Author: Radha Biswas (Age 10)

Have you ever wondered how meat reaches your dinner plate? If you did, then how did you process it? How would you feel if your pet or a close member of your family were going to get slaughtered for meat? While you are pondering upon these questions, why not we explore through the lens of some well-known facts on animal killing? I sincerely suggest that we should not eat these cute, cuddly, and harmless animals that many of us love to eat.

Health

Where did the Coronavirus come from? We do not know the exact source of the current outbreak of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), but we do know based on the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reports that it originally came from eating an animal, likely a bat. CDC claims that some coronaviruses that infect animals can be spread to people and then spread between people (“COVID-19 and Animals”). Not only coronavirus, but several other life-threatening diseases such as Swine flu, Ebola, MERS, Bird flu, vCJD (a variant of mad cow disease) and SARS can all be traced back to eating animals (“Coronavirus, Swine Flu, SARS: Major Diseases Linked to Eating Animals”). So, it is logical to believe that if we continue to eat meat, we can be subjecting ourselves to many more such fatal diseases in the future.

Based on the CDC data, heart disease is the leading cause of death for men, women, and people of most racial and ethnic groups in the United States. One person dies every 36 seconds in the United States from cardiovascular disease (“Heart Disease Facts”). Guess what? If you eat two or more servings of meat, it has been statistically established by CDC that it is prone to cause a 7% increase in heart disease (Heart Matters Magazine). In fact, eating red meat daily triples heart disease-related chemicals in the body. In 2016, Song and others conducted the largest and longest-running study ever performed comparing animal and plant sources of protein in the human diet consisting of 131,342 participants running for 26 years and found a positive association between animal proteins and cardiovascular death as well as all-cause mortality and an equal and opposite lower risk of death with plant protein consumption (Song et al.). Therefore, a leading nutrition researcher Dr. Charlotte Pratt says that these findings reinforce dietary recommendations that encourage all ages to follow a heart-healthy eating plan that limits red meat (“Eating red meat daily triples heart disease-related chemical”). This means eating a variety of foods, including more vegetables, fruits, whole grains, and plant-based protein sources such as beans and peas.

Furthermore, according to CDC, colorectal cancer is the third leading cause of cancer-related deaths in the United States. It is the third most common cancer in men and in women. An increased risk for colorectal cancer has been consistently reported for long-time consumption of cooked and processed red meat. This has often been attributed to chemical carcinogens generated during the cooking process of meat. According to a Harvard Medical School survey, meat eating leads to a 28% higher risk of colon cancer (Red meat and colon cancer). Based on a paper published in the International Journal of Cancer, long-time consumption of meat increases the risk for colon cancer by 20–30% as well as being linked to an increased mortality rate for colorectal cancer (Aykan).

Food safety experts say that meat needs to be cooked for long enough and at a temperature high enough to kill harmful bacteria. However, experts also suggest that it is not good to eat meat that was cooked at a high temperature. For example, Sinha et al. in a cancer research publication warn us that high-temperature cooking methods were also associated with an increased risk of cancer by 26% per 10 g/day of grilled red meat and 15% per 10 g/day of pan-fried red meat consumption (Sinha). So, this means there is no safe temperature for cooking meat – the meat consumers end up choosing between the risk of bacterial infection and future risk of developing colon cancer. Thus far, we established based on many authorized sources that eating meat is extremely risky to human health.

Environment

The impact of eating meat actually goes much further than incurring individual health risks.

Did you know that slaughterhouses are the number one contributor to global warming? Let’s look deeper.

There are greenhouse gases (viz., carbon dioxide, methane, etc.) that form a protective layer around the earth by trapping the right amount of heat from the sun. These gases need to be at the right level to create a protective shield around the earth. We breathe out carbon dioxide, the most common greenhouse gas, and the plants help absorb the excess carbon dioxide. However, if we cause a higher concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere either by running a huge number of vehicles and industries, or by deforestation, that will thicken the greenhouse layer and trap more heat within the atmosphere than necessary. This would lead to increase in the average temperature of the earth causing global warming. Animal farming contributes to global warming in two ways: by adopting an industrialized system of manufacturing food based on fossil fuels and by deforestation.

