Going through back issues of Harper’s, I ran into a February 2015
article by Christopher Ketcham titled “The Great Republican Land Heist:
Cliven Bundy and the politicians who are plundering the West” triggered
some thoughts about the role of cattle in our environmental crisis. As a
food source whose resource intakes (water and land) are disproportional
to its nutritional value and that is increasingly in demand as
globalization allows easy access to beef everywhere, it must be assessed
with a cool and exacting view even if that risks being tarred as a
“neo-Malthusian”.
Long before I began blogging, I wrote a piece titled “Cattle and
Capitalism” that quoted an Alexander Cockburn from the April 22, 1996
Nation:
Unsustainable grazing and ranching sacrifice drylands, forests and wild
species. For example, semi-deciduous forests in Brazil, Bolivia and
Paraguay are cut down to make way for soybeans, which are fed to cows as
high-protein soycake. Humans are essentially vegetarian as a species and
insatiate meat-eating bring its familiar toll of heart disease, stroke
and cancer. The enthusiasm for meat also produces its paradox: hunger. A
people living on cereals and legumes for protein need to grow far less
grain than a people eating creatures that have been fed by cereals. For
years Western journalists described in mournful tones the scrawny and
costly pieces of meat available in Moscow’s shops, associating the lack
of meat with backwardness and the failure of Communism. But after 1950,
meat consumption in the Soviet Union tripled. By 1964 grain for
livestock feed outstripped grain for bread, and by the time the Soviet
Union collapsed, livestock were eating three times as much grain as
humans. All this required greater and greater imports of grain until
precious foreign exchange made the Soviet Union the world’s
second-largest grain importer, while a dietary “pattern” based on
excellent bread was vanishing.
full: http://louisproyect.org/2015/05/01/cattle-and-neo-malthusianism/
_______________________________________________
pen-l mailing list
[email protected]
https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
