Follow the money
There is always a lot of talk in the media about meat being unsustainable. Well-promoted books and articles profess the idea that a meatless diet uses fewer resources and is more ecologically sound than more balanced alimentation.
This is all nonsense, much of it paid for by investment funds that plan to make money selling processed “vegetable” products at a substantial markup to the real cost. Nobody ought to be forced to eat meat if they don’t want to. I didn’t eat meat or fish for seven years, and our family still abstains from meat about once a week. But it’s simply false to claim that a “vegetarian” or “vegan” diet is in any way better for the environment.
“Corporate” agriculture is not sustainable
The fact is that agribusiness is irresponsibly wasteful of natural and civic resources and harmful to the environment. Most farmers care deeply about their local ecologies and the quality of food they produce, but their hands are often tied by usurious agriculture conglomerates. A vast, monocrop field of corn or soybeans contains less species diversity than a desert or an arctic tundra. The agribusiness operations that produce these crops are strip-mining invaluable soil resources and depositing toxic chemicals into local watersheds. There is nothing sustainable about a “veggie burger”. Not only are the crop inputs farmed in a manner that destroys natural resources, but after harvest they have to be processed in a factory that uses even more chemical pollutants!
“Organic” farming is no panacea, because Federal regulations allow large scale monocrop farming with hazardous chemicals to qualify for an “organic” label. What your local, small scale, beyond-organic vegetable farmer calls “organic” and what a multinational agribusiness calls “organic” really aren’t comparable, but current regulations (heavily influenced by industry lobbyists) lump together these very different practices.
It’s true that animals raised in confinement tend to be unhealthy and that feedlots and other such operations may have problems managing the vast amounts of manure they generate in far too small a space. They’re probably unsustainable. However, that waste manure does at least have fertilizer value, which is more than you can say for the remnants of a post-harvest field of glyphosate-engineered corn.
What a “sustainable diet” really means
Grass is pretty sustainable. It even grows well in places that aren’t able to grow other things like cucumbers or potatoes. In fact, grass tends to be pretty much one of the first volunteer species to grow in a patch of bare dirt. Grass roots help keep topsoil from eroding and, year after year, the grass itself adds more organic matter and fertility to the soil. Some of the most fertile soils worldwide were formed from grass decomposing year over year.
Humans can’t eat grass, but ruminant animals can. Traditional diets all over the world have often relied on animals that can eat grass. Grass grows on ground that can’t otherwise be sustainably (or even efficiently) farmed and feeds animals that provide meat and milk. Those animals, through the very process of grazing, add nutrients to the soil that help the grass to grow even more. All with 100 percent solar energy.
If you look at a herd of ruminants in nature, it’s always surrounded by a lot of birds which eat the insects that follow the herd. Chickens and other poultry can help fill this role on sustainable farms. Hogs, goats, and other foragers roam the forests and woody edges of grazing pastures, clearing weeds and brambles that if left untended would both diminish pasture forage and choke off forest growth. The animal herds and flocks move frequently, rather than exhausting any one particular area of forage. The various forages, given time to rest, use the nutrients from animal manure and regrow in time for future grazing. This is a self-sustaining, holistic system.
“Sustainable” means something that has lasted the test of time, not a fad backed by financial speculators and corporate advertisers.
For almost all of human history, people have filled most of their nutritional needs with either meat or seafood. They ate the whole animal, including cartilage, organs, fat, and broth from the bones. Fruits and vegetables were picked and eaten fresh in season, or preserved through fermentation; not shipped halfway around the world. Farmers practiced crop rotation, not just with vegetable crops but also with animals, by allowing animals to forage in a field after harvest, or by keeping a field as fallow pasture every few years, or even perhaps unintentionally through the practice of swidden farming.
There’s a common historical myth that our ancestors ate mostly bread or porridge. This kind of mathematically impossible nonsense could only be propounded by people who don’t know how to cook, or who perhaps are being paid to promote unsubstantiated conjecture as historical fact. The fact is, as anyone knows who has done some home baking, that the amount of flour in a large loaf of bread (enough to make you feel sick if you eat the whole thing) doesn’t contain enough calories to sustain an active adult for a single day. Likewise oatmeal is a common “diet food” for a reason. It is risible to suggest that meat wasn’t widely available in the past and a common part of everyone’s diet, or that people working at hard manual labor outdoors all day were subsisting on bowls of porridge. Those who were enslaved and forced to work on such a diet developed diseases of malnutrition such as pellagra and quickly died. The ubiquity of meat in normal ancestral diets is illustrated by the prominent role given to abstaining from meat for religious reasons, which in a socioreligious context only makes sense if such abstention requires a meaningful change in diet. We can also see evidence of the widespread everyday consumption of meat in pre-modern times by looking at records of army rations, which pretty much universally consisted of roughly equal amounts of bread and meat by weight. In fact, if one simply adds up the amount of meat included in published accounts of historical daily rations, it’s obvious that claims that “today we’re eating more meat than ever before” are the ravings of the historically illiterate and arithmetically retarded.
Ignore food fads and marketing gimmicks. Eat like your great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great grandparents did.
Some well-financed people have been trying to sell us the idea that the kind of holistic food system that has lasted for thousands of years is “unsustainable”, that monocrop latifundia are a historically sustainable means of agriculture (rather than strongly correlating with civilizational collapse), and that we all need to stop eating meat and purchase processed textured vegetable proteins in conveniently branded packages made palatable with chemical flavorings.
These unscrupulous frauds don’t care about you, they don’t care about the environment, and they don’t care that they’re selling a lie. All they care about is their bottom line, to which your personal buying power is inconsequential.
Your local family farmer cares about you, your health, your local community, and your local environment, because your local farmer’s success depends on your continued business — and they live here, too.
The new fad is to claim that the “sustainable” meat of the future will be made from insect protein. Just like the “veggie” scam, there is a lot of well-connected financial capital going into investing in this industry. There’s certainly nothing wrong with eating insects if you enjoy doing so, but basic math and simple common sense tells us these claims are nonsense. The insect proteins these charlatans are trying to sell are made from insects raised predominantly on conventional feed mixes, often food waste products from other food production processes. (So, “garbage”.) None of these insect species are really any more efficient than a chicken at converting feed to protein; most are less so. Since none of these corporations plans to simply serve field-caught chili-fried crickets as a snack, after producing the insects using an equivalent amount of feed as any other CAFO operation, they then have to use far more resources, including powered machinery and industrial chemicals, in order to transform the insect protein into whatever form of processed mystery glop they plan to sell it as. It’s all nonsense: rather than being a viable means of regenerative, sustainable food production, this plan is full of bugs.
