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Meat and the Environment // Wasted Resources
Wasted Resources
Raising animals for food requires massive amounts of land, food, energy, and water and contributes to animal suffering.
Food
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It takes up to 16 pounds of grain to produce just 1 pound of meat.
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Raising animals for food is grossly inefficient, because while animals eat large quantities of grain, they only produce small amounts of meat, dairy products, or eggs in return. This is why more than 70 percent of the grain and cereals that we grow in this country are fed to farmed animals. It takes up to 16 pounds of grain to produce just one pound of meat, and even fish on fish farms must be fed 5 pounds of wild-caught fish to produce one pound of farmed fish flesh.17,18 All animals require many times more calories, in the form of grain, soybeans, oats, and corn, than they can possibly return in the form of animal flesh for meat-eaters to consume.
The world's cattle alone consume a quantity of food equal to the caloric needs of 8.7 billion people—more than the entire human population on Earth.19 About 20 percent of the world's population, or 1.4 billion people, could be fed with the grain and soybeans fed to U.S. cattle alone.20 Learn more about the link between meat consumption and world hunger.
Read more.
17 Gold and Porritt.
18 Robbins, p. 298.
19 Mark Gold and Jonathon Porritt, "The Global Benefits of Eating Less Meat," 2004, p. 22.
20 Ibid.
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