Eating Lower on the Food Chain

Shhh, girls!! I want to hear about this!

Union of Concerned Scientists: List of Top Things You Can Do to Help

the Planet

• #1. Drive less• #2. Eat less red meat and

dairy products• #3. Conserve on heating and

cooling costs in the home

Cow products are the worst!

• Nearly 87% of our agricultural land (50% for cows alone!) is engaged in animal production for food

I BEG YOUR

PARDON?

U.S. Crop % that goes to feed cows

• 80 - 90% of our soybeans, oats, wheat and corn

What! You have a problem with that?

Cow efficiency

• It takes 16 lbs of wheat to make 1 lb of cow

• 5000 gallons of water per lb of cow

• (A lb of soybeans only takes about 260 gallons of water)

• A typical North American Diet requires twice as much water to produce as less meat-intensive diets common in Asia and Europe.

• Eating lower on food chain : same water could feed double the people

• Making animal products use ½ the water in US

• 1 dairy cow drinks about 29 gallons of water a day, and needs 40 additional gallons for sanitation, producing only 8 gallons of milk

Got Water?

Pollution (Deep Doo-Doo!)• EPA : agricultural runoff = primary pollution source for

60% of U.S. polluted rivers and streams • Animal ag. = 130 times more than human waste and

equivalent to 5 tons per person.• AND ITS NOT TREATED BY A SEWAGE TREATMENT

PLANT!• The manure from a 200-head dairy operation produces

as much nitrogen as sewage from a town of 10,000 people!

• One dairy cow produces 120 lbs of waste a day, 12 times as much as a person

• This is a total of 22 tons per cow per year.

Got Trees?

• Eating a plant based diet personally saves an acre of trees annually

• 260 million acres of U.S. forests have been cleared for livestock production.

Our foreign suppliers

• Throughout Central and South America, grazing and feed grain production are the leading economic forces behind rainforest destruction.

• Every quarter lb hamburger costs Mother Nature 55 square feet of forest land!

• U.S. is the world’s top beef importer.• A fast food restaurant can claim to buy

from a U.S. supplier but suppliers are not required to declare the nation

of origin of their products.

Got Petroleum?

• Americans consume nearly as much fossil fuels at the supermarket as at the gas pump.

• The typical American burns about 530 gallons of gas each year driving.

• Eating a meat based diet gobbles up an additional 400 gallons of oil.

• One acre of corn requires 140 gallons of oil to produce.

• Eating corn directly maximizes the energy investment.

• If the corn goes to livestock, only about a fifth of the protein is returned as food, four-fifths is lost

Additional tidbits

• One quarter of all antibiotics produced are used in the U.S. for food animals

• Foreign originated veggies may have been sprayed with DDT

• L.A. water is full of DDT, washed off from foreign fruits and veggies!

• DDT is stored in fat – linked to breast cancer (90% breast cancer patients have DDT in their systems)