Zack Pascal
Ana June
ENG 220-036
11/5/2015
source : Morgue file http://mrg.bz/kwyrDZ
MEAT INDUSTRY IMPACTS OF FARTS AND INDUSTRY
Livestock
is massive industry which greatly impacts the USA in behaviors, expectations
and more far reaching effects. I have the impression of the, ever expanding,
food industry growing in unsustainable direction which focuses far too much on
livestock production. So this paper introduces economic concepts of good types,
how big the livestock market is, what livestock does to people in the USA and
external impacts, and what good alternatives exist to livestock in the food
industry.
2.
Market Concepts
A
few relevant economics terms need to be mentioned and explained for this paper,
they are all very straight forward so don’t panic. The first term is market; this can be as broad or
specific as needed. In this case the market
includes every food item available for purchase. Looking at the food market in this way allows us to get a
grand overall perspective of what types of foods are purchased.
The
next concept is frequently presented as three terms, they are: inferior good, normal good and luxury good. These are immediately
straight forward concepts. Inferior good
is, with in this context, a food you buy when objectively short on money. This
is your grains and rice, the super basic food stuffs that would be considered
bland by its self, but it beats starving. However the food market is a
non-disposable good, you cannot simply stop eating when you can’t afford it,
instead shifting to extremes of the cheapest possible food.
Normal goods,
are the majority bulk of products in existence. When a person has more money
the growth these foods are very directly predictable. More money means more normal goods are purchased, however in
the case of food products saturation is a real thing that prevent infinite
scaling without pre-set assumptions beyond this paper.
Luxury goods
are products are purely unneeded to get by. In the case of the food market luxury goods are your prime steaks,
wines and, yes, organic food. Luxury
goods grow at a very slow rate in comparison to normal goods, and typically
do not co-exist with inferior goods outside of extreme cases of opportunity
cost.
Opportunity cost
is a bread and butter basic of economic concept, which can be reduced to a
“This or That” type description, but is not used in a “This, AND that”, the allowance for more is
normally a function of time or money, and the act of picking is which someone
rather have over another good. This can be changed by seemly any number of
external forces, so for example “I have had too many burgers lately” could be a
food market relevant factor into its self. These self-examinations of worth of
goods exists in a permament state of what was given up.
And
to round this out because this is relevant for the end of the paper, substitute goods in this case are foods
that can be immediately replaced with no loss of benefit so the choice boils
down to what is cheaper.
3.
Perspective of meat as a good
Fairly straight forward
livestock have economically been a luxury
good even in barter systems. Intuitively meat takes more resources than
plants grown to feed them. The reason why livestock and herd based shepherds
used animals is because they would allow them to use more resources of the
land. As far as herbs went, grasses were otherwise impossible for humans to
digest without the livestock as a medium. Back before the great cultivation of
land this livestock eating feed and pasture the owners could not themselves
digest. Now with the extreme modernization and efficiency of farms it’s much
easier to create farms specifically with food that can be, without another
consumer to turn it to meat, be consumed. Instead meat presents more clearly
inefficient uses of farm land which is exemplified NPR’s illustration of the
resources used to make a 1/4th pound of ham burger: 6.7 pounds of
grain and forage, 52.8 water for the cattle and crops, 74.5 square feet of
simple land for grazing and 1036 Btus for all the industry in that space, which
is far harder to relate.
4.
How large is the Meat Market
Now
that we have some basic concepts laid out it’ll be much easier to lay out how
huge the market is. Even with the previously held impressions, the real world
statistics are interesting. Let us start with the most fowl of industries, boiler
chicken. Boiler chicken refers specifically to chickens bred to mature
extremely quickly in 6 weeks to then be immediately slaughtered. The current projected
by the USDA consumption rate of boiler chickens is a staggering 88.8 pounds per
person in the USA. This statistic is year 2015. Likewise the USDA projected
statistic for total red meat in the USA in 105.2 pounds per person in 2015. The
USA’s total projected meat in pounds per person including red meat, all birds;
Turky, non-boiler chickens, at 210.8 pounds of meat which when put on yearly
scale is slightly less than two thirds of a pound every day, which is straight
up staggering. Given the common stat of 318.9 million people in the USA, as of
2014, results in a hard to grasp value of 6.706467e10 which pulled out of
scientific notation is 67,064,670,000 pounds of meat. Thankfully per capita
statistics are far easier to grasp.
Using
strictly per capita data between nations the USA is still the consumer leader but
with a couple nations biting the USA’s heels in this market. The following top
5 is from data 2009 : 120.2 Kg, USA. 119.2 kg, Kuwait. 111.5 kg, Australia.
