to be big enough to make enough money off it when it goes to the butcher. So, since we live in a very commercialised world, people aren’t always patient enough to wait for a long time. There are ways to speed up the growing process. One can replace grass and hay by grains. Those are rich in nutrients and make them grow a whole lot faster. Since you also might not want to keep a single cow, as they’re after all gregarious animals, you might want a whole big bunch to make sure your meat production is profitable. Well, works in theory.
Let’s look on what happens if you hold many of the same species close together. You want to make money, so there’s no big meadow where they grass, there’s a big stable where they stand in their own dirt, no windows, no fresh air. This encourages illnesses of course. Also because you’ve already taken the natural vitamin rich food away from it and replaced it by someone it would normally not eat. So, you need quite some medication to keep your stock healthy.
But what happens if you give your animal some medication? It goes into their blood, and with that into their muscles. And that’s just what you eat.
But let’s look at the environmental side of this. You need to feed your animal grains to make them grown quicker. In the end, you need about 10kg of grains for each 1kg of meat and about 10 000 litres of water (including cleaning and post-production). You can easily eat a 200g steak in one meal, that’s really not that big. Could you also eat let’s say 2kg of soy beans in one meal?!?
So why is this a problem? Today about a THIRD of the earths fields are just used to grow animal feed. Grain production has the same goals as the meat industry. Grow stuff as quickly and as profitable as possible. For that, one needs good fertilizers and pesticides. Or, one goes to Brazil, burns down some rainforest, has some natural fertilizer for a few years and then abandons the field, which turns it into a desert.
The Americans are leading the average per head meat consumption. Each of them eats almost 400g meat EVERY DAY. That’s two steaks. Of course this includes waste as well, because let’s be honest, can you really be bothered to buy things thoughtfully and not toss half of what you bought because it went off in your fridge, unused? Can you really ask people to make sure that what they buy gets used?
This is what you eat 