Beef... It's Why There Is No Dinner!

“The fact is, though, that we can be law-abiding and peace-loving and tolerant and inventive and committed to freedom and true to our own values and still behave in ways that are biologically suicidal.”
--Malcolm Gladwell, in the New Yorker, reviewing Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed by Jared Diamond

The Dust Bowl drought gets mentioned on a regular basis every summer in the plains states, not just in a year like this one where a horrid drought has everyone talking about peak water, but every single year, because every summer we get hot and dry and we wonder when will it ever end.

And then along comes Pollyanna,  reminding us that we actually have it pretty good. Sure, there’s a drought, and our economy seems on the verge of a double-dip recession, and there’s rioting in the streets of London, but for the most part, Americans have roofs over our heads and food on our plates. So cheer up, right?

This, of course, is a selfish point of view, because what we do affects how other people live. The choices we make regarding how we dress, how we eat, how we get to work, have a direct impact on the lives of people halfway around the globe, whom we will never meet.

That bears repeating. It’s not just a bumper sticker, it is a moral code to guide our behavior:

“Live simply, that others may simply live.”

In context of drought, then, we at Myrtle’s place have made arguments in the past for direct improvement of individual lives by collecting rainwater, passively cooling homes, and eliminating unsightly turf grass from urban landscaping palettes. Now we would like to make an argument for indirect improvement of the lives of those in developing countries by a cessation of the consumption of beef.

This is, so to speak, the sacred cow of American (and, in particular, Texan) dietary arrogance. We like meat, so we say we will never give it up. But, as with so many other things we know intuitively we ought not be doing, we develop monumental psychological barriers to facing up to the truth. There is not a single living soul who does not know, deep down, that eating red meat causes obesity, heart disease, hypertension, colon cancer, lethargy, ulcers, and gude kens wha’ else.

In addition, though, cattle raising is the most prolific waste of water ever devised. Eating beef literally means that somewhere in the world, someone will die either of dehydration or of starvation. When The Smiths wrote Meat is Murder, they were thinking of the cows. But they may as well have been thinking of villagers in the Tibetan plateau, or in Sudan, or in Yemen, or in any one of dozens of water stressed countries around the globe. And someday soon, the same fate will await the citizens of Las Vegas, and of Memphis, and of dozens of other communities in the United States where water consumption (for personal use, for agriculture and for industry) far outpaces the ability of Mother Nature to play catch-up.

It takes tremendous quantities of water to raise animals for food. According to an estimate from David Pimental, professor of ecology at Cornell University, it takes 900 liters of water to raise a kilogram of wheat; it takes 100,000 liters of water to raise grain fed beef. Translated into units most Americans can understand, one pound of wheat requires around 108 gallons of water; one pound of beef requires 12,008 gallons of water. Given that within half a century, finding a city in the United States (let alone in the world generally) which is not in some state of water stress will be the exception rather than the rule, consuming that much water, that inefficiently, seems criminal.

Yet we are culturally prepared to eat our way into oblivion. Beef – it’s not “what’s for dinner.” It’s why there may be no dinner. Even the recently revamped food pyramid (and how often does the food pyramid really need to be revamped, anyway?) is a “My Plate” featuring “protein” as a prominent part of the plate.

Why?

When was the last time you heard of  someone having to be hospitalized for a protein deficiency?

Protein is perhaps the single easiest portion of our diets in which we may reach a satisfying stasis. Sufficient sources of protein may be found in legumes (beans, peas, certain nuts), in spinach (especially in combination with mushrooms), even in potatoes – really, in virtually all foods. “Protein” is actually the basic building  block of all DNA, so there is protein in every living cell. Not all of it is assimilable, of course, so vegetarians pay attention to how much comes from which plants. And not everyone is amenable to a vegan diet, but even if you limit your meat consumption to an occasional fish or game bird, you don’t need nearly as much
protein as the Beef Council would have you believe.

The U.S.D.A. daily recommended protein intake is orders of magnitude higher than it needs to be, and it is not difficult to figure out why. There are not millions of dollars being spent in Washington, D.C. by broccoli growers, or by peach farmers, or the onion lobby, or by farmer’s markets or community supported agriculturalists, with all their organic turnips and greens and potatoes and what-all-else, all of which is sufficiently high in protein to produce big beefy cattle, but evidently insufficient to support weak, flabby, addle pated weekend warrior “dittoheads” who order male-enhancement supplements from the back of Golf Digest and talk about how those vegetarians can’t possibly be getting enough to eat – wonder if they were chanting “USA! 
USA!” while vegan Carl Lewis was winning gold medals?

No, we have “protein” and “dairy” featured prominently in our daily recommended allowances precisely because we have such hefty (obese?) beef and dairy lobbies. One has to suspect that in addition to continuing to heavily advertise and push their addictive and destructive product, the Beef Council and their friends will in the future continue to advocate for their clients not just in terms of corrupting our nutritional standards, but also when it comes to allocating water.

During the health care reform debates of 2009 and 2010, the concept of rationing got more airplay than just about any other hot button keyword. It seems Americans do not ever want someone to tell us that we can’t have something – to tell us that there are limits to anything we desire.

Unfortunately, as many communities in the desert southwest know all too well, water is something which will have to be rationed at some point, regardless of how long we manage to stay in denial. There simply is not enough of it to go around, but until the actual time comes when scarcity is not just staring us in the face, but actually beating down our doors, we don’t seem capable of recognizing the plain and simple truth – fresh water is not a renewable resource. And since beef production takes a disproportionate amount relative to other healthier foods, the logical conclusion is…. Come on, put down that hot dog and answer, we know you
can do it…

Sigh.

To return to our opening theme, we are in the midst of a drought which reminds people yet again of the Dust Bowl era. Some people wonder whether the Dust Bowl was a trial sent by God to test the resolve of the American people. Anyone wondering this should seriously turn in their driver’s license, turn over their voter registration card, and admit themselves to the nearest mental hospital. God(s) had nothing to do with it.

The Dust Bowl was caused by farmers. By monocropping, not rotating, deep tilling and not using cover crops, farmers allowed topsoil to lose its ability to retain moisture. Prior to the 1930s, a drought would be bad, but it wouldn’t be devastating. Several pioneering soil specialists foresaw the danger of growing nothing but miles and miles of wheat and corn, but American farmers knew better than “those eggheads” and planted mile after mile anyway. After ignoring all the evidence before their eyes in the name of convenience and economic growth,  though, farmers all across the Great Plains watched their fertile lands literally just blow away.

Now, in spite of all the accumulated evidence, we are watching ranchers let their intransigence and greed shrivel our watersheds. Cows are slurping away our future, and we are looking the other way. Maybe we’re staring at our pretty emerald green lawns. We’re certainly not watching our aquifer levels.

It will be quite some time, we are afraid, before people reach the right conclusion on this one. It would be nice, though, if just once we could say that our society thought long enough with its collective head rather than its collective belly to solve a long-term problem before it overwhelmed us. Oh, well.

Happy farming!