COM103e: Just a little over half a century ago, the number of animals raised for food has more than tripled to meet the ever-increasing: Critique and Evaluation Assignment, SUSS, Singapore

Just a little over half a century ago, the number of animals raised for food has more than tripled to meet the ever-increasing demand for cheap and accessible meat, dairy, and eggs.

Raising lots of animals for food is destroying our planet. It takes a lot of lands, water, and precious resources to raise these animals and grow feed for them just so that they can end up on our plates. The production of corn and soy takes up more than a third of America’s agricultural land, despite humans consuming less than 10 percent of it.

Livestock consumes the vast majority of these crops. According to an article published in The Guardian, researchers at Oxford University found that without meat and dairy consumption we could use around 75 percent less land for agriculture globally. In addition to destroying Earth’s water and air, raising animals for meat on a massive scale uses countless acres of land, destroying vital ecosystems, and harming wildlife and biodiversity.

Sadly, the destruction linked to our meat obsession does not end there. While most meat and dairy companies intentionally do not publish their climate emissions, in 2017, The Guardian attempted to calculate the air pollution impact of animal agriculture.

Using the most comprehensive data from the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, The Guardian estimated that the top 20 meat and dairy companies emitted more greenhouse gas in 2016 than all of Germany, Europe’s biggest climate polluter.

What’s more, three of the world’s largest meat producers, JBS, Cargill, and Tyson, emitted nearly as many greenhouse gases as the biggest oil companies, including Exxon, BP, and Shell. According to the Environmental Defense Fund, if every American had one meat-free meal per week, it would be the equivalent of taking over 5 million cars off our roads annually.

Meat reduction and shifting to more sustainable and healthier plant proteins have the potential to put an end to unhealthy industrial farming practices. Thankfully, there’s already a global shift away from factory-farmed meat and towards healthier plant-based eating.

So what can you do to reduce factory farming’s environmental impact, help save animals from factory farms, and be more sustainable? Simply eat fewer animal products and only purchase meat from small independent farms.

Together, we can help protect the planet, our health, and countless animals. By reducing our meat consumption, we can turn the tide—not to mention improve the lives of billions of animals at factory farms. It’s high time we make a change.