Meat Production: The Silent Killer We'd All Like to Ignore

I know, I know.

You like your steak. You like your bacon. You love a good burger and there’s no way anyone could ever take that away from you. They’re some of your favorite foods--and that’s fine by me! I won’t tell you what to do or how to live your life.

What I will do is let you know that while I support you eating meat if you so choose it, eating meat in the vast abundances we do modernly is not only extremely harmful for your health and propagates an extremely problematic system of environmental injustice in minority communities, but is also very, very bad for the environment!

Modern meat production takes up not only 30% percent of our fresh water, which remains inaccessible to 783 billion people, but also 30% of our agricultural production. In addition, we can tack on the production costs of all of that agricultural production, so much of which consists of corn crops the deplete soil’s nutrients and take up countless acres.

And the harm to the environment doesn’t end there. Beyond the lack of ethics involved in the mistreatment of livestock, things like the methane produced by cows and the waste pools on hog farms can contribute to global warming and awful health issues (spanning from respiratory problems to things as serious as increased rates of miscarriage and strokes) respectively.

This is not to say you have to live a vegan lifestyle to lessen your hurt on the environment--just limiting your day to day meat intake can make a huge difference, especially as more and more people do it! Maybe you decide to only eat meat one meal a day, or only six days a week, or only one day a week--or you go the full mile and decide to stop eating it altogether. A change as simple as trying to regularly eat chicken instead of beef can tremendously lessen the extensive damage we’re causing to the environment every day, and contrary to popular belief, yes, each person does make a difference.

“To do nothing because you can only do little is a tragic mistake.”