ENGLISH 23
(A.K.A. CLIMATE CRISIS 101)
Deep Dive
Cowspiracy and Wasted
Project Drawdown:
“Shifting to a diet rich in plants is a demand-side solution to global warming that runs counter to the meat-centric Western diet on the rise globally. That diet comes with a steep climate price tag: one-fifth of global emissions. If cattle were their own nation, they would be the world’s third-largest emitter of greenhouse gases.”
“Bringing about dietary change is not simple because eating is profoundly personal and cultural, but promising strategies abound. Plant-based options must be available, visible, and enticing, including high-quality meat substitutes. Also critical: ending price-distorting government subsidies, such as those benefiting the U.S. livestock industry, so that the prices of animal protein more accurately reflect their true cost.”
“Plant-rich diets reduce emissions and also tend to be healthier, leading to lower rates of chronic disease. According to a 2016 study, business-as-usual emissions could be reduced by as much as 70 percent through adopting a vegan diet and 63 percent for a vegetarian diet, which includes cheese, milk, and eggs. $1 trillion in annual health-care costs and lost productivity would be saved.”
“As Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh has said, making the transition to a plant-based diet may be the most effective way an individual can stop climate change.”
I watched “Cowspiracy” for the first time last year for my Environmental Science class. I haven’t eaten red meat since.
I remember when this film, “Cowspiracy”, was released and people talking about it, I was about 18/19 years old. I remember not wanting to watch it and continue in a state of ignorance because I was afraid of what the documentary would reveal and what I would be told, and I didn’t want to live in a state of guilt; terrible I know.
There was a statistic in the film that had stated that it takes 660 gallons of water for a singular burger and I had found that rather shocking as I had just eaten a cheeseburger for dinner prior. As this is my comment/response to watching this film, I still love eating meat and will probably love meat for the rest of my life. The solutions of “no-meat Mondays” or eating the vegan burgers just doesn’t even seem like a good alternative to eating the classic burgers and ice cream. I probably sound like a bad person for admitting I hate vegetables and love consuming animal-based products but I don’t envision an American future in which I can’t go to Wendy’s and order a 4 for 4. I do understand though that I must think about who I am buying from as some of these meat corporations do only care about their monetary gain rather than the planet’s being…
Coming into this class with such a consumer-based, animal product heavy, and non-minimalist background makes me feel like the “bad guy” for why the crisis continues, which is why I want to continue to learn about little things I can change to improve how I live. But getting rid of meat is tough for someone who is 6’3 200 pounds and plays sports is kind of hard to ask. I do agree that big corporations need to stop thinking for profit alone and should consider the well being of the planet. As I won’t be cutting meat out of my daily meals, I can agree to be more mindful about what I’m consuming.
Documentary: The Game Changers, currently streams from Netflix. (Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iSpglxHTJVM)
Arnold Schwarzenegger notes in The Game Changers that “I ate a lot of meat. They show those commercials…selling that idea that real men eat meat. Serious man food. But you gotta understand, that’s marketing. That’s not based on reality.”
Another point to bring up is that people just might not know the amount of emissions agriculture produces. Honestly, I didn’t know about it until I watched this documentary. So, how are people, who don’t have an education on the environment, supposed to know the stop eating meat? It goes back to the narrator questioning why no environmental groups have shined a light on the issue. We need to get the word out there and help people ease into an environmental way of living. We can’t just expect them to do it themselves without the right type of guidance.
I’ve heard of Cowspiracy before but have always been afraid to watch it because I thought it would be another source of vegan propaganda where they show gruesome videos from slaughterhouses. Thankfully, I was wrong and the film takes a much more logical than emotional approach. I think this tactic makes the movie much more digestible to the general public that isn’t already vegan or vegetarian.
I have officially become a vegetarian!! While I have a lot of critiques on the film, it definitely swayed me over to the green side.
Watching Ken’s video about both films, I especially was curious about him bringing up dumpster diving and being a “freegan”. I have seen shows like “Cheapstakes” on TLC displaying people jumping in garbage dumpsters behind supermarkets and finding food items that were still safe for consumption, or so it was portrayed. Watching this, I always thought “how come supermarkets don’t give this food to shelters or the homeless if it is still good to eat?”. Looking online, it seems that supermarkets don’t want to be held liable for lawsuits or health risks that may be had eating expired or past “sell by dated” foods. While Ken puts up this suggestion to donate more food in supermarkets instead of throwing it out, my question would be is there any way legally that would all this type of food to get donated but supermarkets not face repercussions? And if so, it that morally correct to donate food that may/may not be safe to consume? I am truly interested in seeing what kinds of ways that the donation of unwanted foods can be facilitated safely to citizens instead of being thrown away and wasted.
