WEBVTT

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Major funding for this program is
provided by the L.K. Whittier Foundation.

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[sil.]

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Are we carving up the planet
for the sake of our palate?

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Is piling on the meat piling on the heat?

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And does that

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bite out of a burger take a
bite and out of our future?

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Some thoughts about food and
food for thought, next.

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[music]

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When Henry Ford started making cars,

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who could have guessed where it would lead.

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[music]

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This century we’ve manufactured more

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than a billion vehicles worldwide.
There are over 500 million automobiles

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on the roads right now and the
environmental costs have been enormous.

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[music]

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You could tell a similar tale about this.

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When families had just one friendly cow

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on the back 40 who would have guessed where it would lead.
Well now there are hundreds of millions of these things

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and there are those who argue that the
environmental costs are enormous.

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They say that producing
too much beef for things

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like burgers leads to the cutting down of too many
trees, the depletion of precious water resources

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and the destruction of valuable topsoil.
Perhaps even acceleration

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of global warming. They argue
that there’s a direct link

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between the food on your plate
and the fate of the planet

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and that’s what this program is about.

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This is cattle country. Walker Basin
tucked away in the Tehachapi Mountains

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above Bakersfield, California.

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Though the days of the Wild West
and the open range are long gone

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cattle is still king in these parts.
In another few months

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these stairs we’ll go to market and eventually
make their way into our food chain as hamburger,

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steak, ribs and roasts.

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Though there’s a deceptive tranquility
here in the pastures of Walker Basin

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on the horizon a storm of environmental
protest is beginning to brew

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about how and why we raise cattle for food.

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300 miles to the north at Stanford
University, biologist Paul Ehrlich argues

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that the beef business carries a
high environmental price tag.

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The way we run much of our cattle operation in the United
States it amounts to both a threat to public health

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in all probability and certainly a waste of resources
because if you graze cattle in the Arid West

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or if you raise them on fields and then take them and grain
feed them you are using gigantic amounts of fertilizer,

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using gigantic amounts
of basic food resources

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that could feed people and huge amounts of water
and (inaudible) mostly producing waste and meat

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that is not terribly good for you.
So, we’d be much better off

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if we ran a leaner cattle operation in general and that
means you’re going to have to change the public attitude

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towards beef and the kinds
of beef they like to eat.

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In San Francisco at the Institute for Food and Development
Policies, World Hunger Expert Frances Moore Lappe

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believes that are meat-based diet
is contributing to well starvation.

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The movement toward a grain-fed meat diet,

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the steak religion that we are now exporting throughout
the world is a symptom and a symbol of very,

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very deep problems. It’s a… it reflects the fact
that the world is being increasingly divided

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between those who can afford a luxury product like
grain-fed meat that takes a lot of resources to produce

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and those who can’t afford to buy the basic grains they
need to keep themselves alive and feed their kids.

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On the other side of the
fence is the beef business

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which maintains that meat production is
both economically and ecologically sound.

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Jane Anderson is executive director
of the California Beef Council.

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I would say that the beef industry believes

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that they are among the very first of the
environmentalist. Someone made the comment… comment

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you know that for farmers and
ranchers every day is earth day

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because essentially there are people out there the feeling
that earth, looking at that earth, keeping it happy

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or they are not going to stay in business.

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Caught in the middle of this beef between conservationists
and consumers are traditional livestock producers.

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People like Bill Rankin who claims he’s
only giving the people what they want.

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Beef is like any other
commodity the consumer

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has to want to go into the store and buy it otherwise
there isn’t any reason for us to produce it you know,

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I think it’s just your basic
supply and demand type situation

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just like with any other product.

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Any way you slice it,
Americans do love that beef.

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In 1989 we devoured
almost 20 billion pounds

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of stuff that’s about 70 pounds each.

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A diet rich in beef,

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pork and poultry has long been
associated with economic status,

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what is an inexpensive food here is a
delicacy throughout much of the world.

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For example, the Chinese population

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of over a billion people
relies heavily on vegetables,

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grains and protein-rich tofu. On
average the Chinese eat in a year

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the amount of beef we eat every two weeks.