109.5 kg, Bahamas. And Luxembourg at 107.9 kg.
Just from this data set at least we can take from this that the USA
isn’t the only country that loves its meat. Kuwait’s consumption makes a great
deal of sense from a luxury good perspective being an extremely wealthy small
nation on the Middle Eastern oil market.
5.
What has happened to the goods type of
meat?
Unfortunately
instead of becoming a luxury good
meat strangely, if we look at fast food, became an inferior good. This is representative of the difficulty to get
decent food that doesn’t depend on a meat patty from the fast food market. For
the USA it is fairly difficult to get good food without meat in it ready made.
6.
What is the Opportunity Cost of this huge livestock market?
The
meat market consumes a huge amount of resources that could instead be spent on
less feed and more grains fit for human consumption. To pretend that grain
doesn’t have its own cost of production is naïve but it’s immediately apparent
that directly grown for food is clear. Eating first consumers; herbivores, is
always at fraction of the nutritional value of the input feed. The larger
livestock the worse this ratio is that could instead be spent directly on
people.
7.
What does having so much livestock do to the earth?
“Globally, over 60% of total CH4 emissions
come from human activities. [1] Methane is emitted from industry, agriculture,
and waste management activities…”(EPA para. 2)
Right
now livestock contributes a significant of methane to atmosphere which the EPA
or Environmental Protection Agency tracks. While on the provided scale graphic,
Manure Management is 10% of the methane contribution to the atmosphere. While
manure is the one of the lesser methane producers it is only this huge because
of the 67 billion pounds of meat that the USA consumes. Currently with the huge
feed lots that we maintain as a nation, they are a potential breeding ground
for horrible company scale destroying disease so they are flooded with a
terrifying amount of antibiotics. This is a greater issue than the greenhouse
gases, a non-necessary use antibiotic is to prop up an overly large market that
both wastes resources and indirectly enables sickness to strengthen and
possibly kill human beings. The alleged need of antibiotics of feed lots is
only out of the sheer density of the animals kept there. This density wouldn’t
be needed if the meat market in the USA was much smaller and treated like the
luxury meat should be.
The EPA states that:
“Methane (CH4)
emissions in the United States decreased by almost 15% between 1990 and 2013.
During this time period, emissions increased from sources associated with
agricultural activities, while emissions decreased from sources associated with
the exploration and production of natural gas and petroleum products.”(EPA para
8.)
Which means that literally cow poop is the only
thing not improving as far as methane emissions go. Which is a real problem even though it’s hard
to take the idea that poop contributing such a global system as global warming
seriously. However with solid data like “Pound for pound, the comparative
impact of CH4 on
climate change is more than 25 times greater than CO2 over a 100-year period.”(EPA para 1),
it becomes extremely hard to ignore.
8.
What could we do with the replaced crops with
food stuffs instead of livestock feed?
Straight
up feed people. There is so much farm land put into relatively wasteful food
supplies of livestock. There is really no sugar coating this.
This is not to say one hundred percent outmode every bit
of livestock in the country but a healthy reduction of 50 pounds per person
probably would enrich our cultural pallet and maybe force fast food restaurants
to have better tasting bulk products to sell, instead of just more burgers.
Currently the future replacements to that protein, which
will turn the stomachs of a few, are bugs. Crickets present an amazing amount
of protein for investment of resources. Now granted we would have to get over
the food taboo that is eating bugs. Crickets with a helping of legitimate
effort allows crunchy protein filled food that has none of the issues of huge
giant livestock lots and antibiotic issues. Bugs like crickets could be cared
for on site without really any resource drain. They provide a mixture of
texture and indeed the protein that would be lost on giving up other meats.
Despite the positives presented the taboo attached to the cricket and other
bugs is difficult to throw off, not that we are not trying right now. Kate
Taylor presents in an article that
“As food makers seek to make insects the
new "it" food, their biggest hurdle won't be publicity or production;
it will be convincing consumers that eating bugs is something they want to do. And while unraveling
age-old perceptions about bugs is no easy feat, the process has already
begun.”(Taylor, pars. 5)
This article goes into great depth in the subject
outlining the whole America eating bugs situation.
The article goes on to outline a large number of vectors to attempt to get the
USA to consume crickets, however some of them do undermine the mainstream goal
that would subsume the greater livestock market. But it still could be
functional displaying them as special exotic food to get them started on the
road to main stream as stated again by the articles author.
