The Starch Solution (13 page)

The 2006 United Nations report
Livestock’s Long Shadow: Environmental Issues and Options
concludes, “Livestock have a substantial impact on the world’s water, land and biodiversity resources and contribute significantly to climate change.”
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Yet this 407-page report mentions the term
vegetarian
a shy four times and avoids any meaningful discussion of this obvious answer to the dilemma it poses; the word
vegan
is MIA.

Based in Rome, Italy, Henning Steinfeld was in 2006 the head of the livestock sector analysis and policy branch of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. As an agricultural economist, Dr. Steinfeld has been working on agricultural and livestock policy for the last 15 years, with a special focus on environmental issues, poverty, and public health. He is also the senior author of the UN report
Livestock’s Long Shadow.
You would think that, over the course of his career, Dr. Steinfeld would have developed some insight into the cause and effect of this worldwide problem. His comment? “Livestock are one of the most significant contributors to today’s most serious environmental problems. Urgent action is required to remedy the situation…. Encouraging the global population to become vegans is not a viable solution, however.”
⁷

What Dr. Steinfeld fails to offer is any reason why this solution is
not
viable. Instead, the report’s recommendations run from improvements in grazing, manure, and water management to a modified diet that reduces the toxic fecal and gaseous output of cows, pigs, and sheep. What?! We will change the livestock’s diet, but heaven forbid we change our own? Indeed, this report won’t offend many people, but neither will its recommendations have any significant impact.

(Please note: The United Nations estimate of an 18 percent greenhouse gas contribution from livestock was conservative. Calculations by the World Watch Institute concluded that over 51 percent of these global-warming gases are the result of raising animals for people to eat.
⁸
)

Only 3.2 percent of the US population, or 7.3 million people, identify themselves as vegetarian, and most of these consume milk, cheese, and eggs.
⁹
About half of 1 percent of the population, or one million
people, are vegans, consuming no animal products. Another 10 percent of adults, or 22.8 million people, say they follow a largely vegetarian diet. It is well documented that increasing the number of people following a vegan or even vegetarian diet makes a
real and significant
impact.

• Animal agriculture produces 18 percent of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions (carbon dioxide equivalents), compared with 14 percent from all forms of transportation combined.
  
 

• Livestock also generate other toxic gases, including nitrous oxide, methane, and ammonia.
  
 

• Nitrous oxide has 296 times the global warming potential, and methane 23 times, of CO
  ₂
  .
  
 

• Ammonia contributes to acid rain and ecosystem acidification.
  
 

• Livestock are the identified culprit in 15 out of 24 important ecosystems that are reported to be in decline.
  
 

• Grazing livestock occupy the equivalent of 26 percent of the ice-free terrestrial surface of the planet, and one-third of all arable land is used in producing food for these animals.
  
 

• Forest clearing for new pastureland is a major source of deforestation. In Latin America, 70 percent of former Amazon rainforests has been given over to grazing. As the “lungs of the Earth,” these forests are vital to removing greenhouse gases from the atmosphere.
  
 

• The livestock industry is one of the heaviest users of our scarce water supply, and contributes to excessive growth of organisms in water, oxygen depletion of water, and the erosion of coral reefs.
  
 

• Livestock pollute our waters with their waste, antibiotics, hormones, chemicals from tanneries, fertilizers, and the pesticides used to spray the feed crops they consume.
  
 

• US livestock are responsible for 55 percent of soil erosion and sediment, 37 percent of pesticides, 50 percent of antibiotics, and one-third of the nitrogen and phosphorus polluting our freshwater sources.
  
 

• Widespread overgrazing disturbs water cycles, reducing their ability to replenish, both aboveground and belowground.
  
 

• The presence of livestock over vast land areas, coupled with their depletion of food crops, contributes to the loss of other plants and animals that are unable to compete.
  
 

Source: Livestock’s Long Shadow: Environmental Issues and Options,
United Nations, 2006
⁶

This change is already happening with some of the world’s most powerful leaders. What do Bill Clinton, Steve Wynn, John Mackey, and Mike Tyson have in common? These four powerful men have all declared themselves in favor of a vegan diet.
¹⁰
I know of no other
similarities among this ex-president, hotel tycoon, supermarket entrepreneur, and ex—prize fighter. You might think that a public figure’s declaration to not eat animals could be a reckless business decision. Traditionally, a vegetarian diet has been considered a sign of weakness, conjuring pale, listless hippies hanging out at the health food store. These four men must have found reasons not only to ignore this common stereotype but also to prove it wrong. My guess is that they were motivated in part by personal gain. A fountain of youth becomes
especially important as health declines with age, causing people to make desperate changes—as radical as replacing burgers and bacon with barley and beans.

Until just before the end of the 20th century, an estimated two billion people worldwide lived primarily on an animal-based diet, while twice as many—an estimated four billion—consumed a largely plant-based diet.
¹¹
These figures are rapidly shifting. It has been predicted that by the middle of the 21st century, the global population will increase to about
nine billion people,
an increase of six million people every month. At the same time, incomes are rising in developing and middle-income countries, most notably in China, India, Brazil, and Argentina. As income rises, so does the consumption of expensive meats, dairy products, and processed foods. These foods are costly in more ways than one: In addition to being costlier to produce and purchase, they have a greater negative environmental impact and cause more medical problems.

