Guilty?
This is what I found about environmental effects of meet production on Wikipedia:
According to a 2006 report by the Livestock, Environment And Development Initiative, the livestock industry is one of the largest contributors to environmental degradation worldwide, and modern practices of raising animals for food contributes on a "massive scale" to air and water pollution, land degradation, climate change, and loss of biodiversity. The initiative concluded that "the livestock sector emerges as one of the top two or three most significant contributors to the most serious environmental problems, at every scale from local to global."
Animals fed on grain or primarily graze need more water than grain crops. In tracking food animal production from the feed through to the dinner table, the inefficiencies of meat, milk and egg production range from a 4:1 energy input to protein output ratio up to 54:1. The result is that producing animal-based food is typically much less efficient than the harvesting of grains, vegetables, legumes, seeds and fruits.
Relatedly, the production and consumption of meat and other animal products is associated with the clearing of rainforests, resource depletion, air and water pollution, land and economic inefficiency, species extinction, and other environmental harms. However, in some instances, "long-distance air transport, deep-freezing, and some horticultural practices for producing fresh vegetables may lead to environmental burdens for vegetarian foods exceeding those of locally produced organic meat."
For an environmentally conscious society that we seem to become more and more this is something we will have to address sooner or later.
Bill Maher said in his show the other day that it is more environmentally friendly to eat a salad in a Hummer then a Steak in a Prius.
But all the environmental impact aside I want to talk a little bit about todays image. Could it be that the reason why a chicken has no head when we buy it in the supermarket be that we don’t have to face its eyes? Would we feel guilty?
Do the eyes of this chicken say, “What have you done? Why did you do this to me?”
Or maybe it is a natural thing. We always have killed to survive and every living being has to die sooner or later anyway.
What do you think?
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