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The Earth on Your Plate:�

Thursday, November 10, 2022

This Photo by Unknown Author is licensed under CC BY

Any photos without attribution are being used by the author under Fair-Use doctrine.

This presentation is for non-profit, educational purposes only, in the interest of the public.

Mohan Gurunathan

Why Diet Change is Essential to Save Our Planet

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About Me

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The Earth is in Trouble

Wildfires

Coastal Flooding

Water scarcity

Food shortages

Extreme Weather

Refugee Crises

Increasing global conflict and violence over the planet’s limited resources

Mass species extinction

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“The truth is, our need for food poses one of the biggest dangers to the planet.”

Source: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/foodfeatures/feeding-9-billion/

“The Future of Food”

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Taken from partial quote: Dr. Joseph Poore, https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/health-and-families/veganism-environmental-impact-planet-reduced-plant-based-diet-humans-study-a8378631.html

and moving towards a

This Photo by Unknown Author is licensed under CC BY

When it comes to personal actions, there is one thing that has been called the “single biggest way” we can reduce our impact on planet Earth.

And it’s not just me saying that; this is a quote from a leading environmental researcher, Dr. Joseph Poore, and is backed up by multiple studies.

And that is: to stop eating meat and dairy, and… move towards a Plant Based Diet.

How can that be the most impactful thing someone can do? All you read on the internet and hear on the radio is that fossil fuels are the main problem. It’s easy to see black smoke from tailpipes and smokestacks polluting the air, I get that, but what’s the big deal with eating a hamburger or hot dog every now and then? Everyone has eaten hamburgers and hot dogs and drank milk all our lives, and there was nothing wrong with it. Everyone is still doing it. What’s the big deal? And I think most people who hear about this, still don’t see or believe there’s connection. And so, the purpose of this talk is to explain all of the connections, between our choice to eat animal products, and all the effects it has on our world. And as it turns out, these effects are severe, and go far beyond just climate change.

So, if you’re ready, let’s dive into the details!

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Energy and Trophic Levels

100%

10%

1%

0.1%

Energy lost in movement, metabolism, bodily processes, etc.

“The

10% Law”

This Photo by Unknown Author is licensed under CC BY-SA

How many of you are familiar with Trophic Levels? Another biology class concept. Throw a “Yes” in the chat if you remember trophic levels.

So, Trophic levels are a way of describing how food energy travels through the food chain. All food energy is created from sunlight by plants, which are called the “Producers.” Plants are eaten by “primary consumers,” who are then eaten by “secondary consumers,” and finally by “tertiary” or “apex” consumers.

Now, there is another law in biology called the “10% Law”. Anyone familiar with that? Throw a “Yes” into the chat if you know what this is.

OK, the 10% Law says the following. Every time food travels from one trophic level to the next, only around 10% of the energy is available to the consumer in the next higher trophic level. In other words, around 90% of the food energy is lost at each trophic level. How is it lost? It’s used for movement, metabolism, bodily functions, and other biological processes. Only around 10% of the energy an animal eats is available to the next animal that eats him or her.

This is one explanation for why we have many more squirrels, rabbits, and insects than we do bears, lions and wolves. The amount of food energy available drops dramatically as you go higher in the chain. This is an important concept to keep in mind as we go to the next slide.

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Humans as Herbivores

7.6 billion

humans

~10x more farmland, ~10x more water, ~10x more fertilizer, ~10x more manure, and BILLIONS more mouths to feed.

Photos by unknown Authors licensed under

Creeative Commons

Carnivores

So, humans like to think that we are at the top of the food chain, but let me start with a hypothetical. Imagine a hypothetical world where all humans were vegetarian. We would have a trophic level diagram that looks like this. We have 7.6 Billion humans, one level up from a a variety of plants that we grow to eat. Pretty straightforward.

Now, let’s take that same population of 7.6 Billion Humans, and put them at the second trophic level. This is more like our current reality, where we use animals – i.e., livestock – to create a significant number of our calories. But looks what happens to the base of the pyramid. It grows in size, by roughly a factor of 10x. What does this mean for the planet? It means we need around 10x more land, water, and fertilizer to produce our food. It also means we produce around 10x more manure, and we have BILLIONS of more mouths we need to feed. You can also see that the population of livestock will likely be larger than the population of humans. This is indeed what has happened –we’ve become a planet with more farm animals than humans. We’ll come back to this point later.

