I wrote the following as part of an assignment for my Environmental Biology course this semester. This is a topic that I am quite passionate about and could write about for days, but I only needed one page, and here it is. Part of my personal brand is hating cows. The initial reason for this is multifaceted and honestly a little embarrassing, but it has since evolved into a deep distaste for the cattle industry. After learning about the scope of related destruction to rainforests in a class in 2018, I even stopped eating beef for a year. My husband’s dairy allergy has limited the amount of “baby cow growth fluid” I consume. Of course I had to watch Cowspiracy the second I discovered its existence. It was an interesting documentary. For the most part I already knew the base facts, but I did learn a few things. For one, no environmental officials seemed to have expansive knowledge or interest in the topic of agricultural destruction. Unlike the documentarian, however, I don’t think this is part of a mass conspiracy. There may be an element of fear in the lackluster reactions—agribusiness is powerful, and as I also learned from the documentary, can be murderous in South America—but I think it has more to do with the fact that animal agriculture is so important. America—civilization in general—depends upon agriculture. Humanity depends upon agriculture. Environmental organizations and government agencies can afford to go after big oil because it is not a fundamental component of the human existence. We’ve only dealt with fossil fuels for a couple centuries. Agriculture has been around for millennia. This extends past the fact that all humans have to eat, and towards the fact that attacking agriculture attacks the everyman. There are no small family oil rigs. There are, always have been, and always will be, small family farms. Fighting the negative environmental effects of animal agriculture is not just hard to market and fundraise with, as said in the documentary, but also political and social suicide. In my personal experiences, being against the cattle industry has been hard. My husband’s grandfather owns a small cattle farm, roughly the size of a city park. When I first met him I wasn’t eating beef, and explaining why was incredibly uncomfortable. People on the Internet have been especially rude. It’s reminiscent of my “militant pacifist” phase years ago. (I’ve since learned that any supposed disrespect towards men in uniform is best kept to oneself.) My husband and I have talked at length about how to more sustainably source our food. I have a serious iron deficiency, and neither of us cook. We live in a relatively small city with few vegan options. We’re poor. Neither of us have ethical issues with actually eating animals or their byproducts. Becoming vegan—or even vegetarian—is not an option for us at this point. The prospect wagered in the documentary that one cannot be a true environmentalist without being vegan hurts me. It may very well be true. Until watching Cowspiracy, my best solution was to be selective about where our food comes from, rather than what it is. Keeping our own chickens and buying from small local farms—the kind we can see and touch and confirm is up to our standards—seemed like the most sustainable option for continued meat consumption. However, the third significant thing I learned from this documentary is that in some ways, factory farming is the most sustainable option. It shocked me, but I should not have been surprised; so much of my environmental work is focused around land conservation and the regulations of its use. We simply do not have the space for large pastures and grass-fed beef. The Earth is too small. Of course, this just leads me to my main solution for every problem: not eating. I mean this not in the sense of eating disorders (another reason I need to keep meat in my diet), but in the sense that on a global scale, the human need to eat is a driver of nearly all of our economic and social issues. We need land for farming. People are starving. Money needs to be made and jobs need to be had so families can have food on their tables. Unfortunately the most obvious solution, the complete removal of any and all need for physical nourishment, is the one solution that is impossible.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
I'm Audrey, a college student and existential rambler.
Welcome to my blog. categories
All
Archives
February 2021
|