The cost of meat

SBS recently (Wednesday, 22 January, 2020) aired a documentary that purported to cover the consequences on our world of the human appetite for meat, an appetite that is growing. It was called Meat - a threat to our planet? presented by Liz Bonnin from BBC One.

During the course of that program we were given a range of information, including the following:

• the production of methane gas from food-producing animals is greater than all greenhouse gasses from transport combined
• methane is being harnessed to produce electricity.
• there are an estimated 200 million cattle in Brazil and about 1.5 billion world-wide
• about 20% of the Brazilian Amazon (about 60% of the whole Amazon Basin) is now destroyed (in one recent summer, the equivalent of five soccer fields was deforested every minute). While the rate of deforestation is decreasing, the habitat is still being destroyed such that, the WWF estimates, about 27% of the Amazon Basin will be without trees by 2030 (my addition).
• about 3 billion tonnes of manure is produced per year by animals farmed for food
• 40% of crops grown by humans is fed to animals which are then farmed to feed people
• about 4 million tonnes of sardines are ground into fish meal each year to feed livestock to feed people and this amount is increasing
• adding seaweed to cattle feed helps reduce methane output by up to 60%
• it is possible to make synthetic meat which has the same characteristics as natural meat but none of the consequences of large-scale production

Brindley Park Feedlot, Roma, Queensland

It got me thinking, among other things, about the connection we have with our food and what that does to our choices about what we eat. Towards the end of this program, we were introduced to a farmer who demonstrated what it takes to humanely kill a chicken for food and how that might feel to us. It struck me that , were we to have this "hands-on" connection to our consumption of meat, we would make different choices about that. If we visited a feedlot, an abattoir, a piggery, killed our own chicken, slaughtered and gutted our own pigs, we would clearly understand that meat does not originate, already packaged, from supermarkets. I felt saddened by the killing, more respect for the animal and the life just taken and a deeper gratitude to these creatures who help sustain us.

If, every time we put food into our mouths, we give time to be present to it, to give thanks for the sustenance, to ingest it with our minds and hearts as well as out bodies, we may change our relationship with food (especially meat) from one of entitlement to one of gratitude.