Animal v Plant based is the wrong debate

Review of Sacred Cow: the Nutritional, Environmental and Ethical Case for Better Meat.

I went vegan in 1995 at the age of 19. If I had seen the movie Sacred Cow: the Nutritional, Environmental and Ethical Case for Better Meat before that, I might not have.

Two things led me to choose a vegan lifestyle. The first was undoubtedly my friends and my community. The 90s punk rock subculture that I was a part of was largely a vegan scene. My friends in Montreal, where I studied and played music for many years, were almost all vegan.

But for me there was something more important than being part of the scene. I went vegan to save the planet.

Within a few weeks of eliminating animal foods from my diet, I could quote every figure in every vegan environmentalist pamphlet ever written. I knew how much water was required to produce a steak, how much grain (that could well have been fed to hungry humans) went into producing a roast chicken, and how much methane was farted by the average cow. My favorite quote from one of these pamphlets was something to the effect of “If every human consumed as much meat as Canadians do, we would need seven planets to support our current population. If every human consumed as much meat as the average Chinese person, we could support seven times our current population on this planet.” (Given that increased Chinese meat consumption doesn’t seem to have forced us to colonize Mars as yet, there was probably something wrong with the calculations on many of these.)

When I left Montreal, I took my strong views about veganism with me. I began a career in the NGO sector working on issues of human rights and environmental sustainability. From a very young age I started traveling around the world to work in solidarity with poor and marginalized communities. Most of the communities I visited were farming communities and almost none of them were vegetarian; certainly none of them had heard of a vegan. To survive I immediately had to downgrade my eating requirements to “lacto-ovo vegetarian” and in some places I still struggled. I can remember leaving the Philippines after a 3 day conference in 2002 feeling weak and undernourished; in Azerbaijan I seem to have contracted a water borne parasite from eating too many salads.

Working with small farmers gave me a new perspective on the question of sustainable eating. Often I would be asked to help local NGO staff and communities set up a project and then have the opportunity to revisit the same community years later to measure progress. There are many ways to measure progress; donors each had their own survey to be filled out by people who often couldn’t read and could rarely understand what was being asked of them. But the easiest way for me to tell whether or not a given farm was doing well was just to look down. The dirt tells the story.

At the start of one project in Bangladesh, the dirt was dead. The land had been farmed with commercial rice for a number of years and was now deficient in a number of key minerals and contaminated with heavy metals. After taking a soil sample, my scientist colleagues were able to identify the specific qualities of the soil and suggest plants – grasses mostly – that might be able to grow in such an environment.

The plants that the community grew on that dry land could not be eaten by humans. But they could be eaten by goats, the ruminant of choice in Bangladesh and many other parts of South Asia. Ruminants – cows, sheep, deer and goats – are magic. With a few months and some careful management, they can turn an almost lifeless topsoil into dark, rich, fragrant dirt teaming with life.

This experience made me question what I had learned from those vegan pamphlets years ago. The farms that had killed the soil had been growing rice, not meat. Could it be that the problem was not what was produced but rather how it was being produced?

The rice farming that had destroyed the land was based on an agricultural model designed in the USA in the 1950s and 60s and then exported to the rest of the world. “Industrial agriculture,” is based around mono-cropping. Where I currently live in South Africa, to travel anywhere by road entails looking at row after row of corn; in other places it may be wheat, soy or rice. Mono-cropping is something that nature never intended. Plants naturally live in diverse habitats. Lots of other plants, as well as insects, herbivores and carnivores make up an ecosystem within which plants have evolved to thrive. When humans grow only one kind of crop, the soil quickly becomes nutrient deficient. In order to continue to produce crops, new nutrients must be put in, usually through chemical fertilizers derived from fossil fuels. All over South Asia, farmers go into debt to pay for chemical fertilizer at the start of the growing season. In India, this has led to an epidemic of farmer suicides as farmers often can’t repay the money they’ve borrowed. Industrial agriculture is to a great extent an offshoot of the fossil fuel industry.

20-year-old me (who was addicted to tofu, hated fossil fuel companies, and went vegan as a way to show support for poor farmers in India) would have been horrified.

On the other side, industrial agriculture produces waste. Some of this I did know about as a vegan. Waste from pig farms and chicken farms can be dangerous for humans and for natural ecosystems if it gets into the ground water or contaminates rivers. And in India, waste burned from wheat fields in Punjab has made the air around Delhi almost unbreathable at certain times of the year.

As my views evolved, I lived in hope that these issues may be picked up by the vegan community and by people who worry about food production more generally. Those hopes were disappointed. Writers like George Monbiot (a journalist with whom I’m usually in complete agreement) were doubling down on veganism as a way to save the planet without really delving into a critique of industrial agriculture.

