To Save a Dying Planet: A Vegetarian's Case for Change

by Annan Nippita ’29

Humanity has a problem with overpopulation. This has been going on since at least the start of the 20th century, so about 120 years, or at least that’s what Google tells me. I disagree with that statement. Not the fact that our population numbers are through the roof, but more so the timeline.

And I can infer this from several things, most notably statistics on the spread of disease and the fact that we’ve been driving animals to extinctions for food for quite some time.

The first well documented disease with widespread impacts was the Black Death, which spread throughout Europe and Asia in and around the early 1350s. There was the Athenian Plague which originated in Ethiopia around 430 BC. Smallpox has its origins around 10,000 BC, being found in Egyptian mummies around that time.

But why am I talking about disease in terms of overpopulation? Well, diseases like The Black Death all spread because humans are in close contact with each other. The Athenian Plague ravaged great empires flourishing in the Mediterranean at the time. And Smallpox? That was found in one of the biggest and longest lasting empires history has ever produced.

This isn’t natural—humans are by nature a hunter-gatherer society. Nature didn’t intend us to live at this scale. We were supposed to hunt in packs, live in small shelters if at all, and generally hunt and be hunted. Of course, that’s all before we learned how to use fire, we stopped being hunted, and our population started to grow and expand into different places.

At some point, humans started driving other species to extinction for food. We had that many mouths to feed. The Genyornis, a giant, flightless bird from Australia, went extinct 50,000 years ago due to our hunting. The Woolly Mammoths were driven to extinction 4,000 years ago. The Auroch, the wild ancestor to domesticated cattle, was extinct by the 1600s. The Dodo perished in the late 1700s.

Probably the most sad human-caused animal extinction, however, was the Passenger Pigeon. Its numbers sat between 3 and 5 billion when European Settlers came to North America. At the time, this bird made up 25-40% of the total bird population. In 1914, the very last one died in captivity after the species had been getting hunted relentlessly for food and game for centuries.

But I’m not here to argue that humanity is evil. At least not primarily. That’s not my problem alone to figure out. I’m here to talk about just one part of the complex system that keeps our growing population afloat: food. This supply chain is one of the biggest contributors to the ongoing deterioration of our planet, causing nearly a third of all global greenhouse-gas emissions.

The specific issue is as follows: humanity cannot continue eating traditional animal meats. It isn’t sustainable: the food that is fed to livestock that is then fed to humans could theoretically feed an additional 3.5 billion people globally on top of the people this livestock feeds. Basically all to say that animals take something like 100 calories of grain and produce somewhere between 3 and 12 calories of edible meat. Meat isn’t inherently bad, but in these large quantities it doesn’t even come close to more sustainable nutrition options.

And yes, there are multiple options. Not all of them are necessarily sustainable, though, so we have to tread carefully. Of these options, we’ve transitioned to what is arguably the worst of the bunch. Well, when I say that, I mean we did that 4 generations ago.

Factory farming has been around for a long time. And the only reason it’s even still around is because it is a big money maker and doesn’t drive species to extinction. (Or at least the ones we are trying to eat: as a consequence, 37.5% of Sharks and Rays, +90% of large/migratory freshwater fish, 24% of freshwater wildlife, and over 100 other endangered species are being driven to extinction.)

But either way, the way I look at it, our options stand as follows: 1) keep up factory farming, the practice which we are currently employing, 2) transition away from traditional meats and eat only their lab-grown counterparts, or 3) stop eating meat altogether.

Option one shouldn’t even be considered, as both options two and three are better, both for our health, the health of our planet, and the health of the species we are trying to eat (and those we aren’t, too). Even so, it is the most viable as it is the one that our society is currently using, and changing from that will come with challenges.

Option two seems the most intuitive. Lab grown meats have 7-45% lower energy use depending on the product, 78-96% lower greenhouse-gas emissions, 82-96% lower water consumption, again depending on product, and 99% lower land usage, according to the European Environmental Agency. This is by far the best compromise between factory farming and flat out no meat at all.

Option three, of course, is a pipe dream. Humans are omnivores by nature, and it doesn’t make sense to change that. Even so, intrusive thoughts may say that because we were able to shift away from being a hunter-gatherer society, there might be a chance to transition to this much more efficient diet.

Now, as stated in the reasoning behind option two, the four main factors to consider are energy use, emissions, water consumption, and land usage, but not necessarily in that order of importance.

Of course, as a Vegetarian, I’m biased in this conversation and I’m going to add morality into the mix, so just humor me as I slot that in.

Until we can start lab-growing plants efficiently (the most logical implementation of option 3), lab-grown meats (option 2) win out in terms of land usage every time. It loses, though, on emissions and energy use, where plants require such a small amount of extra input that it’s basically a rounding error. In water use, too, the vegetables win out because of the excess amounts of the stuff that goes into meat production, though any option would take a significant amount of water.

Now, as stated above, lab-grown meat is on average 75% better than traditional animal slaughter, but obviously not as good as plant production, using the metrics stated above.

