Quote:
Originally Posted by BalancedExistence  While I agree with what you have to say Andrew and am aware of the environmental issues I find is bizarre that everyone associates meat with grain. I know it is the reality commercially speaking where the two are synonymous but naturally speaking there is no cow that clears land, cultivates corn, harvests it, processes it and then eats it. Cows eat grass. It’s what their digestive apparatus is designed to do. We live in a mixed up world where the animals people eat are eating food they have not evolved to eat. So people eat sick animals, get sick and then blame it on meat as opposed to the unnatural farming method. |
But nobody is willing to go back to grass-fed-only beef. American beef is sent off to be "finished" at feedlots, where the cows stand around in groups eating out of troughs of grain. It "fattens them up".
Some of our beef comes from the extras out of the dairy production. Dairy cows get not only grass but legumes (soybean and alfalfa hay) plus lots of grain. Today's dairy cows are bred for huge production amounts and then in many cases given drugs to keep yield high; as a result they MUST get a large amount of nutrition they'd never get wandering a range.
Chickens are ALWAYS grain fed, unless you're buying one of the very few "free range" chickens which may or may not be getting some grain. They never get the seeds, insects, and other natural sources in their normal diet.
The reality is to abandon the current methods for a grass-fed or free-range only method would push up food prices, demand more room for the animals themselves, and demand more labor at the farm. Consumers won't stand for it. As it is the livestock industries are heavily subsidized via things like the Farm Bill here in the US. It's illogical -- for example a lower-nutrition crop such as corn is heavily subsidized because livestock farmers depend on corn. Tomatoes or cherries are not. The bigger picture is that it creates a food market where the poorest people can't afford a fresh-food health diet so they're living on cheetos and burgers. And then we wonder why the lowest income brackets struggle with obesity at a higher rate.
You also need to consider the ecological footprint of even grass-fed beef vs getting those calories from plants. Other than human waste, livestock waste is how we get E Coli, salmonella, and other pathogens in our food, our drinking water, and the lakes our kids swim in. Livestock waste is linked to fish kills, pfisteria (fish disease), and the ocean dead zones. Methane produced by one cow is a funny cow fart; methane produced by millions of cows is an environmental problem. It is an issue if you think how many tens (hundreds?) of millions of livestock animals we raise in the US alone.
Maybe people can't stop eating meat entirely, but going meatless just a few meals a week makes a difference.