Have we set our food priorities right?
A very good article on Malaysiakini on 29/12 last year by Nick Josh K Karean.
Think about this. They are 20 billion ‘slaughter animals’ on our planet. What do they eat? Forty percent of the world’s grain harvesting lands is for the factory farms of industrial nations. Thus, in order to ‘produce’ one kilo of beef, you need nine kilos of grain.
If the massive quantities of grain, soybeans, corn, peanuts etc. that are now fed to farm animals like cows, chickens, pigs and so on were freed up, there would be plenty of food for the entire world’s starving people.
The production of one kilo of beef generates approximately 15 kilos of liquid manure. The nitrate contained in it pollutes the groundwater. The ammonia fumes from manure and slurry is a major contributor to the development of acid rain and dying forests.
Fifty percent of the entire consumption of drinking water is accounted for by factory farming. For the production of one kilo of meat, 100 times more water is used on the average than for the production of one kilo of grain or vegetables.
My question now is, have we really set our food priorities right? Or do we rather take the easy way out by selfishly blinding ourselves from the truth?
Read the full article here.
That's why I choose a vegetarian diet, apart from health concern.
1 comment:
At the moment our priorities are not in the correct order. If you saw my earlier post, cattle apparently cause quite a bit of pollution (CO2, methane, manure) which is helping the planet warm up which they covered in the article.
I remember being in USA, the amount of meat they consume is plain ridiculous. Sooner or later, the cycle of clearing land to make space for cattle will come back to haunt us as there's not enough grain to go around.
Post a Comment