The Omnivore's Delusion: Against the Agri-Intellectuals
american.com
american.com
To address the article directly: only factory farming has animals penned so tightly they can't even stand up. Only factory farming makes the air so foul that you still can't breath on the next farm over. Only factory farming requires the air in the barns to be completely turned over every 20 minutes to prevent the animals inside from suffocating on fumes from decomposing feces.
I believe these ideas need work. The human race tends to blindly run in a direction until it hits a wall, so our current wall is bird flu and swine flu. Sure, we need to improve our course of direction or find ways to mitigate against these diseases but I don't think it helps trying to paint this "running" as being more "immoral", "wrong" or "greedy" than it would otherwise be.
Factory farming, on the other hand, is harmful to animals and the general health of the planet. We know how to avoid the problems, but it takes a few months longer to get the meat from the animals that way, and time is money. Plus, creating a worldwide pandemic doesn't cut into the profit margin -- treating the animals humanely does. You want cheap meat, riiiight?
Why don't we return to older mechanisms of healing people. Why have hospitals for efficiency when we can have more traveling and local doctors?
Factory healthcare is harmful to humans, we know how to avoid these problems but it would be expensive to fund this way and money is money. You want cheap healthcare, riiight?
Sorry to me mean and argumentative but I think you're adding some FUD to this debate. The issue at hand is bird flu and swine flu and prevention of these. However I note that animal rights is also being pushed as an agenda. I'm not sure _everyone_ cares about that.
Yes. MRSA is a result of bad use of antibiotics and bad hygiene practice in hospitals. Studies have shown that when a hospital goes above and beyond in enforcing hygiene MRSA, and all other infections, drop perspicuously. We also know that proper use of antibiotics almost never results in antibiotic resistant bacterial strains.
So the practices that lead to MRSA, and those include farm use of antibiotics, are bad and should be changed.
The diseases produced in factory farms have the potential to kill you in your house, and kill healthy children and adults. In fact, the conditions in these farms is almost ideal to produce such a flu strain.
The argument being put forward is that anything that creates disease is bad. My argument is that a lot of what we already have is built with that trade-off against us.
If someone can afford organic food and doesn't wish to partake as a guinea pig in the experiment if low dose pesticides have long-term harmful effects, why shouldn't they?
Reality is that it is impossible to determine if low doses of toxins or chemicals with hormone mimicking effects have adverse long-term effects in people. Anyone who wishes to be a guinea pig in the experiment can line up.
So to answer a later point, lots of disconnected hamlets are far more likely to breed pandemics, since a disease can evolve to be highly virulent in one population, and suddenly get dumped on a population with no natural (through antibodies or natural selection) resistance to it.
In fact, this tirade looks like a bunch of over-the-top descriptions meant to appeal to peoples' emotions and prejudices - that is, baseless fearmongering.
It is not my responsibility to educate you with every comment that I make. My comment was a response to the article, and it's absurdities.
If you are too lazy, or perhaps you just don't care enough to look the details of factory farming up for yourself, why are you willing to publicly denounce other people on the same topic?
First, the author makes some good points that without modern tools, some of the things we ask of modern farms would be impossible. There's a limit to the natural productivity of an acre of land.
Second, though, he doesn't address a) whether we're asking too much of one acre of land, or b) whether the things that farmers have to do in order to be productive enough to survive are things that are good to be doing to land, long-term.
The author is essentially saying, "If this is what you ask of me, don't complain about the things I have to do to deliver." And that's a fair point. But let's think more about what we should and shouldn't be asking of him and his land.
Additionally, the author makes a well-argued takedown of some of Michael Pollan's points from The Omnivore's Dilemma, but Joel Salatin — the man whose farming methods are the centerpiece of the book — is conspicuously absent from the critique. Salatin's farm is extremely productive, and sustainably so. That's accomplished by embracing technology (like electric fences that take ten minutes to set up), not by throwing it out and reverting to Depression-era methods.
Salatin's work is more hands-on than that of most farmers, and that's necessary for the type of farm he runs. But it's a model that we'd do well to see spread. (Again, though, it cannot spread widely without some significant changes in what farmers are and are not incentivized to do.)
