Tuesday, February 26, 2013

Numbers

Lately I've been wondering if me eating less meat has any affect on anything at all. So I decided to do some calculations...

The average American person eats .5 pounds of meat per day. That's a decent amount of meat - 8 oz. I guess you figure that a 4 oz. piece of meat for two meals a day would equal 8 oz. Using that number, if I abstain from eating meat for a year, I would save 180 pounds of meat.

I want to have kids around the age of 25, and I think that's pretty doable. Right now I'm almost 19. If I eat a meatless diet for the next six years, I will have saved 1,080 pounds of meat.

Once I have kids, I'm most likely going to be cooking the majority of the meals (with possible help from my husband). If I cook the meals, meatless meals, for the entire time that my children are in my house - say I have two kids four years apart (about the average number of children for American families) and a husband for a grand total of four people in my family - I would save 15,840 pounds of meat in those 22 years. Granted, my kids could eat meals in other places, and maybe my husband has meat here and there - but I'm trying to have the best possible scenario. Also, maybe my kids don't eat as much when they're younger, but most certainly may make up for it in their adolescent years.

By that time, I'm 43 years old and have saved 16,920 pounds of meat. My kids are out of the house and making their own decisions. But maybe I have convinced them to be vegetarian - or at least influenced the amount of meat that they want to eat. Say they eat half as much as a normal person, .25 pounds of meat per day, taking into consideration what I have taught them for the past 22 years about our current meat industry. By the time they have potentially have kids, they have saved another 630 pounds of meat each if they have don't have kids for seven years after leaving the house, for a total of 1,260 pounds. Who knows how they raise their children. I'm assuming it would be with less meat...but I'll leave that out of the equation for clarity.

Fast forward 32 years to age 75. My husband now eats .25 pounds of meat a day instead of none because he really likes it. That's another 5,760 pounds I save by abstaining and 2,880 pounds he saves for a total of 8,640 pounds of meat.

I'm going to be optimistic and say I live to be 100, which is definitely possible with the rate at which modern medicine is advancing. Realistically, myself age 75 to 100 would not be eating .5 pounds of meat per day - probably more like .25. My husband's still eating .25 pounds. By abstaining from eating meat from age 75 to 100, I save 2,250 pounds of meat. My husband saves the same amount by having .25 instead of .5, just like he has been for the last few decades. In total that's 4,500 pounds of meat between us.

Add all those numbers up and in my lifetime, I have saved 31,320 pounds of meat.

With an average chicken, you can get about 2 pounds of meat. Cows provide an average of 585 pounds. Pigs give you 200 pounds. And cats I'm just going to estimate (since where would you easily find on the Internet how much edible meat a cat produces) - 8 pounds.

That's about:

15,660 chickens
53 cows
110 pigs
or

3,132 cats.

I include cats because I want to induce a squeamish reaction. If I tell you that in your lifetime you will eat 10,000 chickens, you may say okay, that seems high but I can see that. If I tell you that you will eat 3,132 cats - that's repulsive. I agree, it's repulsive. I would go out on a limb - literally as in even climbing a tree - to save one cat. Would I do that for one chicken? Something to think about.

But even if you don't care about the lives of animals, save your cats - if I abstain from eating meat for my whole life from this point forward and reasonably influence those around me, that's 15,660 chickens soaked in fecal soup and contaminated with E-coli that my family and I don't eat. That's 53 cows' feces that doesn't contaminate the environment - because yes industrialized cows produce toxic waste. That's 110 pigs that won't spread Zoonotic diseases, which are the cause of about 90% of all influenza.

So I come back to my original point...is being a vegetarian worth it? I didn't address in here occasional meals containing meat, which is very likely. Or the fact that maybe I'll eat fish. Or maybe my kids will go out to eat all the time because they don't like vegetarian food. Maybe my husband decides that he will eat a .5 pound breakfast sandwich every day from Starbucks with bacon and a beef patty, which is disgusting but maybe. There is an infinite amount of permutations of how much eat can be eaten and when. 31,320 pounds of meat is on the high side and is a rough estimate that could be majorly subject to change - especially if the meat industry changed its procedures and habits.

Even though that's a high number, looked at in relation to the amount of animals farmed industrially even per day it's miniscule. It is easy to become so overwhelmed with the amount of change you can't enact, and forget about the amount of change that you can. Change is like the domino effect which I hinted at earlier with the influences that I could have on my family. If we don't start anywhere, we don't start at all. Maybe my kids didn't eat meat for the rest of their lives and influenced a good number of people. Maybe enough people stop eating meat over time that the market has to respond to the consumer demand and the system has to change. Maybe not. All I know is that I don't want to throw my hands up in the air right now and by the time I'm 100 say that I haven't even made a conscious effort. If my eating habits only stop one cow from being brutally killed, one person from becoming infected with E-coli, or are as impactful that they stop a Zoonotic pandemic that originated from one pig, then I have succeeded.



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