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Let’s take a quick tour of the
world’s meat market in Tokyo

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a pound of Sirloin Steak runs
$20 and Stockholm it’s 16.50

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in London it’s a steel 8.50 a pound
for the same cut here in the U.S

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the price is just $2.50 a pound.

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Why is American beef so cheap?

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Jack Algeo is an animal nutritionist
and consultant to the Beef Council.

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Beef relatively inexpensive in the U.S because we
have very, very efficient production methodology.

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We… we have done a tremendous job in the…

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in the genetics and breeding of the
animals. We’ve done quite a job

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and they apply application
of the nutritional sciences.

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We have lands to graze animals on.
Environmental analysts however suggest

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two other factors of the ranges where
cattle roam more than half is federal land

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leased to ranchers who pay about a $1.80
or $2.80 a month per head of cattle.

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Critics contend that’s only
about a quarter to a sixth

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of the going market rate. Ranches
counter that their maintenance

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and improvement costs offset
the low grazing fees.

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Water for crops is also sold at low prices

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just a few pennies per thousand
gallons in the Grain Belt.

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Farmers point out that they have the extra
cost of pumping the water out of the ground.

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Many other expenses associated with
cattle feed production such as equipment

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and facilities are financed by
low-interest government loans.

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But within the environmental
community and many are concerned

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that our planet may ultimately be
footing the bill for this feast.

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Francis Moore Lappe who in the early 1970’s first
question the efficiency of meat production

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and have bestseller Diet
for a Small Planet.

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Says there are many other hidden costs
associated with both grain and meat production.

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The illusion of cheap grain exists because the real
cost the groundwater that go into producing it.

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The top soil that is lost in its production.
The pollution of… of the water.

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The pollution from livestock waste
that sort of thing are not counted it

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to the market price of grain and so then
you can that you can feed it to livestock,

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it’s very economical to feed livestock
and make a good profit that way

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but nobody pays in the short term in the
long-term of course where we are losing

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our the quality of our agricultural resources.
Some environmental groups like Earth Save,

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one of the advisors to the
Earth Day celebration

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raise even more questions about
the resources devoted to cattle.

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Their research indicates that 2500 gallons
of water is poured into each pound of meat.

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Much of it used to raise feed grains.
It takes 16 pounds of grain

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to produce one pound of meat.

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And growing that grain erodes
nearly 100 pounds of topsoil.

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The Beef Council claims these
figures are misleading.

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Many of the resources that we
use here in the United States

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contrary to popular opinion don’t disappear. They are
renewable and if we handle them properly the water,

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the air, the earth that we go back to
renews itself and comes back again

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so that we will stay in balance. But the
capacity of the planet to renew itself

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is a matter of sharp debate.

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The supplies in some of our underground water
deposits called aquifers are being used up to grow

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feed crops according to environmentalists.

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They claim that the world’s largest
aquifer the Ogallala underlying

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the Midwestern United States will be
pumped dry in the next 30 to 100 years.

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[music]

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As for topsoil according to
research from Cornell University

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we’re losing between 4 and 8
tons of it per acre every year.

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At this rate where eroding the
topsoil 12 to 16 times faster

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than the Earth can replenish it. And
from the perspective of Paul Ehrlich

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that spells trouble with an
exploding population to feed.

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We’re adding 95 million people a year,
every year of the world’s farmers

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have to feed the population equivalent in addition
to what they had before of Great Britain,

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Ireland, Iceland, Belgium, Sweden,
Denmark, Finland and Norway.

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95 million more people have to
be fed and there’s 24 billion

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less tons of topsoil every year to feed them
and trillions of gallons less groundwater.

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That’s a gigantic problem.

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Over half the country’s farmland is
devoted to raising feed crops like hay,

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corn and oats grown primarily in the
Midwestern grain-belts states of Kansas,

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Nebraska, Iowa and Wisconsin.

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And most of that goes to feed lots

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where cattle spend the remaining
four months of their lives

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fattening up on a calorie rich diet
of grain and grain by-products.

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The extra 300 pound these
stairs gain much of it fat

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makes the meat more tasty and tender.
Something consumers demand.