As a farmer, the most valuable thing he has is that land. It will be in his family for a long time, so it's in his best interest to protect it. From what he says, it sounds like most of what he does revolves around keeping that resource healthy and productive.
My point is, sometimes you have to realize that what's best for the individual is not what's best for society, and that you need to compromise. (In the case of the school zone, the government mandates that you play nice. You can say hello to a fine if you value your fuel economy over the safety of the children trying to cross the street. In the case of a corn farm, the opposite effect is in play -- the government gives you money to only worry about the health of your land. The planet itself can get bent, it's standing in the way of cheap soda!)
government isnt magic, it is an extension of what people want. a horribly twisted extension, but still an extension.
On the other hand, there are hints of complacency in the author's arguments as well. To say that gestation crates protect piglets does not end the argument -- it should cause us to ask whether pigs should be bred that are capable of destroying their own young. To say that fossil fuels cause farmland to be more productive does not end the argument either -- it should cause us to ask whether food is too cheap, which is to say, whether all the external costs of food have been adequately priced in. This is not precious high-mindedness, but sober reasoning in light of the fact that catastrophic environmental damage may result from burning fossil fuels, or that serious infectious diseases may result from intensive animal husbandry.
As for farmers being portrayed as helpless, I would say that they largely are. A farmer can hardly avoid the worst practices of the trade if he is to be competitive; which is why it is only reasonable for the worst practices to be prohibited by law, or driven to extinction by public opinion. Certainly law and public opinion can be incredibly ham-fisted, which is why, I suppose, there's value in articles like this.
This is spot on. Our economy does not price externalities well.
This is true, from a certain point of view. In the short-to-medium term, monoculture does allow us to produce more from a given acre of land. In the long run, though, monocultures are more susceptible to disease, pests, or other major environmental shifts, which if we're lucky will only cut growth for a season, but could lead to permanent conditions. For example, the 'Gros Michele' cultivar of banana has now been almost entirely superseded by the 'Cavendish' cultivar.
Monoculture is efficient because of our methods of working and harvesting. Not because the plants grow better that way. If we had better lighter machinery that could discriminate different types of plants, we wouldn't need monocultures.
He also seems to have missed the part of the book where they compare Earthbound Farms(an organic industrial farm) to conventional farms. Same processes, same labor, same yields. Higher profit margin. The difference is in a few details.
(He also specifically mentions the costs of tilling the field before planting, to kill the weeds. "Omnivore's Dilemma" agrees that this is a bad thing. But it's likely that this has less environmental impact than dumping your herbicides in the river. Industrial organic farming is very far from perfect. But conventional industrial farming is farther.)
Finally, what we see here is another example of the tragedy of the commons in action. Is it okay for one farmer to use lots of chemicals on his crops? Sure, they get diluted heavily by the time they run off into the nearby river. No big deal. But when everyone for thousands of miles around does it, then you have a problem. It's not one person's fault, it's the collective's fault. I don't think the author quite grasps this point.
This article is 90% correct. I agree on most topics. A main thread here is sustainable farming. However 2 key points are intentionally confusing.
1. "Paul Johnson is forecasting a move toward vegetarianism. But if we assume, at least for the present, that most of us will continue to eat meat, let me dive in where most fear to tread."
2. "the amount of nitrogen available naturally would only support a worldwide population of 4 billion souls or so."
Point #1, he quickly skips over possibly the most important way out of this mess. If people were to eat less meat this entire article would be useless. From another article: "According to the journal Soil and Water, one acre of land could produce 50,000 pounds of tomatoes, 40,000 pounds of potatoes, 30,000 pounds of carrots or just 250 pounds of beef."
Point #2, when he says we can only feed 4 billion, he is talking about on a typical meat centered western diet. On a vegetarian diet, this world could feed well 10s of billions.
When I go to Europe, the drinks on the flight there are sweetened with HFCS. On the way back, they are sweetened with cane sugar. "Corn in everything" is mostly and American thing. (And we're so healthy because of it!)
