John Myers
Neither sustainable nor healthy: There are many reasons for leaving meat and sausages on the shelf and preferring to use plant-based products. The biggest problems of meat consumption at a glance.
The global hunger for meat has many negative effects. These are the five main problems of meat consumption:
Antibiotics in factory farming lead to resistance
The big feast is only possible through factory farming, where pigs and poultry live in a confined space. It’s not just cruel to animals. If animals live in close proximity, they also become susceptible to diseases. This is why antibiotics are used preventively in the barn, which in turn bring with them so-called antibiotic resistance. The danger: Essential medicines can then no longer work properly in humans.
Eating meat promotes disease
Eating a lot of meat is also not healthy. Red meat in particular, i.e. meat from beef and pork, sheep and goat, is tricky because it promotes diseases of affluence such as diabetes mellitus (type 2) and cardiovascular diseases.
The International Agency for Research on Cancer has even classified cured meats such as ham and salami as “human carcinogens”, and red meat as “probably carcinogenic” – especially in relation to colon cancer.
Meat consumption harms the environment
Eating a lot of meat and sausages, but also cheese, yoghurt and milk, has a negative impact on the climate. With a share of almost 70 percent, the production of animal-based food is much more harmful to the climate than that of plant-based food (around 30 percent) according to the environmental foundation WWF.
Because animal husbandry with farting and cud-chewing cattle, sheep and goats always produces climate-damaging gases such as methane and nitrous oxide. Cattle farming is particularly harmful to the climate, as it is responsible for 62 percent of all emissions from animal husbandry.
When converting forest to arable land and pastures for animal feed cultivation, climate-damaging carbon dioxide (CO₂) is also released – unlike grazing, by the way, where the CO₂ is “held” in the soil by the dense turf.
The animal feed itself must also be produced – that means fertilizers and pesticides, the production of which in turn requires a lot of energy. This energy consumption is always accompanied by the burning of fossil raw materials such as oil, coal, or natural gas.
Meat production fuels global hunger
Huge amounts of animal feed are required to support the global appetite for meat. Almost half of the grain produced globally ends up in the feeding trough, according to the meat atlas of the Heinrich Böll Foundation from 2021. It is 57 percent for oilseeds and 90 percent for soybeans. This also means that these raw materials are not available for the direct food supply of humans – which would be much more efficient.
According to the FAO, three to nine kilos of grain, legumes, or soy are needed to produce one kilo of meat. If the food were eaten directly, i.e. not via meat, sausage, milk, and cheese, many more people could be satisfied.
Growing animal feed requires a lot of land
We don’t “only” take away people’s food, we also take away their soil. In Germany, for example, we need around 19 million hectares of land for the supply of food. We have 14 million hectares here, and we occupy another five million hectares abroad.
In Brazil, Argentina, Paraguay, and to a small extent in the USA alone, soy is grown on an area of two million hectares for our animal feed.
