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Should We Really Be Defending Beef?

by Maeve McInnis

While I thoroughly enjoyed and agreed with much of the contents of Defending Beef; The Case for Sustainable Meat Production, in the back of my mind there was the niggling thought that the author, Nicolette Hahn Niman, is married to Bill Niman—the owner of Niman Ranch, which is highly revered for its quality grass fed beef. This fact alone calls in to question her credibility and argument because it raises the question of her motive. She does, of course, address this obvious conflict by stating that she is a vegetarian and a lifelong environmentalist. These points do assuage my fears somewhat—I am also a vegetarian and environmentalist—however, it stills leaves traces of distrust as she is directly promoting her husband’s business regardless of whether her motives are pure.

Irrespective of my general suspicions, I thought this book had a solid argument. It was loaded with statistics and technical information yet written in colloquial language for an easy read, especially for people who are interested in this ongoing debate yet aren’t looking for a highly academic and scientific read but want the nitty gritty details of the argument. She breaks the book down into three distinct categories; Cattle: Environment and Culture, Beef: Food & Health, and Critique & Final Analysis.

I couldn’t agree more with the argument she makes in the first chapter that we need to change our industrial form of food production to a more ethical, holistic approach. One which does not separate a symbiotic ecosystem into separate systems thus creating un-manageable environmental and health problems. She discusses how we’ve taken animal husbandry off the family farm where the animal manure was the ecosystem’s fertilizer onto large-scale factory farms that now have ponds full of toxic liquid manure.

In this first section, she also discusses the impact cattle have on the environment. She bravely contests the popularly held believe voiced by many environmentalist that beef is detrimental to the environment, stating that what it really comes down to is properly managed cattle. She is against cutting down vast untouched areas to increase our cattle production. Instead, she suggests that society can use swaths of land that are arid and unsuitable for crops as grassing areas for these animals.

She relies heavily on the workings of a soil management guru, Allan Savory, who has had great success using cattle to improve the health of environment. He argues that certain geographical locations that we consider ‘healthy’ actually aren’t at all and need large animals to regenerate the soil.

In the second portion of the book, she moves on to discuss the human health effects of grass fed beef arguing that this type of beef, hormone and antibiotic free, is good for us as it has protein that you can’t get in any other type of food. This again raises the issue of her being a vegetarian; I would like to know whether she thinks that she would be healthier if she ate meat and why it is that she hasn’t gone back to eating meat when she argues that it is good for one’s health. Is that not the cardinal rule? Practice what you preach?

The final section ends with a general analysis and critique of the other arguments out there against meat. Returning once more to my underlying suspicions, as stated she cited a ton of studies but did not clearly discuss who funded the studies, which is a crucial aspect of transparency since the source of funding will have an impact on the outcome of the study

How does one know who to trust on what is good for our health? Her argument intuitively makes sense: that otherwise unused plots of land not suitable for food cultivation be used for well-managed cattle rearing because they improve the soil with their manure. She argues that not only is this way of managing cattle healthy for the environment, but that beef is healthy for human beings to eat. There are also many arguments against fully against eating meat, even grass fed ethically raised animals such as cows. As a health conscious person who has been raised vegetarian and eating organic food, I find it difficult to choose a side of this argument. I find myself, despite my above mentioned suspicions, drawn to the argument she lays down because it makes sense to me. It also helps that she is vegetarian and a lifelong environmental activist. Another point of her argument that hits home with me is that she is thinking in terms of the whole ecosystem’s health (inclusive of humanity’s health) which to me is crucial. We can’t remove pieces of the puzzle and attempt to solve it that way. Today’s conundrum of climate change and population growth requires this whole systems approach. But once again, how does one reconcile these opposing views with such legitimate numbers to back up their arguments?


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Maeve McInnis just graduate with her Masters of Science in Environmental Policy and Sustainability Management with a specialization in Food Policy from the Milano School of International Affairs, Management and Urban Policy at the New School. She was the President of the Sustainable Cities Club and a member of the Student Advisory Committee with the Dean. She is an avid traveler and lover of food, culture and social justice. 