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Feed Conversion (In)efficiencies

25 units of protein

10 units

of protein

4.5 units

of protein

1 unit of protein

96% loss of protein, calories

90% loss of protein, calories

78% loss of protein, calories

Photos by unknown Authors licensed under

Creeative Commons

1 unit of protein

(Mostly corn, soy)

So the “10x Rule” is just a rough rule of thumb from biology. I wanted to give you some rough real-world numbers that show how much energy is lost when we feed plants to modern livestock. Modern farmers call this parameter the “Feed Conversion Efficiency”.

First let’s look at cows. We feed cows 25 units of protein, typically consisting of soybeans and corn, for every 1 unit of protein we get back. This is a 96% loss of protein, and calorie loss is similar.

For pigs, we feed around 10 units protein for every 1 unit we get back, so that’s a 90% loss of protein. And for chickens, we feed around 4.5 units for every unit we get back. So that’s a 78% loss of protein and calories.

You can see, that even though chicken is the so-called “most efficient” animal product, there is still a huge loss in food energy that occurs, which requires us to use much more land, water, and fertilizer than if we were to simply grow and the eat crops directly.

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An All-American Meal

=

C

1 Burger

~ 25 plant-based meals

…. and Americans eat around

50 BILLION burgers per year!!!

OK, so we have seen that animal products require a large amount of land to produce, and their production emits a large amount of greenhouse gases. Let’s now look at who is consuming these animal products, and in what quantities.

If you look at this map, you will see that by far, the bulk of animal product consumption happens in wealthy western countries. The US and Australia are at the top of the list with 198 pounds per person each. South American countries like Argentina and Brazil are also very high, as they love their beef products. Europe, Israel, Canada and Russia are also high on the list. So if we agree that we need to reduce global meat consumption, the biggest burden on reducing consumption should fall to these countries – including us, the United States. What is really concerning, is that developing nations like China, India, and African countries are starting to copy the consumption patterns of the West as their affluence and middle class grows. This is because in many parts of the world, meat consumption is considered a sign of prosperity. This is a major concern as well, and work needs to be done to stem the rising rates of meat consumption in the developing world.

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Land Use Impacts of Food Choices

OK, given what we’ve learned, let’s look at a 2017 study which considered the amount of land necessary to produce 100 grams of protein from different types of food.

You can see that there is a clear dividing line between animal products and plant products:

Where Animal foods in general require much more land to produce than plant-foods.

Barley is a strange outlier, and I don’t know why that is. But you can see the general trend is that plant-foods

Require much less land to create the same amount of protein.

If you compare soybeans to organic beef for instance: growing 100 grams of soybean protein can take up to 150x less land than growing 100g of beef protein. Beef is just staggeringly wasteful. But even chicken requires around 4x more land than soybeans, which is still a huge difference.

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The World Today (much of it)

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Land Use: USA

Source: https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2018-us-land-use/

~ 41% of the US land mass is used for feeding livestock.

We previously looked at the large land footprint for livestock products. This map shows what this means for the US. In this map, imagine we take all the land used for each different purpose and lumped that together in a continuous region.

Around 41% of the US land mass is used to grow food for livestock. Around half of this is for grazing cattle, and the other half for growing feed crops. This is just a vast percentage of our total country’s land, and much of this land used to be natural ecosystems like forest, marshes, grasslands, wetlands, and other natural lands. But we have transformed this land to unnatural pastures and vast monocropped fields of soy and corn, all to feed our livestock. In the process, have killed of or driven out dozens of wild species such as deer, elk, buffalo, birds, bears, and more.

Also compare this to the relatively small area for the food we eat. This is all the fruits, vegetables, and other plant foods that we grow to consume directly.

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Land Use: World

(> 40% according to some sources)

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How many are slaughtered for food?

?

Around 80 BILLION per year, globally

?

Over 1 TRILLION

Sources: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animal_slaughter , https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fish_slaughter

So, I’d like to know if anyone knows how many land animals do humans slaughter for food every year. Can you throw some guesses into the chat?

OK, I see some good guesses here! The correct answer is: around 77 Billion per year. This is around 10 animals killed for each man, woman and child on the planet. The large majority of slaughtered animals are chickens. It’s just an enormous, unimaginable amount of killing we do. And remember, for every animal killed, there is a new one born to take its place, so it is an endless cycle of breeding and killing animals taking place.

But we can’t forget about marine animals too, because the numbers there are even greater. So, how many ocean animals do we kill?

