12
THE GUILFORD IAN
America trades trees for cheeseburgers
Joshua G. Lewis
Staff Writer
"We've traded our forests for cheesebur
gers, and we've traded our wildlife in the
process," asserts John Robbins, the author
of the Pulitzer prize-nominated book Diet
for a New America, who spoke this past
Saturday in Dana Auditorium.
Robbins tells primarily of the Earth' s tropi
cal rainforests, which are currently being
razed at an alarming rate —mainly to graze
cattle for import to the United States. Every
fast-food hamburger produced, he says, rep
resents the destruction of 55 square feet of
tropical rainforest. The fast-food chains of
our country are the biggest part of the prob
lem, and in his book Robbins mentions
Burger King, which has been implicated by
Rainforest Action Network as "a driving
force behind this environmental disaster."
This activist group tells that "after the cattle
have come and gone, it's [the formerly for
ested land] an eroded wasteland, practically
empty of life."
And while many of us had heard that fast
food chains had stopped buying the beef of
cattle grazed on the carnage of part of the
world's oldest and most various ecosystem,
Robbins reveals that this is far from the
truth. There's a loophole, he says, which
allows the McDonald's and Burger Kings of
ourcountry to tell the public that their burgers
haven't destroyed tropical rainforest. The
minute the cow or steer raised in Central or
South America sets hoof on the dock in the
United States, it is considered U.S. beef.
Likely, few of us are extremely surprised
by this information that Robbins shares. But
he has much more to say—much more about
the toll the meat industy takes on the envi-
naturaC zuorCd is a
community of zuhich ive are a
part, to which zue oivt our
lives.
ronment, on our physical and spiritual health
and on the animals themselves, many of
whom are forced to lead completely unnatu
ral lives in factory farms and who are treated
only "as inventory to convert into cash."
Muchofßobbins' message Saturday night
came from Diet for a New America. One
man for whom Robbins holds a great deal of
respect, as was evidenced from the book and
the lecture, is a Native American of the
Nineteenth century, Chief Seattle. In a
voice that was low, but which commanded
the audience's attention, and with a detect
able measure of awe, Robbins told the story
of Chief Seattle's response when he learned
that the "Great Chief in Washington" wished
to buy his people's land. Of course, Chief
SeatUe's only other option was to have his
people driven off the land by the U.S. mili
tary, but he certainly might have bargained
to improve the dismal lot of his people.
Robbins displays amazement at the one
request the chief made to our government
The Native American didn't ask for more
blankets or horses to make easier the jour
ney his people were about to undertake. He
didn't ask respect for their ancestral burial
grounds. Hedidn'tmakeanyofanumberof
self-serving demands that he might have.
Robbins writes, "His one request was as
prophetic as it was plain: 'I will make one
condition. The white man must treat the
beasts of this land as his brothers. For
whatever happens to the beasts soon hap
pens to man. All things are connected."
Chief Seattle's
sense of the
interconnectedness of
all life is perhaps vi
sionary for our day,
but it also represents
one of the last ves
tiges of a paradigm
that seems to have
been largely pushed
out the the modern
human mind. The world-view that humans
are an integral part of the earth's ecosystem,
rather than the supreme rulers of it, has
almost vanished on a culture-wide scale.
The heinous environmental destruction of
roughly the last one hundred years shows
this all too well.
"Man did not weave the web of life. He is
merely a strand in it," Chief Seattle wrote to
our President. "Whatever he does to the
web, he does to himself."
Robbins says Chief Seattle saw "a war
against nature - a war against ourselves in
some sense."
"The natural world is a community of
which we are a part, to which we owe our
lives," Robbins says. And he demonstrates
our connections to the world around us in
very matter-of-fact, practical ways.
Robbins tells how meat production un
necessarily taxes many of our resources.
One big problem in California, where the
author makes his home, is water shortage.
He says the state has officially been in a
drought for six years running now—but it
still raises cattle. This is so astonishing
because of the amount of water needed for
these animals. Robbins cites a study done
by the University of California at Davis, the
primary agricultural campus of U.C., which
inquired into water usage in the production
of various products in California. The data
reveals it takes 49 gallons of water to pro
duce a pound of apples. It takes 70 gallons
to yield a pound of grapes, 23 gallons for a
pound of lettuce. Take a wild guess at how
much water is required to produce one pound
of beef. Hint; think in thousands and you
might have a chance. Well, here it is: 5,214
gallons are necessary to develop only one
edible pound of these enormous animals.
Robbins makes an interesting point. If
one is conscientious about water use and
takes 5 minute showers, with a flow rate of
four gallons per minute—which is fairly
ample Robbins says—and takes five show
ers a week, one uses 100 gallons of waterper
week, 5200 gallons in a year.
