Sense of Hummus

JamieSW — Mon, 29 Oct 2007 00:34:41 +0000

WHY BEING VEGAN IS PART OF THE SOLUTION

Dish out the tofu and crack open yet another oversized tub of hummus. It’s time to ditch the dairy and celebrate World Vegan Week which kicks off this Saturday (27th). Although you’d be joining a growing movement (now quarter of a million strong in the UK), meat consumption has increased four fold in the past fifty years and now livestock outnumbers humans three to one! Yet 850 million people still go hungry worldwide with an estimated five million children dying each year due to malnutrition. The rearing of farm animals has forced millions of small farmers off the land and the agricultural techniques employed are having an ever more harmful effect on our planet. OK, so maybe the vegan thing is going through a bit of a rebrand at the mo’, but as well as being about respecting the life of all the living creatures with which we share out planet, veganism is also one way we can tackle food poverty and climate change.

Take the forests (Please! International logging corporations especially welcome!). Trees are essential storers of carbon dioxide and help to regulate our climate – but are being chopped down at the rate of 13 million hectares a year. Already almost one-third of the world’s forests have been converted to agriculture use and the World Resources Institute reckons that 60% of current deforestation involves clearing the way for food production. One fifth of this is being used to graze cattle and another 10% is utilised for grain production to feed the beasts themselves.

But of course, land in the UK is much more valuable if you build on it – so most of the feed for our livestock is imported from abroad. Europe as a whole imports 70% of its protein for cattle feed, leading to one European Parliament report sating that, “Europe can feed its people but not its farm animals.” Some six million acres of land in Brazil is being used to grow soya beans for animals in Europe alone – at the same time as 20 million Brazilians suffer from malnutrition. In fact it takes ten times more land to produce one kilo of protein from meat than its does from soya. “If present trends of meat-eating continue” says science writer, Colin Tudge, “then by 2050 the world’s livestock will be consuming as much as 4 billion people do.” A plant based diet requires just 20% of the land of that required by an omnivore.

TAKING THE PESCATARIAN

And its not just the land that’s the problem. Fish-munching ‘veggies’ should beware that more than a quarter of all the world’s fisheries are fully exploited. In Canada at least 140 distinct varieties of salmon are already extinct and many more dolphins, turtles and seals are caught up and killed in giant fishing nets. Not that all the fish caught is eaten – biologist Lee Alverson calculates that around 27 million tonnes of fish are wasted every year because they are the wrong kind or size for the fussy supermarket shopper (that’s more than the total amount of fish eaten in 1950). Shrimp boats that drag the bottom of the sea are the most wasteful, scooping up 10 kilos of other marine life for every one kilo of shrimp that’s actually used.

Last November the United Nations Food & Agriculture Organisation reported that livestock production accounts for 18% of greenhouse gas emissions – more than all the world’s transport combined! Head of the FAO’s Information Unit, Henning Steinfeld says that “livestock are one of the most significant contributors to today’s most serious environmental problems. Urgent action is required to remedy the situation.”

Animal foods account for most of the energy used in agriculture, sometimes up to 20 times more energy per ‘edible tonne’ than grain production! Housing pigs and chickens in huge windowless sheds requires loads of energy for artificial ventilation, conveyor belts and electric lighting. You don’t need refrigeration or freezers to store yer fresh veg!

The fleshy tastes of an increasingly wealthy population, from whom the big food corporations are only to willing to extract as much profit as possible, are on the rise. People are consuming more meat and dairy every year. During the first fifty years of the 21st century, meat production and milk output are both set to double. Many formerly subsistence farmers are turning to grow cash crops for animal feed because it pays better. Such intensive monoculture threatens biodiversity and moves local farmers further away from sustainable agricultural systems. But it’s not the poor eating the meat – a US citizen consumes 15 times more beef than someone from Honduras. The Danes are the biggest pig munchers, getting through their way through twice their own body weight in pork each year, ten times more than a South African.

If you can get a perfectly healthy diet from a vegan diet (and you can) why kill animals to feed ourselves? Pigs have to be given powerful antibiotics during their short (six months) lives, in an attempt to tackle the diseases rife in the filthy battery conditions in which over 95% of them are kept. Poultry farmers send 800 million chickens to slaughter each year in the UK, most of which are kept in huge sheds containing up to 40,000 birds. Two thirds of all eggs are produced by battery chickens which have to live in an area smaller than an A4 piece of paper, even though their wingspan is four times bigger. The more rustic sounding ‘barn egg’ laying chicken gets an A3 sized bit of paper to live on whilst to call a chicken ‘free range’ all the bird must have is ‘access to the outdoors’ during day light hours (on the way to the slaughter house, perhaps?).

Then there’s the torture-in-a-tin that is foie-gras, where ducks and geese are force fed until their livers swell ten times its normal size. The French polish off 30 million ducks a year in order to munch on this ‘delicacy’ and Viva! is running a campaign to outlaw the cruel industry – check www.viva.org.uk/campaigns/foiegras/index.html for more info about the campaign.

- See www.vegansociety.com to learn more about how the animal-free diet can save the planet.

veganism | ukwatch.net

Sense of Hummus