In this week’s special issue devoted to food security, Science asks what it will take to feed 9 billion people by mid century.

Food insecurity—the inability of people to feed themselves—may rise if food supply cannot keep pace with population.  This is a concern that goes back over 200 years to Thomas Malthus.

One theme shows up in a few articles:  Can reducing meat consumption help in the battle to feed more people?

Erik Stokstad’s news feature (subscription required)¹ provides a nice lead:

The United States, for instance, has just 4.5% of the world’s population but accounts for about 15% of global meat consumption. Americans consume about 330 grams of meat a day on average—the equivalent of three quarter-pound hamburgers. In contrast, the U.S. Department of Agriculture recommends that most people consume just 142 to 184 grams of meat and beans daily. In the developing world, daily meat consumption averages just 80 grams. Those numbers suggest that people living in the United States and other wealthy nations could increase world grain supplies simply by forgoing that extra burger or chop.

However, he interviews researchers and cites studies that raise a number of issues potentially complicating this story…

• As meat consumption in developed nations decreases, the price of meat should decrease and become more affordable to people in the developing world, which could actually cause increased demand and meat consumption to rise globally by 13%.
• A study by the International Food Policy Research Institute’s Mark Rosegrant suggests that grain consumption would only rise slightly in the developing world.  As Stokstad reports,

Surprisingly, however, when the rich halved their meat habit, the poor didn’t necessarily get that much more grain—their largest source of calories. According to the model, per capita cereal consumption in developing nations rose by just 1.5%. That’s enough grain to ease hunger for 3.6 million malnourished children—but nowhere near the kinds of gains many expect from curbing meat consumption.

Stokstad argues the reason for this is a mismatch in grain fed to cattle vs. people.  In the developed world, for instance, farmers feed soybeans and corn to livestock, whereas people in developing nations in Asia eat more rice and wheat.  The gains in soybeans and corn therefore don’t necessarily translate into more food for people.

• When developed nations replace meat with pasta and bread, wheat prices worldwide rise, possibly threatening food insecurity to Asians who might no longer be able to afford the higher costs of wheat.

Following these assessments, Stokstad suggests

When all the pluses and minuses are added up, Rosegrant is confident that cutting meat consumption could ultimately help improve global food security. But “it’s a small contribution, like changing to fluorescent light bulbs” to fight global warming, he says.

While it’s important to consider unexpected twists and surprises, I’m not completely convinced by these arguments for a number of reasons, many of which Stokstad offers as caveats to the above assessment:

• As another review article by Charles Godfray et al.² in the same Science issue notes, about one third of the global supply of grain is fed to livestock.  That’s A LOT of food energy.  If you consider that you can feed many more people on a hectare of grain crops than livestock,  that’s a significant boost in food energy to the world, especially if the developed world cuts meat consumption significantly further than the 50% reduction Rosegrant assumes.   Some might argue that this is impractical—the world would never go vegetarian en masse.  Maybe so.  However, if the question is can we feed significantly more people by reducing meat consumption, the answer is clearly yes.  Whether we actually chose to reduce meat consumption enough is another (normative) question.
• As Stokstad notes, in many regions of the developing world, like Latin America and Africa, corn is a dietary staple, so diverting these grains from livestock to people will add more crops to the global markets and drop prices, encouraging greater consumption by a sizable fraction of the developing world.
• What about Asians, who eat more rice and wheat?  Stokstad seems to believe that crop substitutions are unlikely:

It’s true that as demand for corn drops, some farmers might start growing wheat instead. In general, however, climate, soil, or water availability often limit a farmer’s ability to switch crops easily. Iowa soybean growers, for instance, can’t start growing rice, which requires heavy irrigation.)

Yeah, that’s true for rice, but Stokstad solves his own dilemma because Iowans and most of the rest of the American Midwest COULD grow wheat in areas where surplus corn is currently grown and fed to livestock (if the relative price of wheat vs corn incentivizes the substitution).   Now we have increased core staples (corn, soybeans, wheat) to all developing regions.

