In 2003, the American Dialect Society awarded ‘flexitarian’ as the year’s most useful word… this is interesting, considering that perhaps 7 people actually know what it is! Well, I recently became the 8th and will help to push this figure into double digits… a flexitarian is a “vegetarian who occasionally eats meat”… Yes, confusing and contradictory… so why bother? Aren’t we labeled enough? Yes, but to be quite honest, anything that can help ‘steer’ us away from the meat industry is a welcomed friend (pun intended).
Committed vegetarians make up only 3% of our population… it is this select few who might have issues with flexitarians…. ‘part-time vegetarians’ or ‘vegetarians with little will power’ have been used to describe Continuous Flow Manufacturing Lean this ambiguous classification of eaters. There’s no time for hatin’ though… because two people who cut their meat consumption in half is the same as one person going completely veg, and that’s a huge deal!
So why the beef with beef? Oh man… a million different reasons! Here are just a handful:
-The world’s meat consumption multiplied 5 fold since 1950 (we kill 10 billion animals a year in US alone).
-30% of the Earth’s land surface is directly or indirectly devoted to raising the animals we eat (this number is somehow projected to double in 40 years).
-18% of greenhouse gases come from livestock production (more than the entire transportation industry).
-It takes about 2,500 gallons of water to produce 1 pound of beef… a pound of lettuce = 15 gallons, potatoes -30 gallons, apples = 83 gallons of water.
-Millions of acres of rain forest are cleared each year for cattle ranchers, further accelerating climate change.
-Lifestyle diseases like diabetes, strokes, heart disease, and certain cancers are far more prevalent in US than other parts of the world and can be directly attributed to our higher demand for meat and dairy.
-Half of all antibiotics are fed to livestock… this is potentially scary as it would be harder for people to fight diseases that have immunities to antibiotics.
-Factory farming is inhumane and disgusting, creating acres of ‘manure lagoons’ that pollute neighboring areas.
Pow… that list was like a body blow from Evander Holyfield! It’ll take the breath right out of you!… Clearly the consequences of this system are massive, but unfortunately there really isn’t a whole lot going on to address these issues. It’s one thing to tell people to drive less or to switch to CFL light bulbs, but to tell them to give up hamburgers or bacon is much more personal and subjectively offensive. This is sadly ironic because it’s significantly easier to alter our diets than say the transportation industry…
And quickly hitting on the water issue… you might have breezed right by the number of gallons it takes to produce a pound of beef (2,500.) To put this into perspective, we use around 5,000 gallons of water a YEAR for showering!… So why is it that we are told to …
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