Is Meat Destroying the Planet?

Maneka Gandhi on the Impacts of Animal Cruelty

Animal Farming

I’ve been down on meat since I read Peter Singer’s Animal Liberation. The cruelty and environmental impact really got to me. My most recent guest, Maneka Gandhi, added another element to the discussion, asserting that there’s a sort of karmic retribution associated with being cruel in general, and to animals specifically. Cruelty towards animals punishes us in return. In other words, what goes around comes around.

Animals have feelings like we do. They socialize. A cow feels for her calf.  Chickens have a complex social structure. Just because we choose not to see it, doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. How would we feel if some alien species or an overlord supercomputer treated us the way we treat animals? It’s worth thinking more deeply about how we treat species that don’t speak our language.

Maneka is a grass roots animal rights activist and the longest standing member of the Indian Parliament. She spends her time on the ground. So check out the episode, where she discusses the larger impacts of the meat industry on our lives.

The Need for Better Data

In a newsletter on Animal Farming in June, I wrote why I gave up eating meat. As background research for my conversation with Maneka, I read a lot of materials on the meat industry, including Singer’s book. The cruelty we inflict on animals such as cows, pigs, sheep, goats, and chickens occur at a grand scale. Philip Wollen labels animal farming as “speciesism,” not unlike racism. We’ve gotten so used to getting our meat in attractive packaging, that we consume it unthinkingly as “protein.” We might feel differently if we had to kill an animal ourselves on a regular basis for dinner. Out of sight is out of mind.

Maneka has strong views, and some of her assertions fly in the face of conventional wisdom. During our conversation, for example, she referred to studies claiming that humans don’t absorb calcium from milk, sometimes the opposite. I dug around and found a large-scale study showing that higher consumption of milk does not reduce osteoporosis or the incidence of bone fracture in women. I wondered whether the sample was somehow biased by race as such studies often are. Given the increasing prevalence of genetic data, it would be interesting to see the connection between milk consumption and genetics.

Maneka excoriates the meat and advertising industries for creating other myths, such as “white meat” being better for cholesterol than “red meat.”  I did find a Harvard study claiming that there was no difference between cholesterol levels of people who consume red versus white meat, but LDL cholesterol levels were lower in vegetarians compared to meat eaters. It made me wonder about what other assumptions about nutrition we hold that might be questionable.

What became apparent to me is the importance of collecting data on the complicated chains of things that happen in the environment over time when animal farming is involved. Specifically, what has been the effect of animal farming in major human disease outbreaks and disappearance of animal species?

A good place to start would be to put together historical data of environmental disasters and their antecedents and consequences. Starting with the most recent, COVID-19, was it a consequence of animal farming? I don’t know about you, but I feel like I know very little about the origins of the pandemic.

Testing the Maneka Gandhi Hypothesis (MGH)

Maneka’s assertion that cruelty begets cruelty , i.e. what goes around comes around, is worth exploring with data. Her logic is that animal farming and experimentation represents cruelty at scale, and in return, it makes us “bad,” which makes us do nasty things. We are paying the price for it in terms of the environment, human conflict and mental well-being.

 How could we test that?

Unfortunately, we can’t do a controlled experiment to answer the question.

But could we find a good enough natural experiment? In a natural experiment, individuals are exposed to various conditions that arise naturally instead of being controlled by the inquirer. Nature is the experimenter that conducts a randomized controlled experiment.

There may be some hope here. In India, for example, there are large geographic communities that do not consume meat and do not have a meat processing in the vicinity. Could individuals be matched against otherwise identical individuals in other communities? For the performance measure, we could choose incidents of violence or other similar proxies. In this way, a “matched pair” database could control for influences such as wealth, weather, lifestyle, etc. Obvious data sources would be community, justice or police records. In addition, surveys could measure things such as the mental health of a community. Without doubt, constructing matched pairs would be challenging, but not impossible.

Implications

The implications of such a study would be far reaching and provide an objective basis for evaluating the impacts of animal farming on human well-being.

A skeptic might argue that regardless of the result, it is difficult to change eating habits. Secondly, people don’t like to be lectured on good eating, or the morality associated with animal farming. Third, despite the economics and environmental factors being well known – it costs 50 thousand liters of water and 90 pounds of grain to produce 1 kilogram of beef, etc. – people don’t care, because it is out of sight and hence out of mind. This is all true.

Perhaps the first needed change is a modest one, where people are made aware about their personal responsibility for the cruelty and killing in animal farming. What could induce such a change? Data in support of the MGH? According to Wollen, even a 10% reduction in current levels of meat consumption would be a win. It’s better than doing nothing, and real data could make a difference in spreading awareness about the consequences of animal farming.

Another good outcome would be one where food innovation creates affordable synthetic meat. Although plant and cell-based meat companies are struggling in the current macroeconomic environment, there’s a fair bit of optimism about the longer-term prospects of the industry. It would be ironic if technology – which created animal farming in the first place and unleashed mass cruelty to animals – provides the answer that gets rid of its own monster, and restores a karmic balance to the planet.