Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
live entirely on meat but you can't live entirely on strawberries or coffee. It is not just a
luxury, it is a luxury staple - and indeed is promoted as such by advocates of the Atkins
diet. It therefore poses a direct and extravagant alternative to grain based diets.
Secondly, meat is distinguishable by the sheer scale of the industry. According to an
analysis carried out in the 1990s by Friends of the Earth, out of the 3.9 million hectares
abroad which provide the UK with imported food, 2.3 million supply meat or animal feeds
- against 1.6 million hectares supplying oil, fruit, coffee, chocolate etc. 1 About 50 per cent
of arable land in the UK is devoted to meat. 2 If the UK reduced or eliminated its meat
consumption, it would have ample land on which to produce its own food, and no need to
import grain and meat from other countries, releasing land there to produce more food for
poorer people. If everybody in the world stopped eating meat, there would be enough land
for everybody to obtain sufficient quantities of protein, carbohydrates and fat, and to enjoy
coffee and strawberries as well.
Put in these simple terms, the case against meat seems irrefutable. But the way the world
operates is more complicated than that: inefficiencies often have a role to play in the greater
scheme of things. The next few chapters are an attempt to unravel that complexity, to find
out how inefficient meat really is, and also whether that inefficiency serves any purpose.
Measuring Efficiency
The carnivorous human chooses to eat at the top of the food chain. In Beyond Beef ,
Jeremy Rifkin illustrates this with a hierarchy consisting of grass, grasshoppers, frogs, trout
and humans.
At each stage of the food chain, when the grasshopper eats the grass, and the frog
eats the grasshopper, and the trout eats the frog and so on, there is a loss of energy. In
the process of devouring the prey, about 80-90 per cent of the energy is lost as heat to
the environment. Only between 10 and 20 per cent of the energy that was devoured re-
mains within the tissue of the predator for transfer to the next stage of the food chain.
Three hundred trout are required to support one man for a year. The 300 trout, in turn,
must consume 90,000 frogs, that must consume 27 million grasshoppers, which live
off 100 tons of grass. 3
In one respect this doesn't seem too reprehensible. It may take several acres of grass to
keep a human alive, but the grass also supports millions of grasshoppers, thousands of frogs
and hundreds of fish. By choosing to eat fish and large herbivorous mammals, humans are
assuming a position which otherwise is occupied by bears, large cats and wolves. There
would be nothing intrinsically wrong or unnatural in this but for the fact that there are a
lot of humans, while the pyramidal nature of the food chain requires that there can only be
 
 
 
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