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I’ll be the first to admit it:  I love foods that are ethically indefensible.  I love fois gras.  I will eat a full plate of sweetbreads, suck marrow from the bone of a Osso Bucco.  My favorite sushi is Bluefin tuna. I love me some veal.  Which is a difficult habit to maintain considering the fact that I teach ethics and philosophy to engineers and scientists, and that in my classes at the Colorado School of Mines (a top-tier engineering school),we take Deontological, Utilitarian, and Virtue Ethics and apply them to case studies as core thought-experiments.  I expect my students to inquire deeply into their own belief systems.  Yet, it is clear to me, that the way I eat, and the way most Americans eat, is simply not environmentally or morally justifiable.

I know this because I have examined my eating habits through the lens of all of these philosophies, and I have failed every time—there is simply nothing sustainable or moral about the way I eat, and I am certainly not the only one.  Sure, if I want to believe as John Stuart Mills does, that the greatest good for the greatest number justifies some going hungry as long as we all vote on it, well then.  Good enough.  But that’s the sort of thinking that we used to justify slavery and not allowing women to vote.  Or, like Aristotle, I could just imagine that there are a couple of really nice Nichomachean moral virtues that I could choose to apply to my eating habits; say temperance and maybe a bit more moderation.  I might lose weight that way, but people will still starve somewhere while I have comparatively affordable foods delivered from across the globe, and the healthy fruit snack I am eating will still travel around two thousand miles (aggregate, including supply chain) from an orchard the essentially uses slave labor.  Aristotle might not have a problem with that, but I sure do. And if Kant was sitting here with me as I write this, he would point out that the only way his system of ethics would work is by giving everyone an equal and balanced foundation, say a plot of land on which to grow what they need and equal parts water and fertilizer and stock to sustain it.

Which would mean no sea urchin or filet mignon or beef tongue for me or for him.

Kant digs his toe in the carpet and leaves when I tell him that not all plots of land are created equally, either, so even that wouldn’t work.  Kant can really be cantankerous about stuff like that.

Here’s some hard truths about what and how and why we eat the way we do:  hardly any of the food we eat comes to us from local sources, and there are complicating factors like actual miles travelled for delivery, total water used, fertilizers used, carbon emission totals, overall waste and spoilage, etcetera, that play into the environmental and economic impact of having our cake and eating it too.  Chances are, that potato they have chopped up into fries for you travelled 1800 miles (aggregate, including food chain) to make it into the canola oil, which also travelled at least 2900 miles.  The orange you have in your purse might have travelled 3500 miles.  The cumulative distance that hot dog travelled will blow your mind:  4700 miles, because red meat is the worst.

I grew up in a 70’s household that was Mormon, and which functioned more like a household from the 40’s or 50’s, so I was able to live a life that was more reminiscent of days gone by—Wyoming is a lightly populated state, high winds over most of it, and for a good portion of the year it is covered in snow.  So, major supermarket chains don’t much like to move there.  Our main grocery was a small privately-owned affair all the way up until 1990, and even now the produce at the new Safeway looks limp and pathetic compared to what I get at Sprouts in Denver.  What this meant for our eating habits:  we didn’t often get citrus year around.  And our fruit and vegetables were seasonal and often ugly little brutes from local arid farms run by men and women barely getting by on water allotments from the city and state.  Growing up, I actually thought potatoes were supposed to be crooked and bent and about the size of small limes.  Not that I had ever seen a lime that didn’t have brown spots covering them—as a matter of fact, most of the limes I saw as a child seemed to be masquerading as potatoes.

Our meat was often local too, and not always domestic.  During hunting season, it wasn’t uncommon to have the purple meats of elk and mountain goat and mountain sheep and moose wrapped in paper next to the beef or pork.  I’ve seen bear meat wrapped in cellophane next to the bologna.  And let me be clear—my argument is not that those were the good old days.  Anyone who has had antelope burgers knows that even the ground meat from one of those stringy mothers is gristly and gamey and the abundance of Antelopes on the Wyoming range is testament to how little even the hunters want to eat them.

