Normally a Sunday afternoon in late June
should be the cue for a lazy pint of bitter in a beer garden, or a bike ride
along the coast. Instead, this particular weekend brings bone-cold temperatures
and rain pummelling the windows. Netflix provides a lifeline to somewhere else.
Food, Inc. (2008)
First up is the chance to finally knock off
watching Food, Inc. by Robert Kenner. Although the focus is on the US
food industry, particularly the rise of the Concentrated Animal Feeding
Operation (CAFO) where animals are effectively warehoused from birth to
slaughter, there’s a feeling of inevitability that Britain will one day follow.
The fantasy of farming
Food, Inc. looks behind the neat rows of
boneless, bloodless meat cuts on the supermarket shelves to expose the
inconvenient truth of industrial-scale meat production. We allow ourselves to
buy meat, he argues, because we are sold a pastoral farming fantasy. In fact,
we’re supporting a largely hidden, automated production line where the animals
never see sunlight or grass, the farmers rarely see a profit, and a handful of
giant corporations have regulators, supermarkets and the government hog-tied. He
points out that in the US the top four beef packers control 80% of the market
and that McDonald’s alone is the largest purchaser of ground beef and potatoes
in the US.
There’s nothing natural, either, about the
farming. Chickens are raised for slaughter after just 48 days, and cattle
jacked up on corn and antibiotics to keep them alive long enough to grow big
enough for slaughter. When this final stage comes, the animals are funnelled
through just 13 slaughterhouses for beef in the whole country, where
contamination leads to outbreaks of eColi in the food chain. Likewise, at the
largest slaughterhouse in the world in Kentucky, up to 2,000 pigs an hour are
dispatched.
Kenner’s conclusion is depressing. You as a
consumer are kept at a distance from the process, and barely anyone seems to
have the right to regulate, censure or control the big packers. Every time you
buy meat, however, you vote. And with the average American putting away 200 lbs
of meat per year, that’s a landslide.
Cowspiracy (2014)
Kip Andersen's Cowspiracy is more
ponderous, a little looser round the edges, and follows the technique of Vice
documentaries in placing the director firmly at the centre of the story. The
shocking aspect of the conspiracy in question is that it’s going on right out
in the open.
Anderson investigates the central thesis that
livestock produces more greenhouse gas than all transportation combined, making
it the biggest single threat to the environment. Although his figure of 51% of
all greenhouse gas has been disputed, the statistics within the documentary are
otherwise supported by peer-reviewed research.
So Cowspiracy unloads one jawdropping
statistic after another:
- US livestock requires 34 trillion gallons of water a year.
- 1 quarterpounder needs 660 gallons of water, 1 pound of beef 2,500 gallons, a gallon of milk 1,000 gallons of water. A cow eats about 150lbs of food a day and requires 30-40 gallons of water.
- The world’s human population of 7 billion needs 21 billion pounds of food and 5.2 billion gallons of water per day. The world’s 70 billion farm animals need 45 billion gallons of water and 135 billion pounds of feed. As a result, 30% of global water production is for animal husbandry, and 50% of the world’s grain for livestock.
Counting the real cost
This isn’t a documentary that attacks the
cruelty of farming livestock, but targets the environmental cost of eating
meat. He points to the fact that 91% of the Amazon that has been destroyed is
just for raising livestock, yet land can produce 15 times more protein from
plants as it can from animals. In most of the countries where starvation is
high, the land that isn’t desertified has been turned over to raising
livestock, inevitably to provide meat for wealthier nations. When the livestock
is raised at home, the industry receives such generous subsidies from the
taxpayer and government that, he calculates, a $4 burger typically involves $7
of additional costs that the manufacturer doesn’t cover.
Some local input
The documentary also puts the kibosh on the
idea that grass-fed livestock could be a solution, since they take longer to
mature and produce more waste in the process, on top of the fact that there’s
simply not enough land to sustain the numbers. By coincidence, the issue is
touched on in Ben Watson’s excellent Riverford blog which drops into my inbox a
few days later. He takes a different view, arguing that, “There are actually
many arguments in favour of grass-fed beef and the same applies to lamb which,
if anything, offers even more benefits on hilly, marginal farm land. So for
better or worse, grass-fed beef, lamb and venison is pretty much what it says
on the tin. With non-herbivore pork and poultry things are different; in
extremely simplistic terms and ignoring all the other building blocks of a good
diet, there’s plenty of protein in grass but pigs and chickens don’t have the
digestive system to extract it.”
The most unsettling part of the documentary is
when the director tours various environmental groups asking for comment on the
greenhouse gas statistic. None of them seem to be aware of the problem. When
they are, Anderson finds himself stonewalled, obfuscated and finally
threatened. The inference appears to be that the war on fossil fuels is
something of a red herring, but that mysterious forces are preventing
discussion of the bigger problem.
Ultimately, both documentaries support the
view that the only way a planet of some 10 billion people can possibly support
itself is by cutting out meat. Not just once a week, not by switching to
organic or grass-fed, but by eliminating the industrial-scale farming of
corn-eating, methane- and slurry-producing, water guzzling livestock.
It’s a change in behaviour that can only happened
day by day. But for each day, a person who eats a vegan diet saves 1,100
gallons of water, 45 pounds of grain, 30 sq ft of forested land, 20 lbs CO2
equivalent, and one animal’s life.
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