I’d also consider the cruelty of the production process, and as plants don’t have feelings, we can automatically call that one settled. On the other hand, factory farming is notoriously extremely cruel, and it has been a nightmare to try to regulate. They have sacrificed morality for profitability.

Now, why does that matter? Why should we care about what foods to eat, or for that matter, what foods not to eat?

Just to put it into perspective, we slaughter a lot of meat as a species — 330 million cattle a year, 650 million turkeys a year, 1.5 billion pigs a year, 75 billion chickens a year, and somewhere around 1.5-2 trillion wild fish, just to name some big categories. (As a side note, for the fish, only about half actually get eaten by humans: the rest are used as food for the 150 billion fish farmed in captivity annually.)

Per day, a little less than a million cattle, 200 million chickens, and 5 and a half billion fish are slaughtered for food. (Turkeys are left out of this since they are seasonal.) While reading this article, which will probably take you about 5 minutes, 25 million fish will or have already been killed.

I’m not making this up: this number is in the millions. You’d probably be reading through about 240 million animal deaths if you read this whole issue. At this point, ‘sustainable’ is very much an afterthought. Humanity is not talking much about individually counting numbers, because we just can’t be.

That’s not to say it isn’t important: it is – very much so. If every person stopped eating their 139 annually allotted fish, we could stop farming them altogether. Of course, this is skewed a lot towards specific cultures, with some cuisines heavily relying on fish and others not at all, but in essence it seems simple: stop eating meat. Or find a substitute.

For all the obvious reasons, humans hate fake stuff — stuff that isn’t exactly what it says it is. But lab grown meat is still very much meat: it’s from an animal and made from animal cells.

But just because humanity won’t like the concept of it not coming off the bones of an animal, that doesn’t mean we can’t try: cattle, chickens, pigs and fish have all been lab grown and, with the exception of fish, are on shelves at supermarkets. These four, except for lab-grown fish, should be as cheap as their natural counterparts by 2030. Estimates suggest that in less than a decade lab-grown fish could also rise to this level.

There is a way to get towards a world with lab grown meat as the only alternative to vegetarianism (and obviously veganism). There is an obvious lack of moral predicaments since animals aren’t being killed for this, as well as all the other benefits of space, emissions, energy consumption and water consumption. I’m optimistic that naturally produced meats probably won’t last long once lab-grown meat becomes a viable counterpart.

But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t, or can’t, do anything about it for the next 5 years. Some good changes are coming, but our actions have consequences that we just can’t avoid anymore. Humanity has single-handedly driven 100,000 known species to extinction in the past 500 years. We consume enough resources that we’d need two Earths to be sustainable.

We’ve conquered the world, its ecosystems, and its natural riches. We have created a hole deep enough to span Central Park three times, we’ve landed on the moon 6 times, and can send a message half way around the world almost instantaneously. We have artificial light, large language models, and have driven our average life expectancy from 30 to 75.

But we cannot continue this way. When you get home, ask what’s for dinner. If you make it yourself or you are the one going to the store, try to avoid meat, the animals from which probably suffered immensely for the three to nine short months they were allowed to live. Try to avoid fish, of which 20-40% has been lost or have spoiled somewhere along the production chain.

If you eat out, and especially if you cook food for yourself, try to stay away from traditional meats. Pizza? Try to go without the pepperoni. Is the bacon in the mac and cheese really necessary? Does your lasagna really need beef? Next time you sit down for a meal, think about that. Do you really need this?

Really ask yourself if you want to continue supporting this system that is contributing so greatly to the degradation of our planet, or if you want to choose an alternative to make a small but meaningful change to help in creating a healthier world for all of us.

The thing is that this decision is not just about what you eat; it’s deeper than that. It’s making a decision about if you are willing to accept factory farming as “normal.” It’s about whether or not you accept the inhumane treatment of these animals. It’s a question not simply of “what’s for dinner?” but “why do we think this is ok?”

Humans have a long history of adopting change. We changed our diets when we killed off species we had used for food sources. We changed our daily lives when new technology came around. We changed our lifestyles when Climate Change changed our environments.

Now it’s time to change again. What if, in a generation or two, we look back and can’t comprehend the idea of factory farming, just like we look back now and can’t comprehend the ideas of slavery or the denial of women’s rights?

The world is changing. The way we interact with it, but also what we take from it. In the next five years, we may be redefining the way our food system works for generations to come, just as we did with the rise of factory farming a century ago. If we embrace lab-grown meats, we can, just maybe, steer the course of humanity in a more sustainable and ethical direction. A better future for all of us.

So please, ask yourself what’s for dinner. But do it with intention. Ask yourself with the knowledge that your decisions, however small, will impact the future of humanity. Because in the end, it’s more than food. It’s about the world we want to live in, and the world we want to leave for generations to come.

If you want to learn more about lab-grown meats and environmental impacts, this URL can help you get started: shorturl.at/Hs0vJ. If you want to learn more about animal cruelty, I highly recommend Eating Animals by Jonathan Safran Foer.