Meat and sustainability.

• Position: FROM READERS - Letter to the Editor

Your recent articles on the meat industry's unsustainability (July/August 2004) and impacts of human overpopulation (September/October 2004) are more than welcome in a world out of control regarding the need to protect people, ecosystems, and animals now and for the long term. But I disagree with Mark Muller's September/October letter suggesting only "industrial" meat production must go.

Yes, some meat, milk, and eggs are produced without the horrible ecological destruction of factory farms. But that doesn't make "better" methods desirable. Mr. Muller's arguments presuppose that a human world that stops treating nonhuman animals as food sources would make no other improvements. However, to create a good future, we must change the amount of grain produced, the amount of fertilizer used, how land is used when farmers go out of business, how much land we occupy, and poverty and other injustices.

It's factory farming and gigantic subsidies that keep prices so low that products formerly available mainly to the wealthy few are consumed as staples by millions of even the least affluent people in affluent societies. Eliminating factory farming altogether and switching to "sustainably produced" meat, milk, and eggs would mean removing animal products as dietary staples--a wonderful result for many reasons, since sustainability would mean far fewer animals.

Under that scenario, if the animal industries sought any sort of economy of scale or expanded, non-local markets, the industries' inherent inefficiency and unhealthfulness would again kick in: inordinate inspecting, refrigerating, and freezing; cooking needed to prevent food poisoning; saturated fat- and cholesterol-induced diseases; more land needed to feed more animals; more water and topsoil gone for foods no one needs; and more ozone-depleting [sic] methane from animals.

"Sustainable" production means minuscule industries, not another way of fattening billions on animal products. Meat, milk, and eggs are not biological necessities for the human diet--they were added long before the advent of nutritional science or the study of comparative anatomy and physiology. And even a "sustainable" system would find it uneconomical to provide optimal care for animals' natural lifespan and euthanasia rather than slaughter. Under "sustainable" methods, as under factory farming, those raised for their milk and eggs are slaughtered young like those for their flesh. So "sustainable" production is inhumane and...