Meatonomics (19 page)

It might feel like a stretch to assign medical costs to an industry because people who consume its products have health problems. If this concept troubles you, note that based on
actual
medical care costs, fifty US states have extracted a total of $400 billion from tobacco companies to reimburse state-paid medical costs related to smoking. That's a classic example of how an industry is sometimes required to bear some of its share of externalized costs.

Further, the $314 billion in costs of illness related to animal foods covers only a handful of diseases. Because reliable figures are not yet available for the costs associated with other diseases attributable at least in part to animal foods, like Alzheimer's, Parkinson's,
and arthritis, this figure does not include any of those costs. But that doesn't mean these costs don't exist nor that they don't matter. As Einstein noted, “Not everything that counts can be counted.” But it does mean that the number for these externalized costs is conservative.

Some may object that it's unfair to focus on the meat and dairy industries in assessing externalized medical costs. After all, every industry generates medical externalities, so why single out animal foods? Miners have high injury rates. Software programmers get carpal tunnel syndrome. Just as we do for the animal food industry, taxpayers and consumers help pay medical costs through taxes and insurance premiums for these other sectors.

But unlike these other examples, the animal food industry's hidden medical costs are unique and worthy of special attention. The external medical bills generated by meat and dairy are dramatically greater than those of any other industry. The hidden health care costs created by the next-highest sector, the tobacco industry, are $100 billion dollars
less
than those of animal foods. Moreover, the animal food industry's taxpayer subsidies of $38 billion make it one of the most heavily subsidized industries in the country.

Consider just how this diabolical dynamic works. Taxpayers provide the funding essential to keep most animal food producers profitable—and in some cases, to keep them in business. In turn, those same producers impose massive medical costs on us. In other words, first we pay factory farm operators to hurt us, and
then
we pay doctors to treat the injury. That blistering combination puts this industry in a special category all its own.

What can we do? The evidence shows that without question, Americans eat far too much meat and that this high consumption hurts our health and costs us money. One solution seems simple: eat less meat—or give it up altogether. This idea might once have seemed inconvenient, unpalatable, or extreme. But with the proliferation of plant-based foods and the rising number of high-profile vegans like former President Bill Clinton, business magnate Steve Wynn, real estate tycoon Mort Zuckerman, and Ford Chairman Bill Ford, that's no longer the case.

• Animal foods' retail prices have fallen significantly in the past century (on an inflation-adjusted basis), driven largely by producers' cost-cutting practices. Compared to 1935, ham is cheaper by 48 percent and chicken by 74 percent. Just as basic economic theory predicts, these falling prices have helped boost consumption. Per capita chicken consumption, for example, has increased sixfold during this period.
  
• With these supply-driven forces spurring us to buy more animal foods than we would otherwise, Americans' extraordinary rate of animal food consumption is killing us in record numbers. We eat three times the meat per capita as others on the planet do, and as a result, we have nearly three times the cancer rate and twice the rates of obesity and diabetes.
  
• Diseases caused by animal food consumption generate massive financial costs related to treatment and lost productivity. At roughly $314 billion, the health care costs of animal food consumption refute the notion that the methods and levels of industrial animal food production are efficient. In fact, these costs tell of a bloated, overproducing industry that benefits from market failure and a resulting ability to sell its goods in artificially high quantities.
  

The oldest river in North America, and the second oldest in the world after the Nile, is the ironically named New River. Cutting through the Appalachians like a winding road, the muddy, three-hundred-mile waterway meanders from North Carolina up through Virginia and West Virginia. Its sloping banks are lush with chestnut, white oak, sugar maple, currant, gooseberry, rhododendron, honeysuckle, and lily of the valley. Humans first settled at the water's edge more than ten thousand years ago, and as recently as the 1800s, native tribes including Shawnee and Cherokee fished and hunted in the area. But on a humid, early-summer day a couple of decades ago, as modern-day anglers waded the river's banks and recreational rafters screamed down stretches of whitewater, something happened that would change the New River for years.

On June 21, 1995, a factory farm's eight-acre pond of pig waste burst its retaining wall and dumped 25 million gallons of liquid manure into the New River. According to the
New York Times
, “Knee-deep red, soupy waste rushed over roads and tobacco and soybean fields and into two nearby tributaries of the New River until the waste lagoon, which is twelve feet deep and held waste from more than ten thousand hogs, was virtually empty.”
¹
It was the worst hazardous waste spill in North Carolina's history and one of the worst ever in the United States. After the spill, extraordinary levels of nitrogen and phosphorus in the New River caused persistent, toxic algal blooms and a massive hypoxic region—a dead zone in which oxygen levels were too low for the waterway's bass, trout, muskie, walleye, catfish, sunfish, and bluegill to breathe. The incident killed 10 million fish and closed 500 square miles of wetlands to shellfishing.
²

While the manure spill at New River was unusually large, smaller-scale spills are surprisingly routine in the United States. A study published five years after the New River disaster counted a thousand manure spills in ten states over just a three-year period.
³
Animal waste regularly contains nitrogen and phosphorus, and of course, fecal bacteria like
E. coli
and salmonella. It often includes antibiotics and steroids. When these substances enter our water, as they do on a regular basis, they damage ecosystems and threaten the health of people and animals.

With 18,800 factory farms in the United States, routine water pollution is just one of a number of environmental side effects caused by Americans' insatiable demand for animal foods. Air pollution, land degradation, and climate change also figure prominently. Concerned commentators have proposed a variety of solutions to these problems, such as rotational farming, organic production, and local consumption. This chapter starts by exploring the viability and sustainability of these approaches. And because ecological problems impose hidden costs on taxpayers, the chapter's second half looks at factory farming's financial effects on the environment.

