Can
Vegetarianism Help Reduce Terrorism?
Richard H.
Schwartz, Ph.D.
The terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center
and the Pentagon are horrific acts of dehumanization
and failure to recognize the sanctity of human lives,
and visible symbols of an increasingly irrational
world. There is never any justification for acts of
terror against innocent civilians. We join all people
of goodwill in expressing our shock, outrage and sadness
at these unspeakable acts of terror, and our hearts,
condolences, and prayers go out to all those affected.
These barbaric acts changed the world in countless
ways. Steps must of course be taken quickly to defend
against additional terrorism and to punish those who
plan and carry out these crimes against humanity.
In this context, it might be thought that other
considerations, such as dietary choices, are inappropriate
and even offensive. However, it is essential that
these senseless acts of terrorism not further impede
the already fragile global efforts to cooperate in
addressing the world's pressing social, economic,
and environmental threats. While there are no simple
solutions to terrorism, perhaps we can look beyond
the horror and productively to utilize our current
feelings of vulnerability and sadness.
Although seldom discussed, animal-based diets and
agriculture constitute what Jeremy Rifkin called "cold
evil," a form of indirect, unconscious terrorism,
which may also make future terrorism more likely.
For a safer, more stable and sustainable world, it
is essential that, along with other steps to defend
against evil and irrational acts of terror, the effects
of the mass production and widespread consumption
of animal products be considered.
In 1992, over 1,670 scientists, including 104 Nobel
laureates – a majority of the living recipients
of the Prizes in the sciences – signed a "World
Scientists' Warning To Humanity." Their introduction
states: Human beings and the natural world are on
a collision course. Human activities inflict harsh
and often irreversible damage on the environment and
on critical resources. If not checked, many of our
current practices put at serious risk the future that
we wish for human society and the plant and animal
kingdoms, and may so alter the living world that it
will be unable to sustain life in the manner that
we know. Fundamental changes are urgent if we are
to avoid the collision our present course will bring
about.
The scientists' analysis discussed threats to the
atmosphere, rivers and
streams, oceans, soil, living species, and forests.
Their warning:
We the undersigned, senior members of the world's
scientific community, hereby warn all humanity of
what lies ahead. A great change in our stewardship
of the earth and the life on it is required, if
vast human misery is to be avoided and our global
home on this planet is not to be irretrievably mutilated.
Many of the problems that the scientists are warning
about, including hunger, water shortages, demand for
sufficient energy, desertification, global climate
change, and a culture of violence, are already having
major negative effects and also have the potential
of resulting in future acts of terrorism. Fortunately,
these problems can be substantially alleviated through
a shift to plant-based diets:
* The magnitude of world hunger is staggering: More
than a billion people, over one out of 6 people in
the world, are chronically hungry or suffer from malnutrition.
Children are particularly victimized by malnutrition.
Throughout the world, over 12 million children under
the age of 5 die every year – about 34,000 each
day – from diseases brought on or complicated
by malnutrition. Each year, almost 8 million children
die before their first birthday, largely due to malnutrition.
Malnourishment also causes listlessness and reduced
capacity for learning and work, thus perpetuating
the legacy of poverty.
* Numerous factors, including rapidly increasing
world population and affluence, environmental strains,
climate changes, and significant decreases in clean
water, arable land, fish catches, and land productivity
all threaten the world's food security. Providing
enough food for the world's rapidly increasing population
will be a critical issue for many decades.
* Extensive hunger and malnutrition in so many parts
of the world make
rebellion and violence more likely. Professor Georg
Borgstrom, international expert on food science, fears
that "the rich world is on a direct collision
course with the poor of the world... We cannot survive
behind our Maginot line of missiles and bombs. Unless
the problem of global hunger is fully addressed soon,
the outlook for global stability is very poor.
Can a shift to vegetarian diets make a difference
with regard to world
hunger? Consider these statistics:
* It takes about 16 pounds of grain to produce one
pound of edible beef from animals raised in feedlots.
