Recent advice to the Danish government to tax red meat in order to reduce consumption is unlikely to be followed, but the very audacity of the proposal has gained a level of public attention that mere scientific announcements rarely achieve. A government spokesman called the idea a “bureaucratic nightmare.”
In fact, the Danish Council of Ethics is right: we must all stop eating industrially produced red meats as fast as we can. Beef cattle account for 28 times more land and 11 times more irrigation water than pork, poultry, eggs or dairy. The key conclusion of a recent report to the to U.S. National Academy of Sciences is that beef production demands 10 times more resources than alternative livestock categories. Professor Tim Benton of the University of Leeds states that “eating less red meat would be a better way for people to cut carbon emissions than giving up their cars.”
As for the economics of industrial meat production, according to ecological economist Herman Daly, if all the costs of production were to be considered, the decrease in nature’s capital (i.e. environmental costs) would far outweigh the gross domestic product value counted. Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development figures show agricultural subsidies in Canada of $6.9 billion in 2011.
“The way we farm now is destructive of the soil, the environment and us,” says Doug Gurian-Sherman, a senior scientist at the Union of Concerned Scientists. To take one simple example of the downright inefficiency of the present system, the manure from beef and pork becomes a dangerous pollutant rather than the soil replenisher produced by traditional farming methods and we taxpayers are lumbered with the externalised costs of cleaning up that pollution.
Wendell Berry says, “If I am going to eat meat, I want it to be from an animal that has lived a pleasant, uncrowded life outdoors, on bountiful pasture, with good water nearby and trees for shade.”
That’s the picture we paint for our children in stories about farms and it is far from the truth about the cruel and unhealthy realities in concentrated animal feeding operations.
I buy lamb, pork, chicken, beef and sausage from a combination of friends and farmers’ market stalls because I don’t want to contribute to animal suffering and unhealthy conditions and because I want to support meat producers who are providing alternatives. As long as food budgets are tied to the low prices of industrial meats, no solution is in sight. At least the Danish Council of Ethics has presented an economic incentive for reducing the increasing consumption of red meat.
What we have here is only one facet of the wicked problem emerging from the culmination of corporate globalization. A wicked problem is “a social or cultural problem that is difficult or impossible to solve for [many] reasons: incomplete or contradictory knowledge, the number of people and opinions involved, the large economic burden, and the interconnected nature of these problems with other problems.” Wicked problems don’t have solutions. All we can do is stop contributing to their impacts and support governments to do the same.
Marjorie Stewart is past-chairwoman of the Nanaimo Foodshare Society. She can be reached at marjorieandalstewart@gmail.com.