“Insects don't have to appeal to everyone
just yet. They just need to appeal to a certain section of the population that
values adventure and worldliness, eager to try new things. Fortunately for
bug-lovers, that proportion of the population is present and growing. “(Taylor,
pars 20)
Immediate
replacement of any market simply isn’t a possibility in the USA. Hopefully it
will be seen for what it is and supplement all levels of the American diet.
9.
Conclusion
The research provided is not frequently put in this
context, even though this perspective is most definitely needed. The overall
trend of meat becoming an inferior good is disastrous in economies, yet this
only appears to be properly a thing in the USA. Each element contributing to a
problem that puts the entire world at risk of added methane and anti-biotic
resistant sicknesses.
Solutions are not painless, but it almost completely
leans on the change of diet which while sounding simple is ultimately extremely
hard to shift and influence. But if desirable replacements could be placed into
the average person’s mind in this nation and that bulk food retailers would
sell them I am confident there would be a general flow away from so many meat
products. At the very least having more options to diversify from the seemingly
one dimensional market of the meat patty would relieve stress from the
atmosphere and the arms race medicine plays with anti-biotic resistant
sickness.
And maybe we will be met with the chirps of crickets in
kitchens rather than that of apathy. With expectations met with some exceeding
hard to grasp numbers, such as 67 billion pounds of meat consumed in the USA. While
I like my beef patties the extremes of this market reality is staggering. To
improve this situation is to turn a glacier but ultimately it is doable.
CITATIONS
1.
"Per Capita Consumption of Poultry and Livestock, 1965
to Estimated 2016, in Pounds - The National Chicken Council." The National Chicken Council.
USDA, 10 July 2015. Web. 4 Nov. 2015.
2.
"Per Capita Consumption of Poultry and Livestock, 1965
to Estimated 2016, in Pounds - The National Chicken Council." The National Chicken Council.
USDA, 10 July 2015. Web. 4 Nov. 2015.
http://www.nationalchickencouncil.org/about-the-industry/statistics/per-capita-consumption-of-poultry-and-livestock-1965-to-estimated-2012-in-pounds/
(actual cited websight link)
3.
"Per Capita Consumption of Poultry and Livestock, 1965
to Estimated 2016, in Pounds - The National Chicken Council." The National Chicken Council.
USDA, 10 July 2015. Web. 4 Nov. 2015.
http://chartsbin.com/view/12730
http://chartsbin.com/view/12730
4.
"Overview of Greenhouse Gases." Methane Emissions. EPA. Web. 5
Nov. 2015.
5.
Davis, John. "Environmental Scientists Find
Antibiotics, Bacteria, Resistance Genes in Feedlot Dust." Environmental Scientists Find
Antibiotics, Bacteria, Resistance Genes in Feedlot Dust. Texas Tech
University, 22 Jan. 2015. Web. 5 Nov. 2015.
6.
Taylor, Kate. “How Food
Makers Are Convincing America to Eat Bugs” Entrepreneur, Oct. 8. 2014 : Web
November 5, 2015
Reflection
Alright because I don’t see instructions
on what form beyond formatting on the reflection I need to do, such as separate
file or not, but from what I can tell it’s supposed to be within the same
document? So that is my guess and I am totally going with it.
I chose this subject because I knew
enough of economic theory to outline some of the underlining concepts with
personal knowledge. For the longest time I have been aware of the over
industrialization of livestock to clearly sustained by artificial processes
that would immediately die out if catastrophe happened in the area.
I sectioned stuff off with bulleted
points to make it a little bit easier to follow, as I have trouble with longer
papers like this, because I literally think I run out of things to say. I
always tell people I like my brevity in my writing, for good writing makes the
complex understandable rather than making the simple impenetrable.
I very straight forwardly bring up these
concepts, though I do feel like I dropped some of the train of thought.
Unfortunately I can only take the blame for the rushed time table that this
paper took, getting written effectively in four days between other obligations
that either was met or fell through.
Not too much pathos was invoked on the
grounds that topic at hand is not a problem of opinion; it is a problem that is
a matter of fact. Pathos is more of a tool of subjective or political stances.
Though I do admit I had to do the terrible pun about the boil chicken industry,
but I am not sure if that counts as pathos. Rather than invoking the rhetoric
to get people to do things, I rather press direct awareness with a fairly fast
paced paper, instead of hanging on one topic for ages.
I also found out that it’s harder than
you’d expect to be able to pull some statistics out of google.
Hmm…yeah… I don’t have too much more to
put here. I am happy with what I managed to do but I know it’s not the best
paper but I wouldn’t feel bad presenting it to people.