Well, the truth is that we really don’t have a precise number, because we count fish catch by the ton, not by the individual fish. Also, there is so much illegal and unrecorded fishing and many marine creatures are killed unintentionally and dumped back in the ocean, and these aren’t counted. But some estimates range from 1 to 2 Trillion marine creatures killed by humans, every year. This, or course, is an even harder number to imagine. We’ll come back to talk about this later.

The really scary part, is that these numbers are predicted to DOUBLE by 2050, as our population grows, and the developing world’s appetite for animal protein scales up. This is a huge problem, because we simply don’t have enough land or sea to support a planet of 9 billion meat eaters.

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Animal Agriculture:�A Leading Cause of a Multitude of Global Problems

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Environmental Destruction caused by Animal Agriculture

Deforestation

Climate Change

Beef Production = leading cause

1-2 acres lost every second

Staying under 2C warming is impossible without dramatic reduction in meat/dairy consumption.

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Environmental Destruction caused by Animal Agriculture

Ocean Dead Zones

Mass Extinction

100-150 species lost every day
Habitat loss due to meat/dairy agricultural expansion is �the leading cause

Caused by fertilizer and manure runoff from farms

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Environmental Destruction caused by Animal Agriculture

Manure Pollution

Water Scarcity

Meat/Dairy use 1/3 of the Earth’s fresh water
1 hamburger = 600 gallons
1 gallon milk = 1000 gallons

US Farm Animals create �130x more feces/urine than human population

E. coli contamination of groundwater, rivers, streams

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Environmental Destruction caused by Animal Agriculture

Zoonotic Disease

(Pandemics)

Antibiotic Resistance

Swine flu - H1N1 (2009)

Bird Flu – H5N1

(1997)

COVID-19

(2019)

80% of US antibiotics are fed to farm animals, not people

3 out of 4 pandemics in human history originated in animals – and often from animal farming or the wildlife trade.

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World Hunger

800 million people in the world live in constant hunger.

Yet somehow, we manage to grow enough grain each year to fatten 70 BILLION farm animals.

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World Hunger

With Plant-Based Diets, we can feed a human population of 12 BILLION.

A widespread adoption of plant-based diets is the biggest step we can take to �END WORLD HUNGER.

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What our Food Choices mean for Animals

Warning:

This section contains some images which some viewers may find disturbing.

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What Marketing Would Like us to Believe

Cow image source: https://line.17qq.com/articles/surwhqeax.html

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Animal Factories

More than 99% of Farm animals are born and raised in “Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs),” also known as “Factory Farms.”

Note: 99% applies to the US livestock industry

When we raise animals in such vast numbers, there is no way that each animal can be treated like a unique individual, with feelings and needs and a mind of its own. Instead, the animals are commoditized, treated like units of production, flesh making machines, like inanimate objects on a production line. The sole goal of the farmer is to raise as many animals from birth to slaughter weight, as quickly as possible, with the lowest cost of inputs. This leads to animals being confined in a small space for their entire lives, to prevent excess movement and make them easier to handle.

This is the dominant way of raising animals in the US. Over 99% of US animal farms follow this model, also called “Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations” or CAFOs. Another name for these are: “Factory Farms.” Factory Farming is quickly becoming the dominant model for raising animals all over the world.

Read quote from Hog Farmer Magazine.

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A Modern Chicken “Farm”

Here is a picture of a modern Chicken farm. Chickens are by far the most consumed farm animal in the US, with over 9 billion killed each year. Chickens are raised by the thousands in dimly lit sheds where they don’t have room to spread their wings. Perhaps the greatest crime we’ve made against chickens is to mess with their genetics. Through generations of scientific breeding, we’ve created a new breed of chicken that grows extremely obese in a short period of time. These chickens suffer extreme pain throughout most of their life, because their skeleton just can’t support their overgrown bodies. If allowed to live past 6 weeks, these chickens would likely die from heart failure or overeat themselves to death. There’s an immense amount of suffering we’ve created, for the sake of efficiency and cheap meat.

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A Modern Pig “Farm”

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Factories of Horror

Standard practices include:

Intensive confinement
De-horning (no painkillers)
Castration (no painkillers)
Repeated impregnation and separation
Teeth clipping
De-beaking
Tail cutting
Branding

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Dairy & Eggs – especially cruel

Dairy:

Forced impregnation
Separation of mother and calf
Killing of unwanted calves

Eggs:

Live grinding and suffocation of unwanted male chicks

Now I want to talk about Dairy, because when I learned about this years ago, this came as a real shock to me.

