Question: Could we really feed the nearly 7 billion people on earth without factory farming?

Jonathan Safran Foer: Well the argument is sometimes made that factory farming feeds the world and it’s not only untrue, it’s the opposite of the truth. It takes seven calories of food input into an animal to produce one calorie of food output. It’s an extraordinarily inefficient way to produce food.

Now, it’s true that there are some landscapes in the world and some you know, communities where meat really is the only option, and I would not argue against that at all, but that’s not what we’re talking about when we talk about the meat industry. We’re talking about McDonald’s. That’s what we’re talking about. We’re talking about Burger King, we’re talking about airport food, we’re talking about supermarket meat, Tyson’s, Smithfield, and this is food that is not only not going to hungry people, but in a very direct way is injuring the Third World. Absolutely raping Brazil, you know, the number one cause of deforestation of the world, number one cause of the loss of biodiversity. And the way the subsidy structure works makes it almost impossible for, for example, countries in Africa to produce their own food.

So we can absolutely eliminate animals from the equation. They are not necessarily the most important part of this conversation. If what you care about is hungry people eating, then that in and of itself is a very good reason to reject factory-farmed animal products.

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Sections: Vegan Theory
Topics: eating animals, factory farming, fast food, foer, humane meat, hungry people, Jonathan Safran Foer, jsf, meat, starving people, Vegan