• Note that increased wheat production would also alleviate the purported shortage of wheat experienced by Asians as the developed world substituted more grain for meat.
• As the Godfray article points out, livestock also lead to significant increases in methane emissions.

Godfray also adds a few points why reducing meat consumption may not be a complete salvation:

• Meat types vary in their production efficiency, meaning that some meats like poultry require less energy and water than other meats like beef.  Better breeding might be able to increase efficiency even more.
• A lot for livestock are grass fed on marginal pastures on which we can’t grow grains.
• Livestock are often important for other things, like manure fertilizers, plowing and transportation

There’s something to be said about the first point.  As the last post shows, eating beef is more energy intensive than poultry.  The second point is irrelevant— just because some animals are raised on marginal lands doesn’t change the fact that we still feed one third of global grain supply to the remaining livestock.   Again, the point is not to say that we need to eliminate meat consumption just for the sake of it.  We are saying that we can recoup 33% of the grains fed to livestock not fed on grass.  That’s the issue.

Bottom line: I applaud the search for factors that could potentially complicate simple explanations.  That’s a good thing for anticipating unexpected surprises that could appear during a big shift like dramatically reducing meat consumption.  And to be fair, all of these articles acknowledge that reducing meat can be part of an overall strategy to feed more people.

However, the Science articles err on the side of being too dismissive of the impacts that reducing meat consumption can have.

Is this a dose of reality considering that people won’t reduce meat consumption that much?   Maybe.  But I’d rather see Science address what is possible in addition to what is probable.  What we mainly get is the latter.

¹Stokstad, E. (2010) Could Less Meat Mean More Food? Science 327: 810 – 811.
DOI: 10.1126/science.327.5967.810

²Godfray, H.C. et al. (2010) Food Security: The Challenge of Feeding 9 Billion People. Science 327: 812 – 818. DOI: 10.1126/science.1185383

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Photo credit:  http://www.flickr.com/photos/splorp/ / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

MSNBC is giving front page coverage to a potentially serious problem that scientists identified years ago—microbes are becoming drug resistant because of antibiotic use in meat production.

Researchers say the overuse of antibiotics in humans and animals has led to a plague of drug-resistant infections that killed more than 65,000 people in the U.S. last year — more than prostate and breast cancer combined. And in a nation that used about 35 million pounds of antibiotics last year, 70 percent of the drugs — 28 million pounds — went to pigs, chickens and cows. Worldwide, it’s 50 percent.

Governments are starting to realize the urgency of this issue:

The rise in the use of antibiotics is part of a growing problem of soaring drug resistance worldwide, The Associated Press found in a six-month look at the issue. As a result, killer diseases like malaria, tuberculosis and staph are resurging in new and more deadly forms.

In response, the pressure against the use of antibiotics in agriculture is rising. The World Health Organization concluded this year that surging antibiotic resistance is one of the leading threats to human health, and the White House last month said the problem is “urgent.”

….[T]hree federal agencies tasked with protecting public health — the Food and Drug Administration, CDC and U.S. Department of Agriculture — declared drug-resistant diseases stemming from antibiotic use in animals a “serious emerging concern.” And FDA deputy commissioner Dr. Joshua Sharfstein told Congress this summer that farmers need to stop feeding antibiotics to healthy farm animals.

However, entrenched special interests continue to be as resistant as the germs our food system is producing:

Farm groups and pharmaceutical companies argue that drugs keep animals healthy and meat costs low, and have defeated a series of proposed limits on their use.

As Michael Pollan, Peter Singer, Wendell Berry, and others have noted, this is what results from the treadmill of production and the Walmartization of our food system.   When the only thing that matters is producing the most food for the least cost, our modern industrialized food system—and antibiotic resistance—is what we get.

One farmer who buys into antibiotic use echoes this conventional wisdom—that the most fundamental principle of food production is about lowering cost:

“Now the public doesn’t see that,” he said. “They’re only concerned about resistance, and they don’t care about economics because, ‘As long as I can buy a pork chop for a buck 69 a pound, I really don’t care.’ But we live in a world where you have to consider economics in the decision-making process of what we do.”