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[sil.]

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But are we paying a heavy price
to please our taste buds?

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[music]

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If your basic aim is to feed a maximum number
of people feeding growing corn and feeding

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the corn to the beef is a very inefficient way
to do it. The way to do it is to grow corn

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and have people eat the corn directly because you can
feed something order of 10 to 15 times as many people

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on corn as you can on the same
amount of corn first fed the beef

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and then you end up eating beef. So just eating corn you have to be very careful to
balance your diet and get another source of protein in there say from beans itself

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but this isn’t the entire answer because
of course people like a varied diet

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and my own view is some beef in the diet is not a
bad idea but we just have too much beef in the diet

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and the world has too much beef
in its diet for its ecologically.

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This is a kind of energy converter.

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You feed it with gas and oil, keep it topped
up with water and it takes you places.

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Some people think of a cow as
another kind of energy converter.

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You feed it with grass and grain, keep it topped
up with water and you get steaks and hamburgers.

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[music]

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Like automobiles cattle
guzzling lots of fuel.

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In 1989 we fed them 26
million tons of grain

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enough to fill a train of boxcars stretching
from Fresno to the feedlots in Chicago.

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[music]

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Every year 45 trillion gallons
enough to cover the entire state

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of Nebraska in three feet of water is
poured into raising beef and feed crops.

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[music]

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Oil and other energy costs
associated with meat production

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work out to approximately 7 billion gallons or
roughly a half gallon for every pound of beef.

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[music]

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One other similarity. This has an exhaust.
So do cows.

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Worldwide cattle account for over

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56 billion cubic meters of
methane gas enough to fill over

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4.5 million blimps.

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Meanwhile back at the ranch cattle
producer Bill Rankin continues

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a family tradition started by
his grandfather in the 1860s.

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Today Rankin runs roughly a thousand

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head of cattle on this 30 thousand acres grad
in the mountains of Kern County, California.

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He firmly believes he’s producing
a valuable food product

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on land unsuitable to raise anything else.
Our basic resource

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that we’re utilizing out here
is a native grass on the hills

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but a cow can take that… that natural feed and turn
it into a product that is consumable by human.

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People can’t go out and graze on the hills.

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Rankin has (inaudible) the
variety of price fluctuations,

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grain shortages, disease and drought but he’s
especially disturbed by critics who question

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the way ranches manage
and maintain their land.

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The cattle ranchers are…
are very, very conscious

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of the ecology on their ranches. We’ve
been here 127 years five Generations,

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(inaudible) each generation hadn’t worried
about that land we wouldn’t still be here

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but I think that the rancher is a
good steward of the land and I…

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I think we take good care of our ranch.

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Paul Ehrlich who still
enjoys an occasional steak

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has no bone to pick with smaller
traditional family ranchers.

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He even thinks its okay to graze some
livestock on land unsuitable for crops.

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What worries him is the
overgrazing of cattle.

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Especially on dry public lands
in the 11 Western states.

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In the Arid West on public lands
lead cattle that are raised

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only supply a few percent of our total intake of beef
and yet a huge chunk of the western United States

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has been desertified and remains desertified
because of subsidized grazing on public lands.

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The beef industry believes that most of
the damage from overgrazing occurred

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at the turn of the century. And the overall
quality of western lands today has improved.

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Actually there are data on government land

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from Utah State University,
Range Management society

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does show that overall the 97% of the land that
is owned in the far west by the government

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is in better shape today than it was in the
30s. There had been a slow but sure progression

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to actually better management
of the land and the forages.

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And yet according to research
reported in Science Magazine

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during March 1990, some of our grasslands
continue to be destroyed from overgrazing.

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[music]

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A study of the semi-arid pastures of the
Jornada Range in Southern New Mexico

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suggests that the wear and tear of long-term
grazing severely damages the land.

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Is very sad because the…

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the question is often phrased in terms of range management
you know, are we doing a proper job of range management

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and in fact range managers are trying to do a better job and many
of the smaller cattle (inaudible) are trying to do a better job

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but unfortunately the fundamental
question is ecosystem management

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that is, is the highest use of those semi-arid lands,
the grazing of cattle or should there be game ranging?