Animal farming requires huge amounts of land. Forests and wetlands help absorb a lot of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. But, when these ecosystems are destroyed to make way for farms, that land turns into a carbon source. An article published in Nature informs us that cattle raised on pastures created by clearing woodland are particularly emission-intensive. This article projects that by 2050, dietary changes could free up several million square kilometers of land and reduce global carbon dioxide emissions by up to eight billion tons per year. Ruth Richardson, the executive director at the Global Alliance for the Future of Food, therefore said, “We need a radical transformation, not incremental shifts, towards a global land-use and food system that serves our climate needs.” (Schiermeier) Did you know that all transportation contributes to only 13% of global warming while animal agriculture contributes to 51% of global warming (Andersen and Kuhn)? 

So, we can easily infer that if most of the world population take up a plant-based diet instead of eating meat, it would certainly help reduce global warming. Let’s take care of our health as well as our planet by cutting down on meat eating! As of now, we only have one planet – the Earth to live in – if we don’t take care of it, we would all perish.

Cruelty

Now, let’s switch gear to muse on the humane aspects of animal killing. Britannica describes how the slaughter of an animal involves three distinct stages: preslaughter handling, stunning, and slaughtering (Nolen). It is claimed there that in the United States there is humane treatment of animals during each of these stages as required by the Humane Slaughter Act. The stunning of the animal done mechanically, electrically, or using carbon dioxide is believed to have created a painless condition for animal killing. The animal killing is evidently done in an organized and industrialized manner in developed countries but if we take stock of all the processes used in producing meat around the world, one can easily conclude that there is indeed a lot of violence in the slaughterhouses. There are many places in the world where there is no such humane slaughter standard at play, animals are treated quite mercilessly. Moreover, according to Vox news (Matthews), even the US government has never really enforced these humane slaughter standards.

At this point, ask yourselves two questions: (1) Would you feel comfortable if your pet is killed with so-called humane treatment? (2) If a murderer chooses to anesthetize a human subject before murdering, would that be considered a merciful act? The answers to these questions would certainly be subjective, but it stands to reason that such selfish and willful acts of animal exploitation must have some pernicious consequences individually and collectively as it is popularly said that what goes around comes around.

The famous poet, George Bernard Shaw, therefore, very eloquently expresses himself as follows: “Animals are my friends… and I don’t eat my friends. I choose not to make a graveyard of my body with the rotting corpses of dead animals. A man of my spiritual intensity does not eat corpses. While we ourselves are the living graves of murdered beasts, how can we expect any ideal conditions on this earth?”

Meat substitutes

If you are convinced by the facts and reasoning presented thus far, and even thinking about abstaining from meat, you might be also feeling anxious about your current attachment to the taste of meat. Fortunately, there are not just valid but exciting plant-based alternatives offered by Impossible Burger and Beyond Meat patties. You can now avoid meat while retaining the same satisfaction of munching on a succulent hamburger. And Cheyenne Buckingham writes in “Eat this, not that”: “it will taste all the better knowing that you’re doing something good for the planet while you enjoy your dinner.” (Buckingham)

One may also challenge whether a vegetarian food can really serve the protein requirement of our body. Protein is a key part of any diet. The average person needs about 7 grams of protein every day for every 20 pounds of body weight. Because protein is found in an abundance of foods, many people can easily meet this goal. The Harvard school of public health recommends that we should get our protein from plants when possible. The good news is that the plant kingdom offers plenty of options to mix and match (“The Nutrition Source”). To get the most out of a vegetarian diet, one can choose healthy plant-based foods, such as whole fruits and vegetables, legumes and nuts, and whole grains. There are many informative sites which detail such information as well as guide one with vegetarian recipes and diet plans.

Conclusion

If you are traveling on a freeway and happen to see a dead animal lying on the road, I am sure you won’t feel like saying “It’s yummy!” That seems to indicate that we are not naturally inclined to eat dead carcasses and therefore meat is an acquired taste. Regardless of the mechanism in which meat diet has been indoctrinated within our society, the status quo is that animals and their products are consumed in abundance all around the world. According to a 2018 Gallup poll, 95% of U.S. adults subsist on a meat-based diet. According to the US Animal Kill Clock (“Animal Kill Clock”), close to four thousand animals are getting killed every second. People are so used to eating meat that they neglect to even think of what is on their plate and how it was procured. In this article, we established with various evidence that meat eating has a deleterious impact on our environment as well as health thus creating an ecological imbalance on the earth. I urge the readers to sincerely consider the presented valid alternatives in the light of the collective well-being of humanity at large. Consider becoming a vegetarian and cut down meat in your diet. If you are a little hesitant, try eating one less ounce of meat every day till you cut it off completely. You will feel good yourself that you made a sacrifice for our animals, our environment, and our health. Thank you for reading!

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