Not surprisingly, as with the other consequences of meatonomics, the factory farming practices that cause ecological damage are largely about the money. Critics “have been hard on hog farms,” said Charles Carter Jr., whose company built the lagoon that broke and spilled into the New River. “People are just trying to make a living.”
⁴
But when farmers and lawmakers say that livestock-related environmental harms are merely the inevitable result of trying to earn a living or feed the nation, they forget they are responsible for fostering the extraordinary and unnecessary level of consumer demand that drives these problems in the first place.

Occasionally, when I talk to someone about factory farming, I get an indignant rebuke. “I spent my childhood on a farm,” the speaker admonishes me, “and it's not like that at all.” She then goes on to describe the green, sunny pastures and happy, grazing animals of her
youth. Sure, it was like that once. But those small, pastoral farms that some remember from the 1950s, '60s, or '70s, where animals slept in barns and spent their days outside, are almost all gone. They've mostly been turned into housing subdivisions or planted with monocrops like soy or corn to feed farm animals. Today, American farms are radically different.

Even before corporate players came to dominate American agriculture, farming was never especially natural or environmentally friendly. As plant geneticist Nina Fedoroff has noted, “agriculture is more devastating ecologically than anything else we could do except pouring concrete on the land.”
⁵
That said, industrial agriculture has eliminated even the tenuous and limited balance that formerly existed in traditional animal farming. Livestock were once attached to land, where they ate plants and returned waste to the soil as fertilizer. But agribusiness executives discovered that decoupling animals from real estate allows greater scalability and productivity. With the link between land and animal lost, gone even is the modest symmetry formerly found in recycling manure and crop residues back into the system.

As practiced in the industrialized world, animal agriculture today is one of the least natural of all human endeavors. Factory farming now ranks with mining, oil production, and electricity generation as one of the most ecologically damaging industries on the planet.
⁶
In fact, in a much-quoted study, the UN Food and Agriculture Organization reports that among all industrial sectors, livestock production is “one of the top two or three most significant contributors to the most serious environmental problems, at every scale from local to global.”
⁷

With mountains of evidence showing that animal agriculture is polluting and warming the planet, well-meaning commentators have offered a number of ideas to shrink animal foods' ecological footprint. The recipe for sustainability in animal agriculture is variably said to favor small farms over big, organic over conventional, or local
over remote. A look at some of these ideas helps answer the big question: can animal foods be produced sustainably to meet demand? (For purposes of this discussion,
sustainability
means the animal food system's capacity to endure without diminishing future generations' wealth, welfare, or utility derived from environmental resources.)

At the outset, note that measuring the environmental effects of human behavior is sometimes harder than you'd think. Take the conventional wisdom that says paper cups are more eco-friendly than Styrofoam. In fact, a paper cup requires thirty-six times more electricity and twelve times more water to produce than a Styrofoam one.
⁸
Styrofoam can take centuries to decompose, depending on the presence of moisture, sunlight, heat, and other factors. However, although not as persistent, a paper cup can still take decades to biodegrade because of coatings used to improve its ability to hold liquids. So which is better for the environment? “The truth” said Oscar Wilde, “is rarely pure and never simple.”

Consider one of the best-known proposals to make meat production sustainable. In
The Omnivore's Dilemma
, Michael Pollan discusses ecological rotation as an alternative to factory farming. Pollan profiles Polyface Farm, a 550-acre organic farm in Virginia that raises animals by moving them around the farm on a regular basis in portable enclosures. The cattle are moved to fresh grass each day, and the chickens follow several days later to scatter the cow manure and eat the insects it nurtures. The farm produces 140,000 pounds of meat yearly, enough to feed seven hundred Americans at our average annual consumption level of 200 pounds per person.
⁹
Polyface Farm also supports the local food movement by refusing to ship meat beyond a four-hour driving radius. The farm's meat production methods are clearly more environmentally sustainable than most and, except for their practice of slitting the throats of alert chickens, generally more humane. And it's certainly an interesting novelty for a small cadre of well-intentioned consumers and restaurateurs in Washington, DC, and Richmond, Virginia, looking for local, organic meat.

But for a nation of more than 300 million meat-eaters, four out of five of whom live in cities, farms like Polyface are unlikely to ever become more than a novelty. For starters, Polyface produces only enough meat to feed a large college dormitory. Even if there were more than a handful of Polyface-like farms in the country, the quantity of food they could produce compared to factory farms would remain minuscule. The reality is that unless something is done to dramatically reduce the nation's current, extraordinary demand, the only alternative is to continue to industrially produce virtually all the meat, fish, eggs, and dairy that Americans consume.

Returning to Polyface Farm and other efforts like it, the big problem with the prominent attention they receive, both in
The Omnivore's Dilemma
and elsewhere, is that this focus exaggerates their relevance. Many think Polyface is representative of organic farming. It's not, by a long shot. Even if organic animal farming
were
particularly eco-friendly—which, as we'll see, it isn't—Polyface is far from an everyday example of the genre. That's because unlike the happy, grazing animals at Polyface, the vast majority of organic animals are raised in CAFOs largely indistinguishable from inorganic factory farms. For example, organic animals must—in theory—be given access to the outdoors. However, such access is largely meaningless both for organic pigs, who don't graze and are routinely fitted with nose rings to discourage rooting (by making it painful), and for organic chickens, who by nature don't dare venture outside the dark warehouses where they are raised. Pollan observed, for example, that during his visits to free-range chicken farms, he never actually saw a bird go outside.
¹⁰
In practice, the organic label signifies only the absence of synthetic pesticides in feed and chemicals in meat—it certainly doesn't mean the meat was sustainably or humanely produced.