My argument is that it wasn’t that long ago (even less than half a century ago), that we had reasonable habits, reasonable constructions around how the food we harvested and killed made it to our mouths.  Generally, our food just didn’t have to go that far.  These were natural approaches to farming and ranching that also just happened to make some sense morally.  Local organic farms made sense back then (because organic wasn’t something we thought about), and farmers knew how to rotate crops to keep them healthy, forgoing any pesticides or herbicides or fungicides with simple crop management and fallowing their fields from time to time.  Industrial farms plant what is profitable, then keep growing and growing until the soil underneath it is chalked and barren, then they soak it with fertilizer and pesticides that are made from petroleum byproducts. I won’t be going on a long rant about it here (I don’t think I will, anyway), but if you haven’t been paying attention to the crisis of conscience and the crisis of economy that is corporate ranching and corporate farming, it is probably time to read up on it because there are far-reaching implications that don’t end with GMO soy (which is 73% of the soy we eat).

My argument is that we shouldn’t farm and shouldn’t transport our food the way we do:  think of this—if you are a meat eater, and desire an eight-ounce steak, here’s what needs to happen to get it from the uterus of a cow and up to your mouth:

  • 6-10 pounds of corn or grains or soy trucked in around 600-1000 miles (depends on locations).
  • 800 gallons of water (the average cow needs twenty gallons of water a day).

That is just what they need to survive, but there are a number of other concerns regarding that eight-ounce steak; often, that steer that is put up for slaughter is then trucked hundreds of miles away to be butchered, but that isn’t always the end of it—much of the time, that carcass is then trucked to a secondary or tertiary plant where all those different parts are used for things like hotdogs and other disgusting things like that (I eat hotdogs too), and the steak itself goes in another direction.  Let’s say (factoring in all the other things) that the total food miles for that steak are anywhere from 3800-5800 aggregate miles.  You can understand how complicated this analysis becomes if you take into account all the different materials (medicine, fertilizer, seeds, etcetera etcetera, that go into the production of that cow and then into that steak).  If you want to learn more, try here and here.

And that is not taking into account those things I don’t want to talk about or think about, such as:

  • methane gas created by cow farts, aggregate impact on climate change/local environment,
  • impact of concentrated cow shit and piss on local aquifers and rivers and streams and lakes,
  • antibiotic and other pharmaceutical runoff into same water source,
  • hormones and other pharmaceutical remains in the actual animal proteins we eat,
  • differences between GMO corn fed and grass fed overall health of the beef,

And so, so, so many other concerns.

The point:  it’s not just the product that travels to get to our mouths—it is all the rest of it, added up, that gives us these crazy and  (I would argue) unsustainable numbers.  Not to mention, what is the ethical and spiritual cost to us—is ignorance enough of an excuse?  And is there something morally wrong with us, that we throw away 31% (some sites have it higher, some have it lower) of the food that finally gets to us, after it has already travelled thousands of miles, knowing there are people on the planet starving to death?  It is a question we don’t really like to ponder:  are we ethically responsible for those that would starve while we belly up to a plate of bacon mac and cheese (aggregate distance travelled, 3100 miles)?  Kant certainly holds us accountable.  But he does this thing where he makes everything complicated and you should know that he is a pretty miserable human being, someone who mostly goes uninvited to parties because you should hear what he has to say about ethanol and wine and petroleum and corn subsidies and the fact that there are over 2000 varieties of corn but we will only eat one or two kinds due to our farming habits and GMOs, and all that.  And he is one of those dudes who will totally hold court, lecturing us on our bad habits that sometimes become bad moral choices, until everyone clears their throats and makes an excuse to go out on the porch to smoke.  He has some thoughts about smoking, too.

It’s hard out there for a philosopher genius.

