The World Peace Diet: Eating For Spiritual Health And Social Harmony

Profiting from Destruction / 185
period of declining fossil fuel production, bitter and violent conflicts for
the precious oil demanded by our omnivorous eating habits loom larger
every day.
Eating Soil, Water, and Fossil Fuels
The major environmental problem with eating animal foods is that these
animals, whose populations are vast, must eat, and eat a lot. Eighty percent
of grain grown in the U.S. and about half the fish hauled in are
wasted to grow billions of animals big and fat enough to be profitably
slaughtered, or to produce dairy products and eggs at the high levels
demanded by consumers. And over ninety percent of the protein in this
grain turns into the methane, ammonia, urea, and manure that pollute
our air and water. A conservative estimate is that the amount of land,
grain, water, petroleum, and pollution required to feed one of us the
Standard American Diet could feed fifteen of us eating a plant-based
diet. 4 Understanding the implications of this is crucial to our survival,
because our industrialized animal-based agriculture is disastrously
depleting the three essentials on which it depends: soil, water, and fossil
fuels.
Most of us have little comprehension of the enormous amount of
land devoted to growing grain to feed imprisoned pigs, cows, sheep,
birds, and fish. Already, over 521,000 square miles of U.S. forest have
been cleared to graze livestock and to grow grain to feed them. This
amounts to more land than the states of Texas, California, and Oregon
combined, yet it grows daily, with about 6,000 square miles cleared
every year. This amounts to about 10,000 acres per day, seven acres
every minute. 5 This ongoing deforestation, which is seven times the
amount of deforestation caused by building roads, homes, parking lots,
and shopping centers, 6 means loss of wildlife habitat, loss of genetic
diversity, loss of topsoil, degradation of streams and rivers, and
increased pollution. Forests create topsoil, generate oxygen, clean the
air, help bring needed rain, and provide habitat for thousands of species
of animals and plants.
Besides the obliteration of vast areas of forest, animal agriculture is
responsible for the destruction and degradation of even larger areas—of