So when I first heard of a movie that might address some of these issues, I was excited to be able to get a sneak peak. Sacred Cow is more than I could have hoped for. Finally we might be having the right debate.

The wrong debate – the one we’ve been having since the 1960s when Rachel Carson wrote Silent Spring – is the one I’d read about in the vegan pamphlets. The idea that there’s one kind of farming that kills animals and another that doesn’t is simply untrue. Vegetable farms rely on good quality topsoil, and that soil is either coming from fossil fuels or from animals. Those not living under the illusion that we can continue to dig up fossil fuels and release greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere must agree that animals are needed for sustainable agriculture.

There is a powerful scene in the movie when Lierre Keith, a former vegan, tells the story of her organic lettuce garden. As anyone who’s tried to grow lettuce in the USA will tell you, there is a season when the crop will be ravaged by slugs on a nightly basis. Farmers who don’t want to spray pesticides will pick the insects off the lettuce one by one and squish them. For Lierre, who had vowed not to kill animals, this was not an option. So she went to the store and bought lettuce. As she was about to purchase the lettuce, she had an epiphany. “Who am I kidding?” she thought. “Someone killed the slugs so that I can eat this lettuce.”

And that’s when agriculture is at its least harmful. If one consumes soy, for example, one is almost certainly party to a system that kills all kinds of animals in order to continue to mono-crop soy beans. Mono-cropping and storing grains means controlling for pests – most of them insects and rodents. Animals that eat the pests, among them spiders, owls and foxes, also suffer. Some will die from consuming prey that has consumed poison.

There is no agriculture that is “clean” in terms of not killing animals. But there are two kinds of agriculture: industrial agriculture and regenerative agriculture. This is what the movie presents as the true dichotomy in terms of how our food is grown.

Industrial agriculture sees farming as a kind of assembly line. You have inputs (chemical fertilizers and pesticides derived from fossil fuels), you have an assembly line (the time it takes for crops to grow from seed to harvest) and you have outputs (the crop itself and any waste products that must be destroyed). When viewed in this way, the business of agriculture becomes about minimizing cost for inputs, minimizing time required in the field to maximize crop yield, and ensuring that food (especially perishable food) can move quickly to market. In this way we can talk about industrial agriculture as linear – inputs become food and waste. Any recycling happens on top of the core logic of the system as an optional extra.

The alternative to industrial farming is regenerative farming. People use different terms for this kind of farming (I personally prefer the term used by the academic and researcher Miguel Altieri, agroecology). But whatever we call it, regenerative farming is how farming was done prior to the discovery that fossil fuels could be turned into fertilizer. Regenerative farming is cyclical, meaning that today’s outputs are tomorrow’s inputs. Plant waste may be eaten by animals whose manure will be used to create better quality topsoil. Cows and other ruminants literally provide their own food when fields they have grazed are allowed to regenerate with the fertilizer and grass seeds they’ve excreted.

When done properly, regenerative agriculture can not only be carbon neutral, it can be carbon negative. This is especially true of farms that include cows and other ruminants. Through rotational grazing, topsoil can be added to land, sequestering carbon out of the atmosphere. This offsets any potential damage done by methane in cow farts, a topic which the movie covers in some detail.

The movie puts a lot of emphasis on the environmental argument for raising animals as part of a regenerative agriculture system, but it does go over the other arguments as well. One argument dear to my heart is the health argument. As someone who was vegan for a long time, I can attest to the fact that it is possible to survive on a vegan diet. But most nutrients are more available to the human body when they are eaten in animal form (heme iron and vitamin A are two examples). And some nutrients that are essential for human health, like vitamin B12, are simply not found in the plant kingdom. The doctors and nutrition experts interviewed at the beginning of the film make a strong case that meat in some form should be part of the diet of anyone who wants to optimize health and nutrition.

(As a health coach, I might state the case a little less strongly. I often help people who choose to be vegan or vegetarian make dietary changes and add in supplements that enable them to thrive. But it’s also the case that many of my clients are sensitive to at least one of the anti-nutrients found in plants. Gluten is perhaps the most famous of these. Eliminating those plant foods from the diet can have huge benefits for many people.)

Does the movie have flaws? Of course it does. I would have loved more discussion on traditional agriculture systems and things like poly-cropping, for example. And none of the arguments are presented in enough detail to survive dissection by an intelligent vegan. (Those who want to delve further into those details should check out the footnotes in the Sacred Cow book, which I hope to review at a later date).

But on the whole this is an amazing movie. For many it will be the start of a debate around a question which affects us all: how can we create food systems that will nourish ourselves, our ecosystems and our planet at the present moment and the foreseeable future?

We may not all agree on the answer. But, at least Sacred Cow forces us to ask the right question.

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