�

For many years after I stopped eating meat, I still consumed Dairy products because I thought, they don’t have to kill the animal to take its milk, right?

Well, it turns out, I didn’t have all the information right.

You see, Dairy cows produce milk for the same reason that all other mammals make milk, including humans – to feed their young. They are not constantly lactating or producing milk; they only start to lactate after a calf is born.

So, what dairy farmers do to get milk is to artificially impregnate dairy cows. Cows have a 9 month pregnancy, just like humans. When a calf is born after 9 months, it is taken away from its mother immediately. Why? Because they don’t want the calf to bond with the mother, and drink any of the milk, they want to take that milk for humans! If you visit a dairy farm, you will witness mother cows bellowing in distress and searching for their lost calves. Meanwhile, the confused calf is taken from its mother and housed in one of these. These are called “calf hutches.” This is a photo from a large dairy farm, where hundreds of newborn calves may be born every day. The lonely and confused calves will spend a short period of time in these hutches, isolated from contact with their mothers and other cows, before many of them (particularly the males) will be sent for slaughter. Male calves are considered an unwanted byproduct of the dairy industry. Some females will be kept to grow up and be impregnated like their mothers, and other females will be slaughtered as babies.

And after 4 or 5 cycles of pregnancy and separation, mother cows are also considered “spent” or worn out, and they too are slaughtered to make cheap ground beef.

Did you ever imagine that the milk industry is based on literally raping animals, then stealing and killing their babies so we can take the milk that is meant for the offspring? I certainly had no clue. But once I learned about it, I decided that I didn’t want to have any part in this barbaric, cruel and heartbreaking industry.

�

,

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A Quote

Source: https://www.azquotes.com/quote/565413

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The Good News

This Photo by Unknown Author is licensed under CC BY-NC

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A Simple Solution to Many Problems

The power to solve these problems is not with politicians or industry executives.
We don’t have to invent some exotic technology.
We don’t need to make a huge financial investment.
The power is in the choice we already make 3 times a day.
We can solve some of the world’s biggest problems with one simple tool.

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Athletes are shattering the Protein Myth!

Barny du Plessis,

Mr. Universe 2014

David Carter, NFL player

Patrick Baboumian, Weightlifter,

“Germany’s Strongest Man”

Venus & Serena Williams, tennis champions

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U.S. Leading Causes of Death

	Cause of Death	Number of Deceased	Potential Impact of Plant Based Diet
1.	Heart Disease	696,962	40 to 52% reduction
2.	Cancer	602,350	30 to 40% reduction
3.	COVID-19	350,831	Up to 73% reduction in severe symptoms
4.	Accidents	200,955
5.	Stroke	160,264	10% reduction
6.	Chronic lower respiratory diseases	152,657	Improvement (due reduced inflammation)
7.	Alzheimer’s	134,242	Positive benefits shown
8.	Diabetes	102,188	Significant impact in preventing and reversing
9.	Influenza and Pneumonia	53,544
10.	Kidney related diseases	52,547	May prevent or help treat Kidney disease

	Cause of Death	Number of Deceased
1.	Heart Disease	696,962
2.	Cancer	602,350
3.	COVID-19	350,831
4.	Accidents	200,955
5.	Stroke	160,264
6.	Chronic lower respiratory diseases	152,657
7.	Alzheimer’s	134,242
8.	Diabetes	102,188
9.	Influenza and Pneumonia	53,544
10.	Kidney related diseases	52,547

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What Can You Do?

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What to do:

Grow your hair long
Wear Tie-Dye
Eat only Kale and Carrots
Live out of your van
Avoid Bathing

THESE ARE VEGAN STEREOTYPES!

not accurate….

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It’s Simple.��Eat plant-based, as much as possible.�

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You don’t have to be fully vegan.�

Idea: Start by cutting out Meat, Dairy and Eggs for 2 days a week. (Or make your own schedule!)

Just start with small

steps in that direction.

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Replace cow’s milk with a plant-based milk.

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Today’s plant-based meat & cheese alternatives

are better than ever. Try them!

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When you go out to eat, try the

vegetarian option.

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Create New Traditions

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Teach your Family and Friends about this.

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Recognize that Animal Agriculture is a major threat to all life on Earth

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Questions?

Contact: mohan.gurunathan@gmail.com