The film mentioned that even without using gas, oil or fuel ever again we would still exceed our maximum carbon equivalent greenhouse gas emissions, which is 565 gigatons, by 2030 simply by eating livestock and by 2048 we’d have fishless oceans if we kept overfishing. Those numbers were like a shot to the head. It’s already 2021. We have less than 10 years to change the way our agriculture is done and less than 3 decades to change the way we’re fishing our oceans. These are things that will be happening in our lifetimes, but no one is talking about it! It should be a big deal. We are in a mass extinction period, but nothing is being done about it and it’s frustrating because most people who are in positions of power are not people who will be alive to witness these things happen.
Watching this movie, I was incredibly disturbed, not only by our inhumane treatment of animals, but our wastefulness as humans. I knew from my environmental science classes that as you go up the trophic levels, the amount of energy conserved is less and less, so eating meat is not, and never will be, the most efficient way to consume food. That being said I had never really pictured just how wasteful this system really is. We grow all these crops, like grain and corn and instead of feeding it to the 3.5 billion people in poverty and with food insecurity, we feed it to livestock. In addition to the grain, we use 2,500 gallons of water, to produce a single pound of beef, a statistic that is literally baffling to me. In a world where we are already running out of resources, we are taking precious farmland, water and food and essentially wasting it, by feeding it to animals which only a small percentage of our population can afford to consume. As our population continues to expand it only makes sense to redistribute these resources away from animals and give them to humans, as it is significantly more efficient.
The film “Cowspiracy” immediately made me think back to a steak house I went to that had a sign saying “Hey Vegetarians stop eating my food’s food”. After watching this film that slogan is even more ridiculous to me because if we used this food’s food to feed humans we could feed so many more people using a lot less resources such as land and water. Seeing how much water is used to produce beef upset me because I had recently learned about environmental injustice in California that makes it so a lot of people don’t have access to clean running water. One pound of beef takes up 2,500 gallons of water. If beef get that much water each and every human should be able to access clean water. The amount of environmental impact that agriculture has really surprised me. I knew about its effect on deforestation, land use, water use but I wasn’t as aware of the effects of nitrous oxide, runoff in the oceans, and how agriculture impacts wild animal’s habitats. This problem is very difficult to address because just like our discussion on consumerism and big corporations using fast fashion it is all about money for the meat industry.
The depletion of animals in our ocean is something I have always been passionate about. Bi-kill is something that a lot of people are not aware of. Sustainable fishing isn’t as sustainable as we think it is. That term is used to make people feel better about eating fish. I was confused how eating fish could help fish. I have never liked eating fish but I always thought fish was a better substitute to meat such as chicken and beef for the environment. I also know that a massive amount of people rely on fish as their primary protein and so transitioning away from eating fish isn’t an option for many people…
One thing I didn’t appreciate about this film was how it attacked environmental organizations. The environmental community needs to stay united and when someone suggests that they are hiding things from the public as they do in this film, people may lose trust in the environmental movement. The fact that the incorrect percentage of how much agriculture affects climate change is a large basis of the interviews is also very problematic. Although I had these small issues I believe the film is extremely important and that the producer is brave for going up against the commercial agricultural industry and continuing to dig for the truth.
One fact presented in the film that shocked me the most was that 40% our food goes to waste. This is almost half of all food produced!! Of this food, 90% goes straight to the methane-producing landfill! Most of the facts presented actually made me feel very defeated and small, like no matter what I do I won’t have a large enough impact on the issue to generate change. I know that this isn’t the right perspective to have, and I am trying to reevaluate my outlook.
The film “Wasted” was one of my more enjoyed films thus far. I am always so interested in what I can do personally and using my food to the fullest is something I never considered. The fact that it takes 25 years for a head of lettuce to fully decompose in a landfill is wild! I didn’t know that a single head of lettuce would take that long to break down. Clearly people need to learn this information because after asking my housemates how long they thought it takes, the closest answer was 6 months. This fact was baffling to me because I feel like I was taught growing up that as long as it makes it in the trash decomposable items will eventually break down. I never considered that it could take longer is we disposed of things in different ways. This fact was absolutely surprising to me and has already made me rethink what I will do with my food waste in the future, but after seeing all of the solutions available to fix these problems I was upset with our government again. The system of charging people for the food waste they throw away we see in South Korea is a great way to do it.