Over 70 percent of the grain produced in the United
States and over one-third of the world's grain production
is fed to animals destined for slaughter. If Americans
reduced their beef consumption by 10 percent, it would
free up enough grain to feed all of the world's people
who annually die of hunger and related diseases. According
to the Council for Agricultural Science and Technology,
an Iowa-based non-profit research group, the grain
fed to animals to produce meat, milk, and eggs could
feed five times the number of people that it presently
does if it were consumed directly by humans.
* Land that grows potatoes, rice and other vegetables
can support about 20 times as many people as land
that produces grain-fed beef. Feeding grain to livestock
wastes 90% of the protein, almost 100% of the carbohydrates,
and 100% of the fiber of the grain. While grains are
a rich source of fiber, animal products have no fiber
at all. This evidence indicates that the food being
fed to animals in the affluent nations could, if properly
distributed, end both hunger and malnutrition throughout
the world.
Unfortunately, the world is moving increasingly
to animal-based diets as people in nations that have
been becoming more affluent, such as China, India,
and Japan, move up the food chain. Because of a shift
toward meat from grain-fed animals, China shifted
in 1995 from a grain exporter to a major grain importer.
If this trend continues, it will have very serious
implications for future food security.
* Due to heavy demand for water, there are serious
shortages in about 80 countries (including Israel)
which contain 40 percent of the world's population.
According to a report released recently by Population
Action International, over the next 25 years, the
number of people facing chronic or severe water shortages
could increase from 505 million to more than 3 billion.
The report said water shortages would be worst in
the Middle East and much of Africa. Globally, 2 billion
people live in areas with chronic water shortages.
A combination of population growth, drought, desertification,
waste of water, and global warming is causing a serious
water shortage in China that experts say could induce
environmental and political crises. Officials are
blaming drought for a 9.3 percent drop in the summer
grain yield, and water rationing has been imposed
on residents and industries in nearly 100 cities.
Pollution of lakes, rivers, and groundwater further
limits supplies of usable water. In the past few decades,
industrialization, population growth, and the heavy
use of chemical fertilizers have doubled the amount
of nitrogen in circulation, contributing to environmental
problems worldwide and possibly to human health problems
like cancer and memory failure. Hardest hit are coastal
bays and oceans -- deadly algae blooms are cropping
up from Finnish beaches to Hong Kong harbors, massive
unexpected fish kills are occurring from aryland's
Chesapeake Bay to Russia's Black Sea, and coral reefs
are in decline around the globe.
Once again, a shift toward vegetarianism can make
a significant difference. The standard diet of a meat-eater
in the United States requires 4,200 gallons of water
per day (for animals' drinking water, irrigation of
crops, meat processing, washing, cooking, etc.) A
person on a purely vegetarian (vegan) diet requires
only 300 gallons per day. Animal agriculture is the
major consumer of water in the U.S. According to Norman
Myers, author of Gaia: An Atlas of Planet Management,
irrigation, primarily to grow crops for animals, uses
over 80 percent of U.S. water. The production of only
one pound of edible beef in a semi-arid area such
as California requires as much as 5,200 gallons of
water, as contrasted with only 25 gallons or less
to produce an edible pound of tomatoes, lettuce, potatoes,
or wheat. Newsweek reported in 1988 that "the
water that goes into a 1,000 pound steer would float
a (Naval) destroyer."
Mountains of manure produced by cattle raised in
feedlots wash into and pollute streams, rivers, and
underground water sources. U.S. livestock produce
an astounding 1.4 billion tons of manure per year
(this amount works out to almost 90,000 pounds per
second!), or about 130 times the amount excreted by
the U.S. human population Food geographer, Georg Borgstrom
has estimated that American livestock contribute five
times more organic waste to the pollution of our water
than do people, and twice as much as does industry.
* About 70 percent of the world's 13.5 billion acres
of agricultural dry lands – almost 30 percent
of the Earth's total land area – is at risk of
becoming desert. Over a billion people in 135 countries
depend on this land for food. Loss of agricultural
land as well as the destruction of other ecosystems
cause an increase of migration into cities, where
increasingly crowded conditions lead to disease, hunger,
and other negative effects of poverty, including greater
potential for crime and violence.
