Too much meat, says New York Times writer Mark Brittman in his TED Talk. Not because its bad for your health (even though it is), but because its destroying the planet. Who knew that Americans slaughter 10 billion cows, pigs, and chickens each year!?
Brittman places the meat industry as the #2 cause of global warming after electricity generation, while others include the power consumption and transport energy used in the meat industry to place it at the #1 cause of climate change.
Last year the New York Times wrote a story on vegetarian groups coalescing around the climate message to push the case that “there’s no such thing as a meat-eating environmentalist” while simultaneously hedging to prevent alienating the carnivorous masses. Even I’ve previously blogged about the ethics of meat consumption, while stopping short of calling it a moral issue for the same reasons. Yet these days, it seems even Oprah is going vegan for 21 days, largely for moral and experimental reasons as the preponderance of scientific evidence linking meat to planetary destruction more overwhelming than ever.
It may finally be safe to call diet a moral issue in America.
