Hello, everyone.
(Applause)
Let's see. OK.
Today, I want to talk to you all about meat, OK?
Delicious, tasty, succulent meat.
(Laughter)
Now, I've loved meat my whole life.
My very first favorite food was hot dogs.
I loved hot dogs.
And then, when I turned about, like, six,
I decided, actually, pepperoni pizza is the best food in the world.
And I still think so. It really is.
My favorite Chinese food? Hong shao rou.
(Laughter)
Amazing! So delicious!
But despite this love of meat, about two and a half months ago,
I decided to begin eating a lot less meat,
and that was partly, you know, for health reasons,
and partly because I'd always wanted to care more about the animals
that get killed and turned into bacon, right?
But it was also because I learned a lot more about the environmental impact
that my food choices had on the world around me.
Now, there is possibly nothing more manly
than cutting into a big, juicy steak, right?
And I think there's nothing more human.
Meat has been central to our identity as human beings,
and central to the development of our human characteristics.
Meat is what gave us bigger brains.
It's what gave us smaller guts,
although I'm still working on mine, I suppose.
(Laughter)
It's what allowed us to begin walking on two legs,
instead of all four limbs.
Meat is what made us intelligent.
Cooperative hunting is what helped us develop language,
our social skills, and again, our intelligence,
and we have used this intelligence
to create a world where we can eat a lot of meat.
In 1900,
the total mass or weight of all of the domesticated animals in the world,
meaning cows, horses, pigs, goats, sheep,
everything you could put in a fence and keep right next to you,
was four times the weight of all of the wild animals in the world.
Fast-forward 100 years,
and the total weight of all domesticated animals in the world
is 25 times the amount of wild animal mass.
Our love of meat has transformed the world and will keep transforming it.
This is because, ever since the end of World War II,
global incomes have been rising.
Starting in 1950,
meat consumption worldwide was equal to 50 million tons.
Twenty-five years later, that had doubled to more than 110 million tons.
Another 25 years, it doubled again to 220 million tons of meat
eaten by everyone.
Ten years later, another 55 million tons, to 275 million tons,
totaling an average of about 40 kilos per person around the world.
Now, that level of meat consumption is not the same everywhere.
Obviously, the more income a country has the more meat they will eat.
That's why even before World War II, and especially afterwards,
America has been the largest consumer of meat for a long time,
followed by Brazil and Spain.
Also, developing countries
that have not yet sort of risen up into developed-country status
still eat very low quantities of meat.
African countries like Nigeria and Egypt,
since the 1940s, have only seen their consumption of meat levels double,
whereas a country like South Korea, which has become much, much wealthier
in the decades since World War II,
has seen its level of meat consumption multiply by 20 times.
In the next 40 or so years,
scientists estimate that worldwide consumption of meat will jump up 55%.
That rise in meat consumption is coming from developing countries
beginning to eat a lot more meat,
and hopefully, developed countries slowly tapering off their intake,
maybe by doing things like what I'm doing right now.
Every year, we kill 55 billion chickens,
3 billion ducks and turkeys, 1 billion sheep and goats,
300 million cattle.
In America alone,
we kill 24 million chickens every single day.
Now, this is a lot of meat,
and we are going to keep creating more and more of it to kill.
Take China, for instance.
China, in 1961, had the average per capita rate
of less than four kilos per person.
Fifty years later, it had risen to 57.5 kilograms per person
of meat intake in one year.
Researchers estimate that, by 2030,
China's intake of meat will rise to 90 kilos per person,
two-thirds of that being pork.
And with all of this meat being eaten in the world,
it takes up a lot of resources.
One kilo of meat requires a whole lot of land and crops
to support that meat.
One kilo of beef requires up to 50 square meters of land,
to produce the crops necessary to feed that cow.
One kilo of pork requires up to 12 square meters of land.
One kilo of chicken requires up to ten square meters of land.
Now, we are rapidly running out of land to feed all of these animals
that we so ravenously want to eat.
One quarter of all of the continental surface that doesn't have ice
is already taken up by livestock raising, meaning cows and other animals,
eating grass and wandering around pastures and meadows.
It's the same amount of land that is devoted to forests,
or at least, hopefully, will still be remaining forests in the future.
One-third of all arable - made suitable for farming -
one-third of all arable lands right now is devoted to feed crops,
meaning crops that we grow specifically to feed the meat that we want to eat.
In total, humans devote eight times more land
to feeding the animals that we want to eat
than we do to feeding ourselves.
Now, this brings us to South America.
China is running out of land
to feed its insatiable appetite for meat.
As I already mentioned, China's meat consumption
is about 60 kilos per person per year right now,
and two-thrids of that is devoted to pork.
Now, Chinese pigs do not have enough land available in China
to grow the soybeans or the corn that feed those pigs,
which means that China has to import all of this food
to feed the pigs that it wants to eat.
And a lot of that food comes from South America.
China buys one half of the global market for soybean,
and it buys one-fifth of all the corn made in the world.
It buys that soybean from countries like Argentina, Chile, Brazil.
And one of the rapidly rising problems that the world is facing
is that a lot of that land,
which is slowly being turned into crop land
to produce soy to feed the pigs that are in China,
is right now rain forest.
And so, deforestation is when rain forests and other forests are cleared
in order to turn it into crop land that can feed these animals.
And rain forests deforestation, in particular, is very dangerous
because the rain forests are a sponge
for the greenhouse gases that create global warming.
Right now,
the meat that we eat
creates more soybean, which creates less rain forests,
which creates more greenhouse gases,
which create hotter temperatures and weirder weather for all of us.
Now, let's talk about the other feed crop, right?
Remember, there are two feed crops: soybeans and corn.
