My English version of the article that appeared in Arabic in Al-Akhbar on December 30, 2007:
When I was growing up in the 1970s in a liberal, activist household in Middle America, we all read “Diet for a Small Planet”, the groundbreaking work by Frances Moore Lappe. This book's chief principle stated that eating meat starved the poor and harmed the ecosystem. Like most of my “hippie generation” I was always aware that producing a pound of animal protein requires much more more land, fertilizer, water and resources than producing a pound of plant-based protein such as grain or beans. Choosing more plant foods and fewer animal foods meant protecting my health as well as the health of fields, waterways, forests and the ocean.
In succeeding decades, researchers have discovered more information about the harmful consequences of a meat-filled diet: health problems to the individual eaters, environmental problems for the planet, and social problems arising from inequities in food distribution.
Now in the new millenium, I read with dismay that fast food restaurants have become popular in the Arab world, with their offerings of factory-farmed chicken and beef. The traditional Lebanese diet I knew from my childhood visits to family emphasized plants, grains, legumes and dairy products, with seafood, poultry and the occasional feast day portions of lamb or beef eaten rarely. Today, when a prosperous mother anywhere in the Arab world takes her children out to eat fast food, does she consider the health consequences of those hamburgers and french fries she feeds her children? Does she think about the damage factory farming causes to rivers which quench her children's thirst, or does she know that mass-producing animal protein destroys rain forests in far-away South America?
As more people in the developing world seek to consume all aspects of an American lifestyle, demand for meat grows, causing food prices to rise. The poor suffer from such increases much more than the rich. Cereals are fed to animals, or used to produce biofuels, reducing the supply of grains available for humans to eat. Last year the people of Mexico City rioted in the streets, demanding a rollback in the price of tortillas; the corn needed to produce them had been diverted to U.S. Ethanol production. Such suffering can only be expected to increase as the world demands more meat and more biofuel.
Health problems once confined to rich countries now plague citizens of emerging countries: heart disease, cancers, diabetes and obesity. The processing of meat creates its own hazards, among them E. Coli and new strains of salmonella which sicken and even kill. Informed, prosperous consumers in the USA are well aware of these issues, buying antibiotic- and hormone-free meat and chicken; my own school-aged children know that they are not to eat hamburgers unless the meat is from a local, sustainably farmed ranch. Famous restaurants from New York to California vie with each other to serve menus full of organic, local, sustainably-produced delicacies, and some of my snootier friends make “eating healthy and organic” a competitive sport. Children attending elite private schools in my prosperous city carry their own lunches from home filled with organic goodies and nitrite-free hot dogs, while children in public schools eat foods contaminated with preservatives, drugs and pesticides (whose production is heavily subsidized by the US government).
Even as upper-crust American consumers insist on only the best organic, environmentally sound food products, and activist consumers insist on flouting corporate agriculture by eating local and low on the food chain, the rest of the world seems to have heard the wrong message. India, China and the Middle East are now clamoring for the very junk that discerning American consumers reject, increasing pressure on the poor, the ecosystem, and public health.