The ethics of consuming animal flesh have been debated since the beginning of time.
Some people claim all animals are created equally, that they all have feelings and senses and can cry just like us.
Meanwhile, others claim all animals are not in fact considered equal  — some are beautiful and loyal, faithful companions that serve us well, while others are just tasty. Regardless of your personal opinion of why one should or shouldn’t eat meat, the fact of the matter is that industrialized agriculture is killing our environment.
When people actually had to kill their own food and took only what they needed, the food market was as simple (or as difficult) as the hunt itself. Now, the meat market is as simple as supply and demand. The more we eat, the more is supplied.
Unfortunately for the environment, Americans eat a lot.
With the top four meat suppliers controlling more than 80 percent of the market, large-scale meat production has become more than just what we eat — it has become a way of life.
“At about 5 percent of the world’s population, we ‘process’ (that is, grow and kill) nearly 10 billion animals a year, more than 15 percent of the world’s total,” New York Times food columnist Mark Bittman wrote in 2008.
With so many animals being “processed” at such an extreme rate, certain adjustments to the land are made — most, if not all of which, have ridiculously negative impacts on the environment.
More than half of Central America’s rainforest has been cleared to provide beef to North America by implementing larger, more efficient farms, according to the Rainforest Action Network.
A loss of trees means a loss of fresh air and scenery, but in the case of the rainforest, it’s also an extreme loss of biodiversity we may never get back.
Essentially, the only thing efficient about these demon farms is their ability to completely suck the life out of the land on which they thrive. Manure liquidation and crowding have caused such pollution problems in their surrounding towns that people have become unable to live off what should have been sustainable land.
“In McDonald County, Miss., home to 13 million broiler chickens and a few hundred thousand turkeys, every stream is on a government ‘impaired water body’ list,” according to a 2004 article by the San Francisco Chronicle.
If it were an isolated incident, maybe we could all turn our heads away from the facts, but it’s not. More than half of the prosecutions by water authorities for serious pollution are given to farmers, according a New Scientist magazine article.
These large-scale farmers aren’t thinking about our health or well-being. So why on earth are we paying these environmentally uncompassionate tycoons to continue these malpractices?
Allow me to reiterate: For every dollar we spend on Tyson, Swift, Cargill or any other factory farm, we’re telling them it’s OK to poison our land and essentially poison us.
So stop paying them. It’s really easy, or at least it is during Lent.
For the next 40 days, try to make a difference, not only in the way you eat but what you eat. Eat from family farms, or even go vegetarian for a month. It’s not that difficult.
Priyanka Bhatia is a 19-year-old pre-veterinary medicine freshman with a minor in environmental management systems. Follow her on Twitter @TDR_Pbhatia.
 
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