erik wrote:jute gyte wrote: know I'm a jerk, and not the most educated person around, but how is a reduction in eating meat going to save lives? People raise cattle for money. It's not like people who are starving to death are going to be able to pay for that grain.
I think eating less meat could help starving people by lowering the greenhouse footprint of the US (which might keep us all from biting the big one), and by lowering demand for grain-fed beef/etc. here (which may divert some supply to other markets).
The "long shadow" issue is about the possibly less obvious role that high meat consumption plays in global warming, considering the cost of deforestation to create land for cattle to graze on, the greenhouse gases emitted by the cattle, and the high energy cost of meat when you take into account all the resources that are needed to produce and transport it (water, land, huge quantities of grains, which require water, land, and likely pesticides based on petroleum and fertilizers based on natural gas, not to mention the other side effects of having huge masses of cows, such as the fact that they're all generally unhealthy and require for example lots of antibiotics to keep them alive, then you've got your transportation and refrigeration costs, which require more petroleum, etc.).
Also, you can look at it in terms of markets and supply and demand. If there is an inordinately high demand for some resource in a big rich country, people all over will scramble to try to meet that demand. In this case, the the disproportionately high demand for meat in the rich US leads to the diversion of grain output to feed animals rather than people. Look into the recent rise in corn costs due to an increase just in -interest- (not even use) in corn-based biofuels in the US, to get an idea of how demand for things here affects people all over. Another example on a different subject is China's demands for wood (met by nearby countries clear cutting their forests), coal (see Caravan Ray's comments), and metal (which caused things like theft of manhole covers to sell as scrap to China on the black market).
So, if we wanted the some of the grains to go to the starving people, rather than the rich people, the rich people would have to lower their demand by eating less meat, possibly by increasing the cost of eating meat through removal of subsidies and raising of levies. On a larger scale we could try to increase the profitability of selling grains to starving people by providing subsidies for doing so somehow, and by increasing the buying power of the starving people through grants/loans/etc. These are international level things, so they'd maybe have to happen through the UN or some other international outfit. These are all big things that seem like they're beyond the reach of an individual to effect or accomplish, but we can try to be part of a trend toward these goals by acting individually.
By the way, I highly recommend "Fast Food Nation" (the book, not the movie) for anyone who hasn't read it. It's very accessible, and it's a major eye opener. The author takes a pretty dry, not inflammatory look at things, and doesn't write in a holier than thou, preachy style at all. It's really more about how fast food has effected our culture and world than about trashing fast food, but the facts wind up speaking for themselves.