"You save more water in California by not
Features
you save more zvater in
CaCifornia by not eating one
pound of beef than you do by
not taking a shozuer for a
year.
eating one pound of beef than you do by not
taking a shower for a year," Robbins says.
"You save some other things too," he jokes.
The environmental consequences of the
American meat habit, as Robbins calls it, are
far reaching and these accounts don't begin
to put a dent in the problems dealt with in
Diet for a New America. Robbins quotes
comedian Red Skelton who said, "If we
don't change the direction in which we are
going, we will end up where we are headed."
And at this point, as the musical group "The
Church" sings, "our
destination looks
kind of bleak."
But most of us
believe that we have
to eat meat to be
healthy—and that the
more we eat, the
healthier we will be.
Robbins tells that this
is not the case; in fact,
he is simply repeating to a wider audience
what medical research revealed quite some
time ago. The problem, Robbins says, is that
the various meat industries have a vested
interest in keeping from consumers the
knowledge that the meat produced today is
quite detrimental to a person's health in
many ways. Not only is animal meat, espe
cially beef, loaded with saturated fat, today
most is laden with chemicals, hormones,
and antibiotics needed to keep the animals
alive under the conditions in which they are
kept. So these industries exert every effort
to make people feel like they need meat.
One recent example of this is the adver
tisement that goes something like, "Beef:
Real food for Real people." Robbins ques
tions if this means that vegetarians are un
real somehow. His response to the ad is that
if beef is a major part of your diet for a good
while in your life, "you better live real close
to a real good hospital." Hemimicksthead
saying, "Real heart-attacks, Real prob
lems...."
The health problems that have been asso
ciated with meat eating are numerous and
Robbins gives a full discussion in his book.
They are heart disease, breast cancer,
osteoporosis, prostate cancer, ovarian
cancer...and the list goes on. However,
Robbins says, "you don't have to be veg
etarian to be concerned about your health.
People will take steps that work for them, in
balance." He emphasizes that any reduction
in meat consumption will improve one's
health (as long as one gets necessary nutri
ents from other sources, which is not hard to
do) and will ameliorate our environmental
situation and the needless suffering of ani
mals.
Robbins demonstrates how we—and
many of the problems we face today—are
closely linked with the physical world around
us, and more specifically, what we eat in that
world around us. But what about a spiritual
relationship with animals? What does
Robbins offer in this respect? He cites pub
lications such as The Journal of the Ameri
can Medical Association, which can tell us
November 15, 1991
that saturated animal fats collect in our cir
culatory systems and can eventually bring
about atherosclerosis. But they can't reveal
what damage eating animals might wreak
on our spiritual lives. Even if there is not
empirical evidence, however, we can look
to the examples of many , great thinkers of
our time who were vegetarian; people such
as Pythagoras, Gandhi, and Tolstoy, who
Robbins discusses in his book.
One person he quotes often in Diet for a
New America (which consequently can be
ordered through the local chapter of
Earth Save, the organization Robbins
founded, by calling (919) 282-5539) is the
author and playwright George Bernard Shaw.
During the lecture, Robbins shared one state
ment of Shaw's that is not included in the
book. Robbins gathered a deep voice, heavy
with the indignation one might expect of
Shaw and quoted: "A man of my spiritual
intensity does NOT eat corpses!" The imi
tation drew laughs, but the message came
across clearly.
But as Robbins writes, the ethics of eating
animals is not his main concern. "It's not the
killing of the animals that is the chief issue
here, but rather the unspeakable quality of
the lives they are forced to live." The
conditions of factory farms, which Robbins
describes in detail in his book, are horrific.
Indeed, for anyone with a somewhat high
esteem of animals, these conditions would
not seem dissimilar to those of Nazi exter
mination camps.
Robbins writes that today, "the suffering
these animals undergo has become so ex
treme that to partake of food from these
creatures is to partake unknowingly of the
abject misery that has been their lives. We
are ingesting nightmares for breakfast, lunch,
and dinner."
There is much temptation to slip into
denial at such an overwhelming deluge of
bad news. Robbins himself admits he had to
fight off the desire to simply ignore, to
forget Many questions arise. Will we treat
the animals of this land like our brothers and
We are ingesting nightmares
for 6real(fast, Cuncfi and
dinner.
sisters? Will we acknowledge the
interconnectedness of all things in what
Chief Seattle called the web of life? Can we
find a part of ourselves in the nature from
which we seem to have largely divorced
ourselves?
"The more we succeed in numbing our
selves to our deepest human responses, the
more powerless, futile, and isolated we feel,"
Robbins writes. In order to regain a sense of
connection with our planet, and thus to feel
the power our individual lives have in creat
ing a better, more humane world, Robbins
makes this recommendation: "Be out in the
natural world as much as possible, and be
come aware of the ways you erect barriers
between yourself and life.", , , . •