Ultimately, I am probably going to keep eating things that make people question my palate and my morality.  There are answers though—education probably being the starting point.  My guess is that if more of us knew the impact of our eating habits on worldwide mortality and the environment, maybe we would look for local produce in the grocery store more often, perhaps buy less food for every visit to the grocery, perhaps even mark the dates and locations of farmers markets in our area.  We can also impact what our chain grocers present to us:  if more local and organic fruits and vegetables get purchased, they will take note and make changes to their habits.  We are consumers after all, and can engender moral change through what we buy as well.

Most of us care what we eat, but don’t think about how it is made very often.  And sure, education around what we eat is important.  We should know what we are putting in our bodies—the who-what-where-why-how-when of it all.  But I think we should care as much about overall healthfulness of our food as we do the inefficiency of how it is produced, and maybe we should also feel a little guilty about what we end up putting in our mouths, because there are ethical choices to be made AND healthy choices to be made.  After all, what’s a little more guilt added to the mountain of guilt we already feel now that we know everything because it is available on Wikipedia?

But maybe that’s what a couple cocktails before meals are for (I’ll take my Manhattan up, please)—they provide a way to take some of this pressure off before I surrender to it and order that sea bass that we are currently farming or netting into extinction.  It will be my little secret that I know exactly how fucked up that is.


Reading LH photo litfest2015

Seth Brady Tucker is a poet and writer originally from Wyoming. His recent work has been published or is forthcoming in Poetry Northwest, Shenandoah, Chattahoochee Review, Southern Humanities Review, Iowa Review, Pleiades, and others. Seth directs the Seaside Writers Conference in Florida, and lives and teaches in Colorado at the Lighthouse Writers’ Workshop and at the Colorado School of Mines where he teaches poetry and fiction to engineers and scientists.

Seth’s work has won the Eric Hoffer Book Award, the Gival Press Poetry Prize, the Elixir Press Editors Prize, the Bevel Summers Fiction Prize, among many others, and he is the author of the books, Mormon Boy (2012) and We Deserve the Gods We Ask For (2014).

Fabio Parasecoli, associate professor and co-chair of the Food Studies Program at The New School,Michele Manelli, president and winemaker of Salcheto Winery, and professor Lorenzo Zanni from the University of Siena presents the Italian Report on Wine Sustainability.

This work was produced by the Italian Forum for Wine Sustainability, a group supported by Unione Italiana Vini and Gambero Rosso, with over 30 members from universities, research centers, certification bodies and associations who are promoting a sustainable wine business model across production and markets. Over 1,000 Italian wineries participated in a survey to accurately access the progression of sustainable winemaking in Italy.

The roundtable discussion on sustainability in the wine industry was moderated by Professor Parasecoli with featured panelists to include Michele Manelli, Dr. Vino blogger Dr. Tyler Colman, and Bruce Schneider from the Gotham Project. They  discussed sustainability issues and challenges within the wine industry in Europe and the U.S., including cultural, macro economic and business practices with a goal of defining best practices.

 

By Fabio Parasecoli, Associate professor and coordinator of food studies, New School – NYC

From the Huffington Post

Rarely, as in recent months, has the European Union been so unpopular among its citizens. In May 2014, the elections for the European Parliament, its legislative body, saw the success of political parties whose admitted goal is to reduce the meddling of the Union in the daily activities of those living across its 28 Member States. In fact, the EU is often perceived as another layer of wasteful, inefficient, and unbending bureaucracy that weighs on the already weak economic recovery of the continent.

Most Europeans have a clear sense of how much the EU regulations have influenced their food system, from safety to trade, from GMO crops to product traceability. Standardization has been a hotly debated issue. The Slow Food movement lobbied very effectively against a blind application of the HACCP (Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Points) system, introduced in 1994 to ensure safety in food production. The organization pointed out that not all manufacturers — and especially small, artisanal ones — are well suited to adopt the same criteria as industrial enterprises. On the other hand, Europeans do appreciate interventions in the case of emergencies. The European Food Safety Authority was established as the most appropriate response to guarantee a high level of food safety.

