The Myth Of Sustainable Organic Eating

Like most of the world population, I ate meat for the majority of my life. There seemed to be nothing wrong or harmful about eating meat because everyone around me consumed it on a daily basis as well. However, at the age of fifteen I stumbled across environmental issues that were a result of animal agriculture. I became aware of the damage that I was doing to the environment by choosing to eat meat. This made me question my dietary choices; ultimately, it led me to adopt an environmentally friendly plant based diet. The production of meat has a negative impact on the environment due to habitat destruction, greenhouse gasses and inefficient use of natural resources. With these factors taken into consideration, animal agriculture is not worth

It is impossible for the world to feed all cows grass, because there is a growing demand for meat. Also, there would be little to no land to grow crops for humans. Unfortunately, this means that the world now relies on large scale animal agriculture production otherwise known as factory farming. Livestock is raised in large amounts which increases the risk of “mad cow, E. coli and salmonella” (“The Myth of Sustainable Meat”). On top of draining the world’s natural resources, animal agriculture practices put our health at risk. When raising livestock at such a large scale there is no room for sanitation, because the priority is producing the most amount of meat possible. Others argue that animal agriculture has been around from the beginning of the human race; therefore, it must not have any major environmental impacts. However, this is untrue because the world population has grown and “the overall demand for meat has increased five-fold” (“Is Meat Sustainable”). Meat is produced at a larger scale than it was hundreds of years ago, so more resources are required to produce larger amounts of meat. An argument can be made that a “cow produces up to 70 kg of manure per day, providing enough fertilizer in a year for one hectare of wheat” (“Steps to Sustainable Livestock”). While manure can be used as a fertilizer, it releases harmful greenhouse gasses like methane which is associated with climate change. A counterargument to this fact could be that cows would still release greenhouse gasses even if they were not killed for their meat. While this is true, the fact is that there would not be as many cows in the world if large scale animal