Environmental Costs of Your Favorite Foods
By: Anthony Adragna
Published: April 19, 2011

It's quite easy to forget when browsing through the options in your local supermarket that someone had to grow everything there (in some form) for it to arrive in your cart. With Earth Day this Friday, it's time to take a moment and consider how some of your favorite foods were made. Many of them have shadowy histories and enormous environmental costs hidden. Let's examine some of them.
1) Carbon Dioxide Emissions: In 2006, the United Nations released an important paper called "Livestock's Long Shadow." It found that over 9 percent of carbon dioxide emissions came from livestock and that 37% of methane and 65% of nitrous oxide came from the animals. New Zealand officials determined that livestock account for 1/2 of all their carbon dioxide emissions and American scientists estimate that 20 percent of carbon dioxide emissions come from cattle. With human demand for meat continuing to rise, so will these figures.
2) Animal Manure: To illustrate the enormity of this problem, consider the situation within one 10-mile radius in Michigan. In that area, there are 10 Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs). You probably know them better as factory farms, where hundreds of animals are contained within extremely small quarters. They also produce a lot of waste. Those ten operations (because they cannot really be called farms) produced 60 lagoons of waste, which hold 400 million gallons of animal waste. This waste can also seep into the area's water systems. There are two major problems with that. First, large amounts of any waste (animal or human) add nitrates and phosphates into the water. These can cause health problems in humans like bacterial infections or even spontaneous abortions. Secondly, high concentration of animal waste deprives the water of oxygen, which kills fish and other wildlife. Now, take a moment and imagine what would happen if one of those animal waste lagoons broke.
3) Water Resources: Even without any pollution from animal wastes, the demands on our water resources to raise animals are enormous. Estimates vary widely, but author John Robbins wrote about the water needs for particular crops in his book The Food Revolution.  He says that it takes 60, 108, 168, and 229 gallons of water to produce a pound of potatoes, wheat, corn and rice, respectively, but that a pound of beef requires 12,000 gallons of water by comparison. It takes thousands of pounds of grain each year per cow as well. In factoring in the animal's water footprint, you have to consider all the water it takes to grow those grains.
4) Deforestation: As the demand for meat grows throughout the world, deforestation grows as well. Ranchers increasingly cut down area trees to make room for their livestock. With the loss of rainforest and other valuable ecosystems, hundreds of plant and animal species are eliminated from the Earth.
Consider this information as you make your next purchases. There are many farmers out there who practice sustainable farming methods and look to reduce their carbon footprints.
Photo by macieklew