As in every other threat considered in this article,
there is a dietary connection. Grazing animals have
destroyed large areas of land throughout the world,
with overgrazing having long been a prime cause of
erosion. Over 60 percent of all U.S. rangelands are
overgrazed, with billions of tons of soil lost each
year. Cattle production is a prime contributor to
every one of the causes of desertification: overgrazing
of livestock, over-cultivation of land, improper irrigation
techniques, deforestation, and prevention of reforestation.
According to mathematician Robin Hur, nearly 6 billion
of the 7 billion tons of eroded soil in the United
States has been lost because of cattle and feed lot
production.
* At current rates of destruction, the world's remaining
rain forests will virtually disappear by about 2031.
According to a study published in the journal Science,
as little as 5 percent of the Amazon rainforest in
Brazil may remain as pristine forest by 2020. Researchers
fear that roads, new homes, logging, and oil exploration
will devastate the 1.3 million-square-mile Amazon
forest, which makes up 40 percent of the Earth's remaining
tropical rainforest.
Animal-based diets and agriculture again plays a
major role in rainforest destruction. Largely to turn
beef into fast-food hamburgers for export to the U.S.,
the earth's tropical rain forests are being bulldozed
at a rate of a football field per second. Each imported
quarter-pound fast-food hamburger patty requires the
destruction of 55 square feet of tropical forest for
grazing. Half of the rainforests are already gone
forever and at current rates of destruction the rest
will be gone by the middle of the next century. What
makes this especially ominous is that half of the
world's fast disappearing species of plants and animals
reside in tropical rain forests. We are risking the
loss of species which might hold secrets for cures
of deadly diseases. Other plant species might turn
out to be good sources of nutrition. Also, the destruction
of rain forests is altering the climate and reducing
rainfall, with potentially devastating effects on
the world's agriculture and habitability.
* Global climate change may be the most critical
problem the world will face in the next few decades.
There is a growing scientific consensus that we are
already experiencing the effects of global warming,
and that human actions
are playing a significant role. Global average temperatures
have increased about one degree Fahrenheit since 1900.
This doesn't sound like much, but it is causing major
changes in our weather patterns. The warmest decade
in recorded history was the 1990s. The ten warmest
years on record have all occurred since 1983, with
seven of them since 1990. The global temperature in
1998 was the warmest in recorded history.
In the year 2000, in its Third Assessment Report,
the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC),
a U.N.-sponsored organization composed of leading
climate scientists from over 100 nations, made two
momentous revisions in its previous forecasts of global
warming. It estimated that by 2100, the average world
temperature could rise between 2.5 and 10.4 degrees
Fahrenheit, a range significantly higher than the
1.8 to 6.3 degree rise predicted by the IPCC in 1995.
Also, the group became far more emphatic that it is
human activities, rather than natural planetary cycles,
that are "contributing substantially" to
the increase, and they indicated that they expect
these human contributions will continue to grow. The
IPCC report, which runs to over 1,000 pages, was written
by 123 lead authors from many countries who drew on
516 contributing experts and is one of the most comprehensive
produced on global warming. Hence, the conclusions
of the report represent an unprecedented consensus
among hundreds of climate scientists from all over
the world. This makes their summary statement that
"Projected climate changes during the 21st century
have the potential to lead to future large-scale and
possible irreversible changes in Earth systems,''
with "continental and global consequences'' especially
ominous.
While recent increased concern about global warming
is very welcome, the many connections between typical
American (and other Western) diets and global warming
have generally been overlooked. Current modern intensive
livestock agriculture and the consumption of meat
contribute greatly to the four major gases associated
with the greenhouse effect: carbon dioxide, methane,
nitrous oxides, and chlorofluorocarbons.
The burning of tropical forests releases tons of
carbon dioxide into the atmosphere and eliminates
the ability of these trees to absorb carbon dioxide.