The Earth can support an estimated one billion to two billion people living at the American standards of income, health, food consumption, personal dignity, and freedom.
¹²
The US share of this population would be 100 to 200 million. This compares with a current world census of seven billion and a US population of more than 312 million.

At the present growth rates, if every human being on Earth were to live according to American standards, including consuming the typical American or European diet, we would need four or more planet Earths to feed, house, and care for us all.
¹³

We have three options for addressing worldwide overpopulation and the problems that result from it: population control (an unacceptable approach to most), increasing agricultural productivity to feed more people, and changing the way we eat.

In 1978, China implemented a one-child-per-family policy to alleviate the country’s social, economic, and environmental burdens. An
estimated 400 million births have been prevented by this policy over the past three decades.
¹⁴
Reducing the population in this manner worldwide would require a huge investment in reproductive health care and birth control services.

Even if the human species stopped reproducing altogether, it would take more than two generations to cut the world’s population in half. Wars, starvation, and disease could force a more rapid decline, but naturally these are conditions we wish to avoid. On its own, elective population control would take too long to preserve the planet in its current state.

Couldn’t we simply increase agricultural output to assure food for all? While we have made great strides in food production over the past 50 years, these improvements can’t continue under the conditions caused by climate change. Fires in Russia have destroyed hundreds of thousands of acres of grain. Canada’s wheat crop has been decimated by heavy rain. Drought in Argentina has devastated the soybean crop. Floods in Australia have destroyed much of the country’s wheat. The growing unpredictability of our weather conditions makes any sustained agricultural efforts nearly impossible.

Adding to these food shortages are what we do with the food once it’s grown. Currently, one-third of US-grown corn is diverted to produce ethanol fuel. We can and must continue to squeeze as many healthy calories as possible from our agricultural lands. But even with increased agricultural output, there is no possibility of keeping up with the increasing demands of animal production on our agricultural resources. We can run as fast as we can, but we will never catch up.

In recent times we have seen citizens in the Middle East, from Egypt to Libya, turning to revolt in an effort to remove their leaders from power. Their motivation is the primary challenge they live with every day: feeding themselves and their families on subsistence wages or less.
Starvation poses a threat to more than individual or even population health; it threatens global stability and security, affecting even those of us living far from these politically unstable regions.

The Middle East was once known as the word’s breadbasket, yet millions of people living there no longer have enough to eat. In 2009, UNICEF reported that 30 percent of children in half a dozen countries throughout the Middle East and North Africa were suffering from stunted growth as a result of malnutrition.
¹⁵
The UN announced in 2011 that world food prices had reached record levels. Currently, nearly a billion people worldwide live at the edge of starvation as the prices of their staples—rice, corn, and wheat—rise beyond their meager income of about a dollar a day.

There is something seriously wrong with a world in which half of the population is severely underfed while the other half overfeeds itself into a state of illness and even death. You might think the most sensible thing for people to do would be for those with excess resources to share their bounty with those who are starving. If those enjoying the excess were to make the change to a starch-based diet, this would free up sufficient rice, corn, wheat, and potatoes (now going to animal feed) to allow the entire world population adequate or even bountiful food supplies.

In fact, reallocating land from animal to crop production would increase our food resources at least seventeenfold: Crops like potatoes can produce 17 times the calories as animals on the same piece of land.
¹⁶
There would be additional positive consequences of replacing animal foods in our diet with plants. Fossil fuels used in the production of food could be reduced fortyfold. Consider that about 2 calories of fossil-fuel energy are required to cultivate 1 calorie of starchy vegetable food energy; with beef, the ratio can be as high as 80 to 1.
¹⁷
We would also reduce the needless suffering from the health consequences of our lives of excess, including obesity, heart disease, type 2 diabetes, arthritis, and breast, prostate, and colon cancer, to name a few. We would reduce our national debt by vastly reducing the health care costs
associated with these unnecessary illnesses. And we would free a great portion of the world from starvation.

Governments, businesses, local groups, and individuals are seeking answers to our environmental problems through reducing the use of fossil fuels—coal, oil, and natural gas—and by trying to get industrial waste under control. At the same time, we are waging a war on chronic diseases with strategies to reduce smoking, the use of alcohol and drugs, toxic environmental chemicals, and infectious diseases. But where is the effort to fix the food?

It would not take much for us to solve these individual and global problems in one fell swoop. All it takes is one big U-turn back to where we came from. Back to our roots. Back to what we once knew was healthy and natural: a diet based on starches and other plants, including fruits and vegetables. At the root of both human and environmental health is
what we eat.
Food is plentiful. We just need to choose the Starch Solution.

As you seek to achieve your personal goals of dropping a few (or even a hundred or more) pounds, bringing your blood pressure and blood sugar under control, weaning yourself from medications for high blood pressure or diabetes, battling cancer or staving off a recurrence of it, relieving your joints that ache from arthritis, easing your depression, increasing your energy, or simply slipping gracefully into your swimsuit this summer, consider your immense contribution to the world around you. As you switch to a starch-based diet, think about the positive impact of what you are doing will have on your children and grandchildren, and on generations yet to come. If you get stuck along your path and find yourself heading back to old eating habits, reflect on how far you have come and what a difference you have already made.