I’m behind on blogging but that doesn’t mean I haven’t noticed issues hitting the news lately. The other night I caught just 5 minutes on CNN’s Cafferty File that ticked me off at the stupidity of our media. Cafferty reported that the U.K. did a study and it turns out that raising sheep for food adds to the U.K’s carbon footprint big time. By time Cafferty was finished explaining that eating lamb is adding to global warming he was shaking his head and grinning. So he ended the segment by posting the question: “Are you willing to change your diet to combat global warming?”
I wanted to smack him up the side of the head. Or better yet, take Cafferty and Wolf Blitzer, who joined in the merriment, on an impromptu visit to a large CAFO and have them inhale the fumes from a pink tinged open air lagoon of waste that oozes methane into the atmosphere. Another reporter that did that almost passed out.
The reporters at CNN obviously didn’t take that into consideration. As a major news source one would think they would be up on articles like this: http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?artid=2367646, or http://www.alternet.org/environment/140059/our_appetite_for_animals_is_taking_us_toward_apolcalypse/?page=2 or http://www.cok.net/lit/veg.php or any of dozens written by our own Dept. of Agriculture or CRS (Congressional Research Service) reports to Congress that show our food animals are detrimental to the environment.
On cok.net it stated that a U.S. Senate Committee on Agriculture, Nutrition, and Health reported that 5 tons of animal manure is produced annually for every person in the U.S. Considering our population is 300 million and 5 tons equals 10,000 lbs., well I just found my calculator doesn’t have enough decimal points so that’s 1 billion, 500 million tons of manure annually. The water that is polluted as a result is a whole other blog!
So what’s not to understand here? A billion tons of manure is a heck of a lot of methane. Since the U.K. loves its mutton, I can see where their report came from. Sheep top their list of carbon footprint devils.
And where does Cafferty live that he hasn’t noticed we’re a nation of obese people eating far more meat than any other country on earth? We want national health care so we can continue to neglect our own health? We should be willing to change our diet to save ourselves, yet we don’t do it. No one considers that our obesity might end up being a detriment to our ever getting national health care because obesity is a ridiculous and preventable drain on any health system for the disease it produces. By following the guidelines for healthy eating, we will help ourselves, help the environment, and possibly stop the horrible abuse of food animals by eliminating CAFO’s altogether.
Tags: Obesity