Also, the highly mechanized agricultural sector uses
an enormous amount of fossil fuel to produce pesticides,
chemical fertilizer, and other agricultural resources,
and this also contributes to carbon dioxide emissions.
Cattle emit methane as part of their digestive process,
as do termites who feast on the charred remains of
trees that were burned to create grazing land and
land to grow feed crops for farmed animals. The large
amounts of petrochemical fertilizers used to produce
feed crops create significant quantities of nitrous
oxides. Likewise, the increased refrigeration necessary
to prevent animal products from spoiling adds chlorofluorocarbons
to the atmosphere.
In 2001 a series of brownouts (rolling blackouts)
in California and rapidly rising gasoline prices thrust
the energy issue back into the foreground. Announcing
the recommendations of his energy task force headed
by Vice President Dick Cheney, President George W.
Bush argued that if America failed to act now, "this
great country could face a darker future, a future
that is, unfortunately, being previewed in rising
prices at the gas pump and rolling blackouts in the
great state of California." Bush stated that
''America needs an energy plan that faces up to our
energy challenges and meets them.'' The White House
task force?? report cited a ''fundamental imbalance
between supply and demand'' and depicted the potential
for a very gloomy energy picture, including high gasoline
and electricity prices across much of the country,
soaring natural gas prices causing havoc with farmers
and the possibility of power blackouts in the West
and Northeast. Responses to the Bush task force energy
recommendations were predictable, with Republicans
and oil, gas, and nuclear interests strongly supporting
it, and Democrats and environmentalists loudly opposing
it.
Whatever methods are used to produce energy, a shift
to plant-based diets can sharply reduce demand for
energy. In the United States, an average of 10 calories
of fuel energy is required for every calorie of food
energy produced; many other countries obtain 20 or
more calories of food energy per calorie of fuel energy.
To produce one pound of steak (500 calories of food
energy) requires 20,000 calories of fossil fuels,
most of which is expended in producing and providing
feed crops. It requires 78 calories of fossil fuel
for each calorie of protein obtained from feedlot-produced
beef, but only 2 calories of fossil fuel to produce
a calorie of protein from soybeans. Grains and beans
require only two to five percent as much fossil fuel
as beef. The energy needed to produce a pound of grain-fed
beef is equivalent to one gallon of gasoline.
* Animal-based diets and agriculture also have implications
re the possibility of the spread of anthrax and other
deadly bacteria, as well as our ability to resist
these bacteria through antibiotics. The October 2001
issue of the New England Journal of Medicine reported
that three independent studies found that up to half
of supermarket meat and poultry samples were contaminated
with antibiotic-resistant bacteria that each year
kill thousands and sicken millions. All this is in
spite of the implementation of the new, highly touted
USDA meat inspection program and without the workings
of anyone wishing us ill.
Now, consider the opportunity that a slaughterhouse
provides to a bio-terrorist. US slaughterhouses have
a very large turnover of undocumented aliens. It would
be relatively easy for a bio-terrorist to enter the
country legally or otherwise, join the slaughterhouse
staff, and slip a powerful pathogen into a vat of
ground meat destined for hamburgers or hot dogs (frequently
eaten uncooked). The culprit would be long out of
the country before the contaminated product reaches
supermarket shelves and thousands of his victims begin
dying. Anyone really concerned with anthrax or other
form of bio-terrorism would be well advised to lay
off meat and poultry for a while.
There are also threats to our ability to respond
to diseases because of the decreasing effectiveness
of antibiotics. Over half the antibiotics produced
in the United States are routinely fed to animals
in their feed. It would be impossible to maintain
healthy animals under the cramped conditions of "factory
farming" without these drugs. Further, for reasons
which are not fully understood, the antibiotics also
seem to act as "growth promoters" leading
to heavier animals and thus more weight for the market,
providing even greater incentive to administer drugs.