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Should there be more attention paid to
the needs for water for Western cities?

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Should there be more attention paid to the needs of
campers, hikers, fishermen, sportsmen who want to hunt

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and so on and that’s a very much bigger question
than just exactly how we manage the grazing.

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According to Ehrlich the desertification
of the Western pastures

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is especially disturbing because these states supply
only a small percentage of our total beef supply.

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Some ecologists are
saying it may be decades

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before these lands will again
be agriculturally productive.

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A similar story of
environmental destruction

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is taking place in the vast tropical rain
forests of Central and South America

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where land is being cleared
in part for cattle.

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Susanna Hecht is a specialist in
tropical development at UCLA.

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What we seeing right now in Tropical South
America is the conversion of large areas

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of forest to pasture lands or grasslands.
We’re looking at the conversion

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of more than 2.5 million acres of
tropical rain forest every year.

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So we’re looking at one of
the largest and most rapid

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forest conversion processes in human history.
What happens when you convert forest to pasture

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is that the soils there are so poor

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that after you burn the forest you get maybe a little
ash and that gives you a couple of years of reasonable

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but still very modest by U.S.
standards of grassland productivity

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but then within ten years you
have to then you pasture.

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So one of the things that drives the
expansion of a forest to pasture is the fact

00:20:10.000 --> 00:20:14.999
that a lot of the area
goes out of production.

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This ravaging of real estate is not
solely the work of cattle ranchers.

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It’s not all determined by consumption
patterns that there are other

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kinds of dynamics internal to these
economies that pushed deforestation

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and conversion of forest pasture
does the strong much more strongly

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and consumption of plants.

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Gold miners, government projects, loggers
and land seekers are also staking

00:20:45.000 --> 00:20:49.999
their claim to the fragile forest.

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But is our appetite for beef here in the United
States as some environmental group suggests

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helping drive the destruction.

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Americans don’t have the opportunity to eat
the beef from the rain forest countries

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so by saying we’re not going to eat a burger and we’re
going to save a rain forest it’s too simplistic,

00:21:10.000 --> 00:21:14.999
it doesn’t work that way. No fresh meat comes in
from the countries where we have any concerns

00:21:15.000 --> 00:21:19.999
at all about the rain forests. And yet U.S.
Department of Agriculture Statistics

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show that, in 1989 we imported
400 million pounds of meat

00:21:25.000 --> 00:21:29.999
from both Central and
South American countries.

00:21:30.000 --> 00:21:34.999
Places like Costa Rica where Paul
Ehrlich recently paid a visit.

00:21:35.000 --> 00:21:39.999
Well, there’s… there’s a lot of controversy about how direct the
link is between U.S. meat consumption and rain forest destruction.

00:21:40.000 --> 00:21:44.999
I think is a fairly direct link
that is the there’s no question

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that be for export for instance in Costa
Rica has gone way way up as the forests

00:21:50.000 --> 00:21:54.999
have been cut down to make pastures and it has not been used for
internal consumption and I don’t think it’s going to Rwanda.

00:21:55.000 --> 00:21:59.999
So it basically tropical rain forests are being
destroyed to provide meat for export of that

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meat is going to rich countries in the
United States is the biggest rich country.

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Let’s run down the menu once more. We
have got a meat habit and to fade it

00:22:10.000 --> 00:22:14.999
we produce animals that are four-legged equivalent
of gas guzzlers. They eat most of our grain,

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which takes up much of our water,
which sometimes leaves deserts

00:22:20.000 --> 00:22:24.999
and takes away this valuable topsoil.
Now tropical rain forests

00:22:25.000 --> 00:22:29.999
to being cleared at least in part to
make way for pasture and range land

00:22:30.000 --> 00:22:34.999
and that’s not the end of the story.
This has become a hot potato.

00:22:35.000 --> 00:22:39.999
Why? Well because of what scientists
called a runaway greenhouse effect

00:22:40.000 --> 00:22:44.999
that seems to be
accelerating global warming.

