What the 'bleep' are they telling us?
The real cost of your burger!
Meat
and dairy products are among the great food killers of our age.
But
not eating meat and, if you are a vegan, avoiding dairy products, is not
just about health and animal abuse. I keep talking about connections and
here’s one of the most important of all.
The connection between hungry children and eating meat.
We are spun the yarn that we increase agricultural production with
chemicals and poisons in order to feed people. No we don’t. we increase
agricultural production to feed farm animals – to grow meat or, if you
own a company involved in meat or dairy production, to grow money.
It
is hard to believe, I know, but it’s true just the same, that only 8% of
our farmland in Britain is growing crops for consumption by people.
The rest is for animal feed. What
was it they said about not being able to feed people without chemicals? It
has been estimated that this country could feed a population of 250million
on an all-vegetarian diet without any food imports. We have around 57
million.
Turning
grain into meat is incredibly wasteful.
You have to feed an animal on average ten pounds of vegetable
protein to create one pound of meat protein. It takes five acres to
provide protein for one person for a year from meat while in the same area
you can provide the yearly protein for three people from wheat and 30
people from soya. An organic
vegetarian system of food production would also save other resources.
In a world of scarce and diminishing water supplies, it takes 60
gallons of water to produce a pound of wheat, yet a pound of meat needs
……2,500 gallons. Even a
quarter of the fish caught every year end up in farm animals.
The
waste of protein and land is bad enough in this country but it can be a
death sentence on the poor throughout the less developed world.
We actually import crops grown in countries where there is
widespread hunger in order to feed our farm animals and boost the profits
of the meat and dairy industries. Only
a system motivated by greed and not need could sanction this obscenity.
In 1984 during the Ethiopia famine Britain imported £1.5 million worth of feed from there to give to our farm animals. More than a third of the crops produced in the world are fed to livestock while over half a billion people are severely malnourished. The European Community is one of the biggest importers of animal feeds with nearly 15 million hectares of the Third World growing for European livestock, including Britain. These are the things we have to take into account when we survey the steak or hamburger on our plates.
From 'It doesn't have to be like this'- David Icke