Human beings use lots of stuff. Everything material in our lives we take from nature, making it into something to use, wear, or eat, and when we're done with it, it goes back to nature in some form.
Consider plastic toothbrushes, for example: We pump petroleum oil from underground, use some of it to make toothbrushes, and when we're done using them, we throw them into the garbage. But that's not the end of them. From there, the toothbrushes go to landfill or maybe further, to the huge "garbage patch" in the Pacific Ocean, an area twice the size of Texas where our toothbrushes join all sorts of other bits and pieces of manmade plastic and Styrofoam, slowly drifting on a huge, circular current. Baby albatross birds at sea ingest things like our toothbrushes, mistaking them for food, and die because they cannot digest them.
In "The Face on Your Plate," Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson takes us with him on a 200-page consideration of these same kinds of questions with respect to food: the chicken or beef or bacon we are eating, even that milk we are drinking or those eggs we are scrambling. Where does our food come from? How are those animals being raised that we butcher, or milk, or steal eggs and honey from? And the waste that those animals produce as they are being raised for our benefit: Where does it all go?
The farms these animals are raised on are not the farms of our imaginations, Masson explains. They are big business farms. Consider the egg: Ninety-eight percent of chicken egg farms in the United States house hens in small cages (four to 10 hens in each 20"-by-20" cage, the size of a crate of apples), stacked sometimes six cages high; they are not given dirt to scratch around in and dust their feathers with, or even small branches to roost in, nor access to sun to spread their wings under or common space to socialize in (Hens like to socialize. Or consider dairy cows: they produce milk, like all female mammals, when they produce offspring. But because the milk of a dairy cow goes to humans, calves are taken from their mothers right away. Mother and calf low for one another for days before giving up, and the commercially raised milk cow produces 10 to 15 times the amount of milk she would produce if she were feeding only her calf. Even much of our fish is "farmed," raised in small, crowded channels of water where they are fed food pellets (including color pellets to make salmon artificially pink) and swim in their own filth.
"The Face on Your Plate" raises readers' consciousness about another aspect of animal "factory farming" as well -- its huge environmental impact. Here's just one set of examples: "Nearly 70 percent of former forests in the Amazon have been turned into grazing land for animals" and "if we continue to destroy the forests at the present rate, in just the next four years we will have pumped more CO2 into the atmosphere than all the flights in the entire history of aviation."
Amazingly, the raw waste produced by factory farmed cattle and pigs forms "vast lakes . . . often larger than small cities," which sometimes leach into human water sources. Another staggering fact is that animal dung and urine emit gases that contribute greatly to air pollution: a United Nations report of 2006 found that "livestock accounts for 18 percent of human-induced greenhouse gas emissions . . . more than the entire transportation sector of the whole world, including cars, ships, airplanes, and trains." If we stopped raising animals for human consumption, we would significantly lower our pollution of air and water. And we would greatly increase available acres for farming rice, grains, soy and vegetables for human beings.
Given the dire situation, what can we humans do? Masson argues that we should become vegetarian and the growing number of our friends who eat no meat of any kind -- beef, chicken, pig, lamb or fish -- and maybe even no animal products of any kind -- eggs, cheese, yogurt, milk and even honey. He argues that once we work through our denial about the suffering our animal-based diet causes, we will choose a plant-based diet. It's better for animals, it's better for us, and it's better for the environment. Aspire to live like the Jainists, he says, a vegetarian sect from ancient India that lives according to the rule of ahimsa, which means "do no harm."
But how realistic is Masson's vision of a vegetarian planet? The weight of our animal-based culinary traditions is very heavy. The pull of the food chain -- some animals eating plants and some eating other animals -- is strong, though perhaps like a ball and chain is strong.
But even if you cannot commit to being a vegetarian, if you read Masson's very relevant, very approachable book, you will probably come away with a commitment to do at least "less harm." Less harm by eating much less meat and eggs, drinking less milk. Grains, beans, fruits and vegetables are generally cheaper than meat, and what you save in dollars and cents may be reward enough. An even greater reward, as Masson encourages us to understand, is the part we can play in changing the way we humans treat the environment and the animals we raise for food.