But the OP said that the amount of naturally occurring Nitrogen is enough to feed 10bn people if we move towards a more vegetarian diet. That is, no need for artificial nitrogen.
Which brought me to my question that Corn is the #1 direct consumer of nitrogen. So unless livestock is consuming an awful lot of Corn, reducing the livestock headcount isn't going to reduce the amount of Corn per se.
That's probably true, as the corn industry, at least in the US, will find another consumer for its quantities (since, if Pollan's research is to be believed, the corn industry and the government essentially created and supported the market that exists now).
If you are growing vegetables though, you can easily just rotate your crops year by year between crops that fix nitrogen into the soil (like peas, beans, clover, grass) and other crops that take nitrogen (like corn, berries, etc).
"Legumes are an example of a nitrogen fixing plant. These should be rotated with your vegetable crop in order to keep a proper amount of nitrogen in your soil. Crops most often paired by farmers are rice and cotton, and soybeans and maize. These crop pairings are essential for the continuing health of the soil."
Like you, I grew up (in part) on a farm, eating meat. Your points about a vegetarian diet feeding more people, from a simple farm to nations, are correct.
But most importantly, eating meat causes much unneeded suffering in the world.
So the point that livestock require far more resources than comparable amounts of vegetables is irrelevant to the question of whether we can/should/must move toward a vegetarian diet.
I often see vegetarians make the argument that one acre of land can grow far more vegetables, but you're completely ignoring the fact that the calorie content of beef is far higher than the calorie content of vegetables. I work out and pay a lot of attention to my diet and calorie intake, and a large portion of my diet consists of vegetables and beans. One of the first things you realize on a diet like this is that you have to eat a serious amount of vegetables to take in the same amount of calories as you get from beef or chicken — like, an entire dinner-plateful with each meal.
100 grams of beef has approximately 330 calories, while the same amount of tomatoes has approximately 18 calories. That works out to about 20 times more calories in beef. So, 250 pounds of beef is actually equivalent to 4,500 pounds of tomatoes. It's still an order of magnitude off, but it's certainly not two orders of magnitude as it would at first seem. (All numbers are approximate as a result of some quick Googling.)
Furthermore, the fact that other useful products are produced from cattle is ignored: leather, gelatin, glue, tallow, bone meal for fertilizer, etc. Literally every part of the cow is used.
FYI: people in the rest of the world do eat the way in you describe. i.e., a vegetable-and-grain based diet with a little bit of meat now and again.
The one week's food photo series from different parts of the world will make it abundantly clear.
Btw, 1 lb of beef takes 7 lb of corn to produce (cows in America are primarily fed corn). Are you seriously claiming that eating the cow instead of the corn is more efficient?
I don't disagree that cattle may be less efficient to produce than vegetables and grains. However, there's still many reasons to produce cattle, as I pointed out. The by-products and higher energy density of the food for one, and many others, such as variety in your diet. There is a reason people do the things that they do. If we were optimizing everything on one axis, if we were solely concerned with the efficiency of production, we'd live pretty sorry, unfulfilling, colorless and utterly boring lives. We would not take the time to weave patterns into our fabrics, we would not put decorative architectural touches on our houses, and we would not style our hair.
I do not want to live in a world where people are made to feel guilty about eating meat because it's less efficient to produce. I do not want to be an efficiency-bot automaton. I really feel like the deafening push to induce guilt for not reducing your carbon footprint is the new puritanism, in a bad way. If we're going to feel bad about flying on airplanes to go on vacation, we all might as well take the idea to its logical conclusion and deny ourselves every modern convenience of the last 500 years: return to subsistence farming in self-built huts with no electricity. Short of doing that, no token self-denial is going to realistically make an impact.
FYI: people in the rest of the world do eat the way in you describe. i.e., a vegetable-and-grain based diet with a little bit of meat now and again.
The simple fact of the matter is that most of the rest of the world is poor, and we are rich. They eat that way because they have no choice, not because there's something inherently better about it. Not to say, though, that there isn't something better about it — like I pointed out, I eat mostly vegetables and beans. But simply the fact that everyone does it doesn't make it good a good idea in and of itself.
