Meat and the Environment // Wasted Resources
Wasted ResourcesRaising animals for food requires massive amounts of land, food, energy, and water and contributes to animal suffering.Rainforest
Eating chickens destroys the rainforest. That's the message of a major environmental organization alarmed at the rapidly increasing destruction of the Amazon rainforest in Brazil. According to the nonprofit group Greenpeace, all the wild animals and trees in more than 2.9 million acres of rainforest were destroyed in the 2004-2005 crop season in order to grow crops that are used to feed chickens and other animals in factory farms.1 While many of the world's largest meat, egg, and dairy-products companies are responsible for this, Greenpeace blames the notorious animal-abusing company KFC for leading the way in laying waste to the Amazon—check out the giant banner below that Greenpeace activists displayed in Brazil.2
One of the main common crops grown in the rainforest is soy—in fact, much of the enormous amount of soy that is needed to feed the world’s farmed animals now comes from the rainforest. (The soy that is used in veggie burgers, tofu, and soy milk in the United States is almost exclusively grown domestically, not in the Amazon.) A whopping 80 percent of the world's soy crop is used to feed farmed animals.3 It is hugely inefficient to feed crops to farmed animals instead of eating the crops ourselves; it takes up to 16 pounds of grain to produce just 1 pound of animal flesh.4 If we simply ate soy and other plant foods ourselves instead of feeding them to farmed animals, we would not need to raise nearly as much crops and we could eliminate the need to decimate the rainforest. On top of all that, by eating only plant foods instead of animal flesh, we would have enough food to feed every person in the world, making an enormous impact in the struggle against world hunger. 
KFC doesn't just torture hundreds of millions of chickens; it also destroys the rainforest. Read more. 1 Greenpeace, "Eating Up the Amazon," Apr. 2006 2 Greenpeace, "KFC Exposed for Trashing the Amazon Rainforest for Buckets of Chicken," 17 May 2006 3 Greenpeace, "Eating Up the Amazon," 5. 4 Mark Gold and Jonathon Porritt, "The Global Benefits of Eating Less Meat," 2004, p. 22. |