Eating Lower on the
Food Chain
Shhh, girls!!
I want to hear
about this!

Union of Concerned Scientists: List
of Top Things You Can Do to Help
the Planet
• #1. Drive less
• #2. Eat less red meat and
dairy products
• #3. Conserve on heating and
cooling costs in the
home

Cow products are the worst!
• Nearly 87% of our agricultural land
(50% for cows alone!) is engaged in
animal production for food
I BEG
YOUR
PARDON
?

U.S. Crop % that goes to feed cows
• 80 - 90% of our
soybeans, oats,
wheat and corn
What! You have a problem with
that?

Cow efficiency
• It takes 16 lbs of wheat to make 1 lb of
cow
• 5000 gallons of water per lb of cow
• (A lb of soybeans only takes about 260
gallons of water)

• A typical North American Diet requires twice
as much water to produce as less meat-
intensive diets common in Asia and Europe.
• Eating lower on food chain : same water
could feed double the people
• Making animal products use ½ the water in
US
• 1 dairy cow drinks about 29 gallons of water
a day, and needs 40 additional gallons for
sanitation, producing only 8 gallons of milk
Got Water?

Pollution (Deep Doo-Doo!)
• EPA : agricultural runoff = primary pollution source for
60% of U.S. polluted rivers and streams
• Animal ag. = 130 times more than human waste and
equivalent to 5 tons per person.
• AND ITS NOT TREATED BY A SEWAGE TREATMENT
PLANT!
• The manure from a 200-head dairy operation produces
as much nitrogen as sewage from a town of 10,000
people!
• One dairy cow produces 120 lbs of waste a day, 12
times as much as a person
• This is a total of 22 tons per cow per year.

Got Trees?
• Eating a plant based
diet personally saves
an acre of trees
annually
• 260 million acres of
U.S. forests have
been cleared for
livestock production.

Our foreign suppliers
• Throughout Central and South America,
grazing and feed grain production are the
leading economic forces behind rainforest
destruction.
• Every quarter lb hamburger costs Mother
Nature 55 square feet of forest land!
• U.S. is the world’s top beef importer.
• A fast food restaurant can claim to buy
from a U.S. supplier but suppliers are not
required to declare the nation
of origin of their products.

Got Petroleum?
• Americans consume nearly as much fossil
fuels at the supermarket as at the gas pump.
• The typical American burns about 530
gallons of gas each year driving.
• Eating a meat based diet gobbles up an
additional 400 gallons of oil.

• One acre of corn requires 140 gallons
of oil to produce.
• Eating corn directly maximizes the
energy investment.
• If the corn goes to livestock, only
about a fifth of the protein is returned
as food, four-fifths is lost

Additional tidbits
• One quarter of all antibiotics produced are
used in the U.S. for food animals
• Foreign originated veggies may have been
sprayed with DDT
• L.A. water is full of DDT, washed off from
foreign fruits and veggies!
• DDT is stored in fat – linked to breast
cancer (90% breast cancer patients have
DDT in their systems)