Meat Production, Climate Change, and Global Nutrition
Text by Emily McIssac, Photography by Sasha Tymoshenko
Intensive livestock production methods are linked to environmental issues such as species extinction, climate change, deforestation, depletion of soil, and water pollution. It’s hard to comprehend the link between the meat in our fridges and the destruction of the environment, but just multiply the number of meat packages in your fridge this week by the number of weeks in a year and multiply it again by the number of households in the country and again by the number of meat-eating countries in the world, and then you have an insanely large amount of meat packages. Almost all of these come from CAFOs (concentrated animal feeding operations), which mass-produce meat by keeping animals in confined and unsanitary spaces and by fattening them up with grains as fast as possible before slaughtering them. Not only is this cruel for the animals, but it’s also a huge waste of grain.