By Barbara Kessler
Green Right Now
We make cows sick. Then we eat them. And they make us sick.
That’s the very short version of the industrialized beef program we’re living with right now. Has a certain terrible symmetry doesn’t it? And by abridging the story, I don’t mean to make light of the situation, only to highlight the obvious stupidity of it.
By now, if you’ve seen the movie Food, Inc., or read or viewed any of a dozen reports (here’s just one) on the problems of mass-produced beef, you know what I’m talking about. We’ve taken a grass-eating animal and, in the interest of quickly fattening it for slaughter, turned it into a grain-fed animal that is packed it into feedlots. And in so doing, we have produced beef that’s fatter than ever, full of antibiotics, pesticides and growth hormones — and created an E. coli factory.
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Greenpeace warns that cattle trade has dangerous ecological impacts
From Green Right Now Reports
Greenpeace’s report “Slaughtering the Amazon” notes that Brazil’s thriving and expanding cattle trade, which has made it the world’s largest exporter of beef and the top producer (along with China) of leather, has out-sized environmental consequences.
“The cattle sector in the Brazilian Amazon is responsible for 14% of the world’s annual deforestation. This makes it the world’s largest driver of deforestation, responsible for more forest loss than the total deforestation in any country outside Brazil except Indonesia,” according to the report, the result of a three-year investigation by Greenpeace International.
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Tags: · Amazon, beef, Brazil, cattle trade, deforestation, Greenhouse Gases, illegal deforestation, leather, rainforests, ranches, supply chains
Meatless Mondays: A way to reduce your carbon output and sat fat intake
By Barbara Kessler
Green Right Now
Veggie advocates want American omnivores to adopt a day without meat. Well, some of them want us to just give up meat totally, but I’m talking about the Meatless Monday campaign here, which argues that if we’d cut out the steaks and pork chops on just this one day, we’d reduce the saturated fat that we consume and make a big dent in the greenhouse gas emissions produced by the livestock industry.
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Tags: · BarbaraKesslerBlog, beef, Bloomberg School of Public Health, Carbon footprint, Johns Hopkins, meat, Meatless Mondays, obesity, pork, poultry, Public Health, vegetarian
A meaty bit of advice
By Barbara Kessler
Green Right Now
There are lots of reasons to cut your meat consumption. Producing beef is the more resource intensive and energy costly than almost any other type of food production (save maybe extracting gourmet delicacies like caviar) and has a big carbon imprint, contributing to greenhouse gases at many stages.
There are also health reasons to trim the volume of animal products from your diet because meats contribute to high cholesterol, hardening of the arteries and so on.
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Tags: · beef, CAFOs, grass-fed beef, meat, organic meat, Sustainable Table