Unfortunately, this practice places enormous "selective
pressure" on the bacteria which inhabit these
animals to develop resistance to the antibiotics in
the feed. Genes which neutralize the effects of antibiotics
arise as a result of this selective pressure (i.e.,
in the presence of antibiotics, only those organisms
which have the capability of neutralizing the antibiotics
will survive). These resistant genes are easily transferred
from one bacterium to another, and they may protect
germs which cause human disease from antibiotic treatment.
There has already been a tremendous increase in
antibiotic resistance in common food poisoning bacteria
like salmonella,45 but the problem is even worse than
simply the antibiotic-resistant bacteria in the food
animals themselves. Bacteria also have the capability
of rapidly transferring and spreading the antibiotic-resistant
character to other bacterial species, including those
which cause other diseases. Therefore, diseases which
are not even related to food consumption may become
resistant to antibiotics, and hence a much greater
threat. For example, staphylococcus bacteria have
been isolated in recent years which are resistant
to every known commercially available antibiotic.
If this organism gets into one's blood stream, the
person will very likely die.
As a result, there is a scientific consensus that
the extensive use of antibiotics to produce meat and
other animal products, along with their over-use in
medicine, has increased resistance among bacteria
and jeopardized human health by causing diseases that
are difficult or impossible to cure. For example,
in 1997, the World Health Organization called for
a ban on the routine use of antibiotics in livestock
feed. In 1998, the journal Science called the meat
industry "the driving force behind the development
of antibiotic resistance in certain species of bacteria
that cause human disease," and later that year,
the Center for Disease Control blamed the use of antibiotics
in livestock feed for the emergence of salmonella
bacteria resistant to five different antibiotics.
Joshua Lederberg, M.D., a Nobel Laureate, stated "we're
running out of bullets for dealing with a number of
these infections. Patients are dying because we no
longer in many cases have antibiotics that work."
The widespread use of antibiotics in animal feed
is thus a global threat to human health for every
individual on earth. People need prescriptions for
these drugs, yet the animal industry uses them casually.
This irresponsible misuse of antibiotics is unilaterally
disarming our species from a last line of defense,
and devastating epidemics may well be the legacy of
the hunger for inexpensive meat.
* Another benefit of a shift toward plant-based diets
is a reduction in the current widespread violence
in the world. Presently 10 billion animals in the
US alone and 45 billion animals worldwide are cruelly
treated on "factory farms" and then slaughtered
for consumption. Many practices are particularly shocking:
the force-feeding of huge amounts of grains to ducks
and geese to produce pate de foie gras; the raising
of veal calves who are taken away from their mothers
almost immediately after birth, and are kept in narrow
pens, where they are denied exercise, and fed a diet
deficient in iron and other essential nutrients; the
killing of over 250 million male chicks immediately
after birth because they can't lay eggs and have not
been genetically programmed to produce much meat.
There are documented studies that violence towards
animals by children is a strong predictor of violent
and criminal behavior in the adults those children
grow up to be.
In view of these many negative effects of animal-based
agriculture, it is scandalous that U.S. meat conglomerates,
aided by the World bank and other international financial
institutions, are promoting food policies and trade
agreements that would double world production and
consumption of meat and other animal food products
in the next 20 years. Most of this expansion would
take place in less developed nations, through massive
factory farming operations similar to these currently
being used in the developed world. This would have
very severe consequences for the poor countries and
worldwide: more hunger, more poverty, more pollution,
more animal suffering, less self-determination for
the people in low-income nations, and less water for
everyone.
When we consider all of the negative
effects of animal-based diets, it is clear that animal-centered
diets and the livestock agriculture needed to sustain
them pose tremendous threats to global survival and
increase the potential for future terrorism. (The
direct negative effects on human health of high fat,
high cholesterol, low fiber animal-based diets should
also be considered.) It is not surprising that the
Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) ranks the consumption
of meat and poultry as the second most harmful consumer
activity (surpassed only by the use of cars and light
trucks). It is clear that a shift toward vegetarianism
is imperative to move our precious but imperiled planet
away from its present catastrophic path and to reduce
the potential for future terrorism.
Back to the Schwartz
Collection on Judaism, Vegetarianism, and Animal Rights