Another farmer, who eschewed antibiotic use, is one of many who are bucking conventional wisdom:

Kremer sells about 1,200 pigs annually. And a year after “kicking the habit,” he says he saved about $16,000 in vet bills, vaccinations and antibiotics.

“I don’t know why it took me that long to wake up to the fact that what we were doing, it was not the right thing to do and that there were alternatives,” says Kremer, stooping to scratch a pig behind the ear. “We were just basically killing ourselves and society by doing this.”

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Photo credit:  http://www.flickr.com/photos/wwworks/ / CC BY 2.0

In a NY Times column yesterday, Sorry, Vegans: Brussels Sprouts Like to Live, Too, Natalie Angier pushes the boundaries of what we consider to be ethical eating.

She works through a series of biochemical and physiological examples of how plants are amazing—almost animal-like.  With one of my undergraduate majors in botany, I agree:  Plants are amazing and animal-like.

Attacked by an herbivove?  Plants can emit volatile chemicals to warn other individuals of the same species (analogous to a warning call). They can turn on chemical defenses that make themselves less palatable (an immune response).  And in an amazing display of evolution, some plants can even send signals to the predators of the herbivore to come get a free meal (analogous to getting your big brother to beat up the bully picking on you). For example, some corn varieties when being eaten by insect larva emit a chemical signal to attract wasps that lay eggs in the herbivorous pests, turning the pest into a tasty meal.

But being animal-like doesn’t mean we ought to give plants the same ethical considerations as animals.  Sure, plants are amazing, but that’s not a particularly effective ethical argument for diet choices for a couple of reasons:

• Plants, without well-developed brains and nervous systems, are not sentient beings with a capacity to suffer or a will to live (sorry Brussels sprouts).  They are watery bags of enzymes and genes with exquisite biochemical and physiological responses.  They are essentially green cellulose robots that are evolutionarily and genetically programmed to respond in complex ways to complex and multifaceted environmental stimuli.  Eating plants, as many ethicists would argue, is therefore less morally challenging than eating a sentient mammal that can feel pain and possibly possesses a will to live.  Just like smashing a mosquito is less morally challenging than smashing your pet dog.
• We have to eat something.  And until the day comes when we can mass produce food from tissue culture (don’t laugh, people are trying to culture meat in test tubes), we will have to eat living organisms.  Three arguments strongly favor plants over animals in terms of food ethics and sustainability:  (1) Plants have less capacity to suffer and feel pain (although some primitive animals like mussels and oysters may fall into this category), (2) we can feed a lot more people on a diet of plants than a diet of animals, as noted in an earlier post, and (3) growing plants for food releases fewer greenhouse gases than raising livestock.

It’s hard to tell whether Angier is being serious or satirical (and whether the rest of the blogosphere and I are being punked by developing an elaborate rebuttal).  The following passage suggests the former:

But before we cede the entire moral penthouse to “committed vegetarians” and “strong ethical vegans,” we might consider that plants no more aspire to being stir-fried in a wok than a hog aspires to being peppercorn-studded in my Christmas clay pot. This is not meant as a trite argument or a chuckled aside. Plants are lively and seek to keep it that way.

Nevertheless, her argument is flawed because it asks us to equate the moral consideration of sentient animals (like pigs) and plants.  I don’t know of a single ethicist who would make this argument given what we know about intelligence and sentience.

Furthermore, by equating plants and animals ethically, she implicitly uses this to justify eating meat because plants are objects of moral consideration too.  As the title of her article insinuates, if we are no longer able to eat Brussels sprouts, we must not be able to eat anything because of ethical equivalency.  We are led to conclude that this is absurd, so, therefore, we should just chill out and eat anything we want.

What Angier’s argument lacks in ethical rigor, it makes up in one important way:  It asks people to be thoughtful about what it means to eat other organisms.  Humanity should recognize and marvel at these amazing plant evolutionary adaptations—even be thankful for them—and do what we can to preserve them over the long haul.

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Photo credit:  http://www.flickr.com/photos/sea-turtle/ / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0