Eating Our Way to Extinction

Eating Our Way to Extinction
Produced by Kian Tavakkoli, Ludovic Brockaway and Mark Galvin

Since 1900 (we are told), we have experienced climate change and a massive increase in weather-related disasters, species loss, pollution and water use. Then we are told all of this is happening because we eat meat. Did we just start eating meat one hundred years ago? Did climate just start changing one hundred years ago? We have climate data for thousands of years. Climate has always been changing. If we look at the data, we see that nothing wildly new is going on. They say the increase in water use is at least partly due to raising cattle. Did cattle just start drinking water one hundred years ago? Does that water disappear from the planet forever, or does it eventually get returned to the environment?

We have invented creative new ways to pollute the planet, and we do need to clean that up. Yes, there is air pollution, which is not a great thing. My personal theory is that much of the hot air, misinformation, carbon dioxide and other forms of air pollution are coming from the pieholes of politicians. A relatively modest investment in piehole plugs for politicians (PPP) would solve many of the world’s problems by tomorrow morning.

One of pseudoscience’s more persistent and pernicious mistakes is to make assumptions that gain popularity and reach a point where they magically graduate to the status of sacred doctrine, unquestionable by mere mortals. One such assumption seems to be that this planet was at the optimal temperature for life around the middle of the twentieth century. We are told the planet has been warming since then and, unless we do something, it will continue to heat up until it is a glowing fireball. The solar system will have a second little sun.

Solar output—the amount of heat we get from the sun—varies in cycles. This has been known for centuries. Is this considered in the video? No. Is the bovine population at an all-time high? No. But the solution to this global meltdown is the Bart Simpson maxim—“Don’t have a cow, man.” If there were more bovines, especially buffalo before Columbus, why have they just become a problem in the last century or two? Sounds like a conspiracy theory to me, or maybe a cowspiracy. A new KKK. Krazy Konniving Kows that will kill us all.

Many of us living in the eastern U.S. have a bad habit of thinking the entire world can grow massive amounts of corn, soy and grain. However, much of the world’s population occupies areas where the climate does not allow for growing any plant except grass. They have two choices: raise animals that convert grass into meat and milk, or starve. Demanding that they starve is not exactly the first stop on the moral high road.

Experts in this video whine about how inhumane it is to eat meat but then essentially campaign for the virtual extinction of cows to save the planet. Why are cows so environmentally unfriendly? Because they breathe, drink water and exhale carbon dioxide and methane. Vegetation produces methane whether it is fermenting in a cow or a swamp. Guess who else exhales carbon dioxide? You do. Me, too.

I have a CO2 meter which I put in my eight- by twelve-foot greenhouse. When I first walk into the greenhouse, the meter reads a little over four hundred ppm. After I work in there for an hour, the reading has doubled or more. We produce a lot of carbon dioxide. Experts like Joel Salatin can explain how properly pastured cows sequester a lot of carbon from the air into the soil. The same cows that are accused of being the problem are really the most economical and ecological solution we have.

I know there are people out there who engage in all manner of creative self-loathing and consider human beings to be useless parasites on the environment (and some of them are). Who produced this video? Some of the funding comes from organizations like Veganuary and Veg Capital. It is fairly obvious what they are about. Blue Horizon is not so obvious, but their website says their mission is to take animals out of the food chain. If we eat the way they are promoting, that would ultimately lead to the extinction of all humanity and bovinity.

All this to save the planet. And to save it for what? I don’t want to save the planet for cockroaches. If cows had thumbs, those hairy thumbs would point the same way my thumb points for this video. DOWN.

This article appeared in Wise Traditions in Food, Farming and the Healing Arts, the quarterly journal of the Weston A. Price Foundation, Summer 2023

🖨️ Print post