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Dig In: A Recipe for Healing the Planet With Your Fork

by Steve Lustgarden

Are you looking for a healthful, easy way to shrink your environmental footprint? If you are among the rapidly growing number of people adopting and enjoying a plant-based diet, you will be pleased to learn that your environmental footprint is significantly smaller and magnitudes more ecologically benign than that of someone subsisting on the standard meat-centered American diet.

Fact is, what you elect to place on the end of your fork has profound implications for the welfare of the planet and all life on Earth. The great news is that the healthiest way to eat-a diet consisting principally or exclusively of foods of plant origin-is also the most gentle on the environment. What's best for us personally is also best for the planet.

Producing animal foods, from beef and poultry to fish and dairy, requires prodigious amounts of increasingly precious natural resources-generally several times the land, water and energy needed to create an equal amount of plant foods. (As a bonus, of course, plant foods contain protective nutrients unavailable in animal foods and none of the saturated fat or cholesterol.) For example, it takes 40 times as much fossil fuel to produce a pound of protein from feedlot beef than to produce a pound of protein from soybeans.

Similarly, it takes upwards of 2,500 gallons of water to yield a pound of edible beef. With the same amount of water, farmers can produce nearly 50 pounds of fruit or over 100 pounds of potatoes.

Animal foods production is not only resource-intensive, it also generates vast amounts of waste. Consider that the manure produced by all farm animals in the US is roughly ten times the waste produced by all the country's human residents, helping to make factory farms the biggest contributor to polluted rivers and streams. A typical factory hog farm, for instance, produces the raw waste equivalent of a city of 12,000 people. In one telltale incident in the summer of 1995, 25 million gallons of hog waste (enough to fill 75 Olympic-size swimming pools) was discharged into a river in North Carolina, followed in quick succession by several other major spills.

With such occurrences routinely making the evening news, the very troubling environmental footprint of animal foods production is becoming increasingly difficult to hide and ignore. Consider some additional recent findings:

• The United Nations reports that because of overfishing, all 17 of the world's major fishing areas have reached or exceeded their natural limits.
  
  
• Atlantic fishing grounds that sustained ten generations of fishing are said to be largely barren. And, one third of the world's fish catch is fed to livestock, so cutting back on animal products has the double benefit of reducing demand for fish.
  
  
• Like fisheries, rangelands almost everywhere are being grazed at or beyond their sustainable yields, according to the Worldwatch Institute. Livestock grazing harms roughly twenty percent of all threatened or endangered species.
  
  
• Belgium, the Netherlands, and France now produce more animal manure than their land can absorb. Ammonia gas released from hog operations and the acid rain it causes are the top environmental concern for farmers in Northern Europe.
  
  
• The European taste for frog legs has decimated frog populations in India and Bangladesh.
  
  
• Beef production in Latin America, for both domestic and export markets, contributes in profound ways to the destruction of biologically irreplaceable rainforests. In October 1995, the New York Times reported, "Burnings in the Amazon appear to be approaching the worst levels ever." Ranchers razing forests to create cattle pasture is a principal cause for the fires.
  
  
• Fertilizers, pesticides and other runoff from midwestern farms (most of which are raising grain to feed livestock) now collect in the Gulf of Mexico off the coast of Louisiana in concentrations that create a vast lifeless expanse devoid of oxygen. In 1995, this so-called "dead zone" reached new and ignominious size-40,000 square miles, roughly equal to the state of New Jersey. Recall that approximately 70 percent of the grain grown in the US is fed to farm animals and the connections between our dietary choices and such environmental debacles becomes readily apparent.

The toll exacted on human health by a diet laden with foods of animal origin is both devastating and thoroughly documented. Now the veil on the diet's ecological fallout is being lifted. The environment-friendly nature of a plant-based diet makes following such a diet all the more compelling and personally satisfying.

Besides being easy, delicious, economical and healthful, following a plant-based diet transforms your fork into a powerful tool for environmental protection and restoration. Make the shift, and make a difference for yourself and the planet three times a day.

This article was originally published in Dr. T. Colin Campbell's Nutrition Advocate newsletter in Feb. 1996

Steve Lustgarden, MS, formerly a fellow at the Institute for Resource Management, is now Associate Director of EarthSave, a nonprofit health and environmental organization that promotes the benefits and joys of shifting toward a plant-based diet. For information or membership, call (800) 362-3648.