00:22:45.000 --> 00:22:49.999
The glass in this greenhouse lets heat energy
in but stopped some of it from going out

00:22:50.000 --> 00:22:54.999
so it gets warmer. Gases like
carbon dioxide and methane

00:22:55.000 --> 00:22:59.999
do much the same thing in the atmosphere.
That’s why they’re called greenhouse gases.

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Normally that’s a good thing because keeping the
surface of the earth warm helps sustain life

00:23:05.000 --> 00:23:09.999
but if it gets out of control, too much carbon
dioxide or methane for example then the heat is on

00:23:10.000 --> 00:23:14.999
and it might be more appropriate to call it a
hot-house effect than a greenhouse effect.

00:23:15.000 --> 00:23:19.999
Some scientists say that candle production
adds greenhouse gases to the atmosphere.

00:23:20.000 --> 00:23:24.999
Researchers at Lawrence Berkeley
Laboratory estimate that the beef

00:23:25.000 --> 00:23:29.999
and dairy industries are responsible
for between 5 & 10%

00:23:30.000 --> 00:23:34.999
of man-made global warming. The beef
industry thinks that’s a lot of hot air.

00:23:35.000 --> 00:23:39.999
When you look at the
production of methane gas

00:23:40.000 --> 00:23:44.999
from and CO2 from the other
things that humans do,

00:23:45.000 --> 00:23:49.999
what animals do is… is nothing.
It’s… it’s miniscule.

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And yet methane that unglamorous byproduct
of cows is a potent greenhouse gas

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and even more important is
carbon dioxide. 15 to 30%

00:24:05.000 --> 00:24:09.999
of the world’s carbon dioxide emissions are
released by the clearing of tropical rain forest

00:24:10.000 --> 00:24:14.999
for ranching as well as farming and logging
according to the April 1990 Scientific American.

00:24:15.000 --> 00:24:19.999
There’s no question that we human
beings are changing the atmosphere

00:24:20.000 --> 00:24:24.999
and raising cows seems to be part of the
problem. Scientists don’t yet agree

00:24:25.000 --> 00:24:29.999
about how much global warming we’re in for but there
is a consensus that the planet will be heating up.

00:24:30.000 --> 00:24:34.999
We should be taking out insurance
against global warming.

00:24:35.000 --> 00:24:39.999
We should be doing everything we
possibly can to limit our population.

00:24:40.000 --> 00:24:44.999
We should be in general moving towards more energy efficiency and
agricultural techniques that are… that are more gentle on the soil

00:24:45.000 --> 00:24:49.999
and so on but there are still people out
there they are sort of trumpets to say,

00:24:50.000 --> 00:24:54.999
\"Let’s use it all up now and science we’ll produce some answer
in the future that will save us, some miraculous new resource

00:24:55.000 --> 00:24:59.999
or some miraculous new energy source.\" The scientists
are working on these things don’t say that.

00:25:00.000 --> 00:25:04.999
They all give you the same story
while we’re in deep trouble

00:25:05.000 --> 00:25:09.999
and so the answer is we live in a democracy. You don’t want to imbeciles
wanna jump around saying boy everything’s fine they just prove one thing,

00:25:10.000 --> 00:25:14.999
you know, I always say, if you can keep your head while those around
you are losing theirs you just don’t understand the situation.

00:25:15.000 --> 00:25:19.999
The stakes are now high enough

00:25:20.000 --> 00:25:24.999
that everyone not just scientists
should try to understand the situation.

00:25:25.000 --> 00:25:29.999
We have long sensed that our
fate is linked with the Earths

00:25:30.000 --> 00:25:34.999
but we’ve now reached the time when we
can appreciate those links in a new way,

00:25:35.000 --> 00:25:39.999
scientifically. In these
ingredients our diet,

00:25:40.000 --> 00:25:44.999
our use of water, soil and other resources

00:25:45.000 --> 00:25:50.000
there is the potential for a new
recipe, a recipe for survival.

00:27:40.000 --> 00:27:44.999
Major funding for this program

00:27:45.000 --> 00:27:49.999
is provided by the L.K. Whittier foundation

00:27:50.000 --> 00:27:55.000
This is PBS