Btw, 1 lb of beef takes 7 lb of corn to produce (cows in America are primarily fed corn). Are you seriously claiming that eating the cow instead of the corn is more efficient?
I made no such claim at all in my post. I simply pointed out that the disparity is not so great as people like to claim. However, now that you've brought it up, I would indeed argue that eating beef instead of corn is more efficient. It all depends on what you define as 'efficient'.
Do you know how long it takes to shovel a dinner plate full of vegetables down your throat four times a day? Like, two hours a day. Think about the fact that beef has twenty times the calories of tomatoes — you have to eat twenty times the number of tomatoes to get the same number of calories. That is a lot! A significant chunk of your day becomes devoted to eating. That's not efficient. That's time I could be spending doing other more important and useful things — like writing software to automate other mindless tasks, making us even more efficient. Of course, I eat that way for other reasons, but I would never argue that it's efficient.
Meat is kind of like the food equivalent of fossil fuels. Oil is the super-concentrated end product of millions of years of sunlight shining down on plants and algae. We can then burn that concentrated end product to power a loom to weave fabric really fast, rather than doing it slow by hand. Similarly, meat is the end product of months of a cow sitting in a field chewing grass and in a barn eating corn. We don't need to sit around eating massive amounts of vegetables because the cow already did that for us.
Simply put, the 7 pounds of corn may not be efficient when you look at it with tunnel vision from the perspective of a single variable (land use), but it very certainly may be efficient when you look at it from others. So don't pretend it's so simple.
I'm not arguing against vegetarianism or eating vegetables, I'm simply saying there are also valid reasons to produce meat. I like everything in moderation.
colories per gram pototatoes = 0.7866
colories per gram ground beef = 2.59
therefore colories per acre:
potatoes = 31,466
beef = 647.5
There we go, back to 2 orders of magnitude.
From this aritcle:
http://www.treehugger.com/files/2009/03/vegetarian-diet-coul...
"An area the size of Russia and Canada combined could be freed from use as pasture or cropland used to grow animal feed, if people switched from current levels of meat consumption common in Europe and the United States to a diet based on plant-based protein."
My entire point is that, sure, it's less efficient, but that doesn't mean there's not reasons for raising cattle.
The world as it is now is tight for resources. We are tight for land, oil, energy, and water. Globally we are trying to use less of all 4 to move towards a sustainable future. Farming uses up quite a large part of all 4 of those (meat farming creates some nasty byproducts along the way as well like water polution, air polution, steroids in our food, etc). We need to make some cut backs right now. Because meat is 10 (sometimes 50) times less effeceint, it's a good candidate for cutbacks. Maybe we can bring it back when we learn how to manage our resources better, but for now, I think it needs to be scaled way back.
You can bet your ass that if producing some vegetable like rice used as many resources as beef did, it would be gone in a heartbeat!
I suppose in the very distant future there could be a day where we have to choose between potatoes and tomatoes... I hope that day never comes.
I love meat. I'm not giving it up, but I moderate my consumption due, in part, to stuff like this.
The author has a very good basic point. Farmers and the agribusiness industry do what they do not because they are evil but because customers want what they produce. This is often overlooked by those of us who criticize the current system of production. So we need to keep in mind that it is a system, and we all consume what this vast system produces, and we don't show any slackening of demand in the stuff we buy, particularly in the corn economy.
But the author's self interest gets a little heated, and he misses many of the points made in Omnivore's Dilemma (note the second word of the title and who it belongs to). There is a lot of exposition about the current financial structure of the industry with subsidies going to the small and huge family farms that actually provide significant benefit to the agribusiness and reduces the flexibility that the farmer might otherwise have regarding what to grow.
It is not useful, in my mind, to demonize the critics of our current way of business, nor is it useful to demonize the industry. This is a pretty complex problem.
As a former farmboy and current tech guy I found Omnivore's Dilemma to be quite evenhanded. This article is not. Both have good points worth contemplation.
Food is a huge ethical dilemma, and things are more interrelated than one might first think.