Soybeans are grown for the protein to feed these pigs.
Corn is grown for carbohydrates,
and almost all of the world's corn is grown in America.
Now, American-made corn
is tremendously productive,
and the reason it's so productive is because we pour lots and lots of oil,
and gasoline, and fertilizer into that land
to create these amazing amounts of corn.
It takes about 50 gallons of oil to create one acre of corn,
and all of that oil is used to build fertilizer.
Fertilizer's magic ingredient is nitrogen.
Now, nitrogen is not very good for the environment
in really large quantities,
and those are the quantities that we are feeding our lands.
When nitrogen seeps into the soil,
it can enter our drinking water supply,
and that can be harmful for our health, especially the health of little children.
However, the real problem with nitrogen and water pollution
is when nitrogen leaks into the soil and travels down into a river,
and travels down that river and enters the ocean,
and enters shallow coastal waters,
like the Gulf of Mexico.
A huge portion of the nitrogen in America
has leaked into the Gulf of Mexico,
creating what's called eutrophication,
and eutrophication is what happens when nitrogen enters water
and creates a massive growth of algae, these big algae blooms.
And when all of that algae enters a huge space in water,
it sucks up all of the oxygen,
leaving what are called hypoxic dead zones where fish cannot breathe
and where all of the fish and the sea life in that region dies.
And what America's amazing and incredible sort of industrial factory farming
has done to the water in the Gulf of Mexico
has created a hypoxic dead zone that is as big as the state of New Jersey.
Now, that's not the only sort of euthophication
that's happening in the globe.
Eutrophication is happening all over, and it is a rising problem.
Next, I want to talk about meat production's effects on the atmosphere,
on greenhouse gases and global warming.
Every kilo of meat, as we've seen,
has a particular price that we pay to the environment.
Beef, in particular, is the most expensive.
Now, meat production is responsible for three primary greenhouse gases:
carbon dioxide, which, hopefully, you are all aware of;
methane, which is produced when cows burp and fart out,
(Laughter)
after eating lots and lots of grass or, nowadays, corn -
Methane is 21 times more poisonous than carbon dioxide.
Nitrous oxide is created from animal manure
and from these nitrogen fertilizers leaking into the soil and the atmosphere.
Nitrous oxide is even more poisonous than methane.
Nitrous oxide is 310 times more dangerous for the environment
than carbon dioxide.
Now, altogether, meat production produces 10%
of all carbon dioxide emissions worldwide.
It creates 40% of all of the released methane into the environment,
nearly two-thirds of all human-caused emissions of nitrous oxide.
Altogether, this means that meat production
is the second highest leading cause of greenhouse gases,
accounting for one-fifth of all greenhouse gases produced in 2004,
and it's rising every year.
This is more than the greenhouse gases produced by all of transportation,
meaning planes, trains, automobiles, trucks, ships combined.
Let's look at American cows in particular.
Now, American cows produce more greenhouse gases
than 22 million cars on the road per year.
And American cows produce that many greenhouse gases
because Americans eat a lot of beef.
The average American eats about three hamburgers per week,
which equals 156 hamburgers per year,
which, if you multiply by the population of America,
means that Americans going to McDonald's, and Wendy's,
and Burger King, and all the other delicious restaurants that we have
are eating 40 billion hamburgers per year,
and those 40 billion hamburgers are exacting a huge toll on our environment.
Every single quarter-pounder that we eat needs 100 gallons of water,
1.2 pounds of grain, 1 cup of gasoline,
and creates 1.5 pounds of topsoil,
meaning the best kind of soil for the most fertile crops,
that is lost due to erosion.
All of these sort of economic ingredients
pay a big price when it comes to the environment.
Every quarter-pounder hamburger
accounts for about 6.5 pounds of carbon dioxide equivalents.
That means that Americans' massive hamburger habit -
we've got to have it! -
three hamburgers per week, again, multiplied every American,
means that American hamburger habit
is the cause of about 158 million tons of greenhouse gases
released into the atmosphere every year,
which is equal to 34 coal-fired power plants running year-round.
Now, that is a big figure, and that's all because of what we eat.
So now, I want to talk to you a little bit about what you can do about this.
So, the reason I'm giving this talk
is because, a couple of months ago, I started reading a book.
You know, I'm not a scientist, I'm not an expert.
I'm just someone who's very hungry and wanted to read about it.
(Laughter)
Alright?
It turns out that if you reduce -
let's say you eat two hamburgers a week.
If you start switching to a diet of only one hamburger per week,
you are saving the equivalent of about 350 miles of one car taken off the road,
for a whole [year].
If all of us make the decision to reduce our meat intake,
we can all make a difference.
I have decided to drop my sort of meat intake
from 12 meals every week to about four meals every week.
I can't give up meat because it's way too good, right?
However, every small little choice that we make matters.
I want to leave you with a quote,
by an American writer, poet, and environmental activist
named Wendell Berry.
He says that "eating is an agricultural act."
What he means by that
is that every decision we make about what we are eating
affects what the farmers grow and produce.
It affects what the restaurants serve to us.
It affects what our mom will cook us for dinner, right?
Eating is a political act.
We can vote with our mouth and with our stomachs,
and by choosing to eat less meat, we can make the world a better place.
So, please, I would love it if all of you guys left today thinking,
"OK, when I go to McDonald's, I'm not going to choose the hamburger.
Instead, I'll choose the apple pies."
(Laughter)
Those are delicious.
Or, when you're out at a restaurant with friends,
and you're all sharing a couple of meat dishes and some veggie dishes,
switch out one of the pork dishes for another vegetable dish.
Every little decision that we make has an effect on the world.
So, together, let's eat better and let's make the world a better place.
Alright. Thank you.
(Applause)