This time, the EU is weighing in on issues of sustainability and waste. On July 2nd, the Commission approved a set of proposals to increase the recycling rate in the Union and facilitate the transition to a “circular economy,” a system where no products go to waste and materials are constantly renewed. In a Q&A memo, the Commission explained: “a circular economy preserves the value added in products for as long as possible and virtually eliminates waste. It retains the resources within the economy when a product has reached the end of its life, so that they remain in productive use and create further value … The circular economy differs from the prevailing linear ‘take-make-consume and dispose’ model, which is based on the assumption that resources are abundant, available and cheap to dispose of.” In this economic model, biological materials should always reenter the biosphere safely, while technological materials should circulate without entering the biosphere at all.

The potential impact of these theories and practices, which systemic design has embraced as its guiding principles, is enormous, including its possible influence on food systems. Some of the Commission’s proposals would have a direct influence on the way food is produced, packaged, distributed, and consumed. By 2030, the Union should reach the goal of recycling 70 percent of municipal waste and 80 per cent of packaging waste (glass, paper, plastic, etc.). From 2025, recyclable and biodegradable waste should not be allowed in landfills, to be eliminated completely within the following five years. A section of the document deals explicitly with food, highlighting record-keeping and traceability as tools to limit hazardous waste, invoking limits on the use of plastic bags, and demanding the restriction of illegal waste shipments.

Furthermore, the Commission proposed that “Member States develop national food-waste prevention strategies and endeavor to ensure that food waste in the manufacturing, retail/distribution, food service/hospitality sectors and households is reduced by at least 30 percent by 2025.” A very tall order which seems to focus mostly on the distribution and consumption side of the food system. The only explicit proposal that would directly affect production is the development of “a policy framework on phosphorus to enhance its recycling, foster innovation, improve market conditions and mainstream its sustainable use in EU legislation on fertilizers, food, water and waste.”

It is unclear to what extent the Commission will be able to bring these propositions to fruition in the present political climate, at a time when Union interventions are often met with suspicion if not outright criticism. The realization of these proposals may be perceived as entailing additional costs to producers and consumers at a time when Europe is recovering from a recession. Moreover, each Member State has a different degree of sensibility towards environmental and food production matters. However, the emergence of circular economic values in the language and perspectives of an important executive body is a feat of relevance in and of itself. It remains to be seen whether the general public, and national governments will embrace these ideas, and what policies will be adopted to make them accessible and understandable

The New School is holding its first annual Earth Week Festival this April, coordinated by the Office for Sustainability. This cross-disciplinary collaboration of administrative and academic departments and student groups will raise awareness about sustainability issues, strengthen our campus community, and link The New School with millions across the country in the 42nd annual Earth Day celebration.

Careers in Sustainability

A panel of alumni working in sustainability-related jobs discuss their work and career trajectories. Moderated by Professor John Clinton, director of the Environmental Policy and Sustainability Management Program, The New School for Public Engagement.

Master of Science in Environmental Policy and Sustainability Management |http://www.newschool.edu/milano/environmental-policy-sustainability-managemen…

Panelists include:

Kirsten Brooks, Master of Science in Nonprofit Management from Milano, Manager of Corporate Outreach, A+E Networks

Jason Hudspeth, Master of Architecture from Parsons
Designer, New York City-based firm LEVENBETTS

Ashok Kamal, Master of Science in Nonprofit Management, Milano
Co-Founder and CEO, green social media marketing firm Bennu

Reana Kovalcik, Master of Science in Urban Policy, Milano
Development Coordinator, Wellness in the Schools

Alex Smith, Bachelor of Science, Environmental Studies
Environmental Educator, Green Design Lab, Solar One

Visit http://www.newschool.edu/earthweek for more information.

Milano School of International Affairs, Management, and Urban Policy |http://www.newschool.edu/milano

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M1tcx08ia48&feature=relmfu]

How do your personal food choices influence larger social and political issues? Listen as Fabio Parasecoli, coordinator of Food Studies at The New School, discusses the rise of food studies over the past decade, and its emergence as a truly urban discipline.

THE NEW SCHOOL | http://www.newschool.edu
http://www.newschool.edu/foodstudies

For more information, contact the Food Studies program at foodstudies@newschool.edu