This often gets lost in the shuffle. Pollan investigated four different modes of food production, and followed the trail from farm to table for each. Certainly, he made some judgments about what he saw (and what he saw affected how he eats), but he gave each mode its due.
http://www.snopes.com/critters/wild/turkey.asp
{edit} Even if that story is true, it's a poor justification for caging all animals. "All animals need to be bred in cages and indoors because one particular animal can't survive outdoors." <sarcasm> Seems like sound enough logic to me </sarcasm> {/edit}
I now view this entire article as a rebellion of agribusiness to the fact that people are starting to become more interested in how their food gets to the table and don't like what they see.
in all my comments below, but I couldn't quite put it this eloquently.
I think you are exactly right; he is arguing that his way is best for his fields, his profit margin, and for getting low prices at the store. "The Omnivore's Dilemma" takes a more holistic approach and argues how this approach is worse for the planet as a whole (and how it's just plain wasteful). It's good to hear both sides of the story, but I can't help but feel that the "organic" way is closer to what's best for everyone.
I think that's why the author used so many examples of unpleasant things that he saw as a farmer growing up. He was trying to say that no matter how it's done, farming is a dirty and bloody business. It's nice to picture farming like it was in re-runs of Lassie, but that doesn't mean we should expect him to run his business based on outdated ideas.
I think that this is a case of technology progressing faster than society is comfortable with. Whatever problems are created by industrial farming (environmental damage or harm to the animals) will be corrected by some ambitious startup founders who come up with clever solutions. The idea of industrial farming is relatively new, especially when compared to the thousands of years put into mastering regular farming. I don't think it's wise to stand in the way of progress just because we find certain elements of it to be distasteful (but not harmful).
I haven't read Omnivores Dilemma tho I have read In Defense of Food. Thinking I'll pick up the former this week. Sounds like a good read.
I find this attitude to be a bit dangerous. Sitting around waiting for some entrepreneur to save the world doesn't strike me as the best solution.
Regarding the bloodiness of farming, Pollan, in _The Omnivore's Dilemma_, doesn't shield the reader from this. In fact, you get a very detailed view of what chicken farming and processing looks like on a sustainable farm. What's most interesting about it is how human Salatin and his family are about it--they understand they are killing things, and that if they don't give themselves some respite from it, they will change for the worse.
The biggest issue I have with technology and farming (particularly the use of chemicals and hormones, not as much with machinery) is that we don't understand the ramifications of what we are doing yet. Consider that at one point in time, we thought it was smart to spray ourselves with DDT. We may not learn what the various herbicides and antibiotics and hormones are doing to us for years to come. One of Pollan's primary points in his writing is that food is too important for us to hand over to technocrats and big business.
And there is no such thing as "way of progress" unless you say history has a goal (set by god?). Progress depends on many factors amongst which technology (otherwise our "progresses" in killing technology would have already eradicated humanity). Technology is a tool with a lot of complex implications: sadly, it is more often used to free powerful people from their dependence on dominated people than the contrary.
The lack of (and then rapid increase in cost of) water will end up pushing this farmer out.
Bottom line, his way of life, like most of America's is becoming increasingly hard to sustain. Attacking deep ecology and the Organic movement is the wrong tack.
The article has a conservative slant, anyway, which likely means that they don't want to let facts get in the way of their beliefs. I wish it was not this simple, but it seems to be...
Anybody read about John Jeavon's work? I just bought his book (How to Grow More Vegetables) a couple of days ago. He claims that we have the technology to create self-sustaining farms which can feed a person on about 4000 sqft. Present day agriculture requires between 9000 and 30,000 sqft per person.
So it's entirely unclear to me that industrial agriculture is the only way to feed the planet.
Certainly his method is human-intensive (by design), so you can't have situations like a family of 2 adults farming 1000 acres of corn. So it's unlikely to be adopted in the US.
Web sites: www.growbiointensive.org
And they have a store in Palo Alto: www.bountifulgardens.org
Unsettling.
We hopefully not always listen to "experts" and we care about what happens around us.
I guarantee you there are places (on the Internet and in real life) where farmers are talking about the flaws of any number of software and hardware. This just isn't one of them.