Cowspiracy was a difficult film for me to watch. I knew that producing beef had a high carbon footprint however certain statistics, such as the fact that 1 hamburger is equivalent to 2 months of showering, definitely caught me off guard. Considering that I had had a hamburger the day before I watched this film, I did not feel too great about myself. I was also unaware of the large impact that fishing has on the planet. The fact that, for every pound of fish caught there is five pounds of unwanted bykill, seems easily preventable and highly unnecessary. If only fishing companies would take the time to fish properly rather than knowingly stealing the lives of other sea creatures. I think a poignant part in the film was when the narrator discussed how animal agriculture is never mentioned as a leading cause of climate change: “Was this truth just too inconvenient even for Al Gore?” For entirely political reasons, climate change organizations that we know and trust are lying to us about the biggest issues in the world. Who can we trust nowadays? As this course progresses, I’m starting to think that the only proper answer is ourselves.
This week’s documentary “Wasted” highlighted the lack of consideration human’s take regarding food waste. To accommodate our population growth since the industrial revolution, humans have mastered the mass production of food. Human’s have end up producing more food than we actually eat. One shocking statistic that came from the documentary was that “10 millions tons of produce goes unharvested each year”.
The compost system set up in the school in Louisiana was really inspiring. I think it is such a good idea to teach about environmentalism in the K-12 school system, and the hands on approach that this school implemented is amazing. There was a line in the film that said something along the lines of, when you teach one child, you teach their whole family and their whole community. I may have messed that up but the general idea of it was really uplifting. It really put things into perspective and it made me more aware of how small things can make a big impact. Instead of leaving me discouraged, like some documentaries do, this one left me feeling hopeful and motivated to make a change.
The fact is that we need to reinvent this American diet and lifestyle, America is known for its large portions and unhealthy food choices when in fact for the most part it is what the companies are fueling and feeding to many (the more people demand it, the more it will be supplied). Though, especially in California a vegetarian/ vegan diet is starting to become accepted and even a normal diet, I find it hard to believe that this will solve our climate problems. We need this influential movement to be the normal diet for most Americans or nothing will change. Overall, I found Cowspiracy to be very eye opening and influential in many ways, as I addressed above I found it very interesting and useful that this film also talked about alternatives and how healthy this diet can be.
Cowspiracy gave statistics that sounded as if they were fake (minus the 51% of emissions from cow agriculture). The fact that we are causing the largest extinction since 65 million years ago and that we are on our way to fishless oceans in 2048 is unimaginable. Knowing that I would be 46 in that year, with quite a life ahead of me, I dreamt of being able to swim and interact with the ocean as a kid. The fact that we could wipe out life from 70% of the Earth from water sounds apocalyptic. Throughout the film, I really admired Andersen’s perseverance to put himself out there and at risk of being targeted for spreading the truth about this controversial topic, which shouldn’t be as all the science points to animal agriculture as a leading contributor.
I like this type of reading somethings instead of the regular argumentative passages because I more of a science person. This reading activity is super helpful when we are trying to put things we have talked about into real life perspective. All of the 25 solutions we have read gave very promising result of CO2 reduction while reducing financial requirements. The top one helpful solution is to reduce food waste which matches up our topic of the week. As stated on the website, there is waste produced in every steps of food production yet we still would throw away some which counts for 8% of global emission. I just can’t believe how wasteful the food industry is. Aside from the film and the lecture, the website provided us one other major problem — food resource lost. As usual, those developing countries lose food unintentionally yet the developed countries are wasting food from the origin of the production to the consumers. We can deduce from our life experiences that people will throw away half left rice, ignore fruits that are bruised just by a little and these kind of actions accumulate into our “food throw away” culture. I can’t stop thinking why we just want to throw things away even with food since they are all the same for everyone. I guess this has been built in our blood that we have abundant resources and choices to be used so we can pick what we like to live in the moment. We are never thinking about the future. However, if one reads this website and sees that there are so many options that can be implemented now in order to reduce CO2 emission, he should be reflecting on himself and seek ways to help to achieve the goal.
Nevertheless, it is obvious that most of the solutions proposed can’t be done on an individual level such as promoting female education and restoration of forests yet one can still act in someways to push the implementation of these solutions starting by switching to a plant-based diet and introduce it to friends and family. As listed in the reading, there could be a 63% drop in CO2 emission by following a vegetarian diet and as said in the film, a plant-based diet can totally support the need of an adult if not better than meat diet. Moreover, one can support the restoration of forests by joining tree planting activities and post about it on social media which could help to spread the idea. One can also switch LED lights at home which can help to reduce energy use and maintenance costs. It is fabulous that we have these solutions in hand to solve the climate issues, but it is required from us and our government to implement these as quick as possible to save ourselves before sinking in the mud of desperation.