30JUNE07 Environmental Vegetarianism

So Dee and I are pretty much Vegetarians when at home (and not gnawing on Yak bones in Lhasa!), and have decided to be so mainly for environmental, social and economic reasons. I personally just feel more healthy when eating a complex vegetarian diet, and find it hard to justify the relative cost and inputs required for the production of meats for human consumption. When you look at the production of meat and animal products at current and future levels, especially considering the consolidation and growth in factory farming over the past decade, it is quite easy to argue that the practice is environmentally unsustainable.
Over the years, Industrialization has led to intensive farming practices and diets high in animal protein, primarily in developed nations and mainly the West. The reality is that most of the world's population today subsists on vegetarian or near-vegetarian diets for reasons that are economic, philosophical, religious, cultural, or ecological. Makes one wonder whether we should get (back) with the program! This is not to say that I don't enjoy the occassional piece of animal protein, but it has to meet my personal criterion of being 1) sustainably and ethically farmed, and 2) locally produced.

A number of things inspired me to give it a go, including this Rolling Stone article by Jeff Tietz. I found the article when I found the piece on Chinese tourism in Tibet which I posted earlier to this blog, and I couldn't take my eyes off the story.
It's an investigative piece on how Smithfield Foods, America's largest hog slaughterer, circumvents law, pollutes like crazy, and creates antibiotic and vaccine-laden pork products that feed our continent. I don't intend to become one of those annoying vegangelicals who tries to convert everyone to tempeh, but this was just a fascinating read:

Smithfield's holding ponds -- the company calls them lagoons -- cover as much as 120,000 square feet. The area around a single slaughterhouse can contain hundreds of lagoons, some of which run thirty feet deep. The liquid in them is not brown. The interactions between the bacteria and blood and afterbirths and stillborn piglets and urine and excrement and chemicals and drugs turn the lagoons pink.
Even light rains can cause lagoons to overflow; major floods have transformed entire counties into pig-shit bayous. To alleviate swelling lagoons, workers sometimes pump the shit out of them and spray the waste on surrounding fields, which results in what the industry daintily refers to as "overapplication." This can turn hundreds of acres -- thousands of football fields -- into shallow mud puddles of pig shit. Tree branches drip with pig shit.
Some pig-farm lagoons have polyethylene liners, which can be punctured by rocks in the ground, allowing shit to seep beneath the liners and spread and ferment. Gases from the fermentation can inflate the liner like a hot-air balloon and rise in an expanding, accelerating bubble, forcing thousands of tons of feces out of the lagoon in all directions.
The lagoons themselves are so viscous and venomous that if someone falls in it is foolish to try to save him. A few years ago, a truck driver in Oklahoma was transferring pig shit to a lagoon when he and his truck went over the side. It took almost three weeks to recover his body. In 1992, when a worker making repairs to a lagoon in Minnesota began to choke to death on the fumes, another worker dived in after him, and they died the same death. In another instance, a worker who was repairing a lagoon in Michigan was overcome by the fumes and fell in. His fifteen-year-old nephew dived in to save him but was overcome, the worker's cousin went in to save the teenager but was overcome, the worker's older brother dived in to save them but was overcome, and then the worker's father dived in. They all died in
pig shit.

Link to "Boss Hog," by Jeff Tietz.