I'm in awe of the fantastic diaries in support of ending hunger in America. I totally agree that being food secure should be a right in our country, the wealthiest the world has ever known. There are so many issues that need to be addressed to make this happen; chief among these issues is the glaring inequality that underlines our economic system. But the solutions don't really address the foundational weaknesses which contribute to hunger both in U.S. and globally.
The rest of the world is blindly following the U.S. with its primarily industrial food production system without considering the hugely negative impacts that the U.S. system has wrecked on climate change, public health and food security.
The industrial food system, especially livestock production, is a major cause of climate change and has contributed to the massive public health problem of the creation of "super bugs" that are resistant to conventional antibiotics. And because at least one-third of the world's grain is fed to livestock rather than to humans it makes less food available to humans and contributes to food insecurity.
As the crisis of climate change becomes more urgent, leaders are emerging to educate about the most simple and economical solution to the crisis—that of reducing meat consumption.
Prominent among these is leading world scientist Patrick O. Brown M.D. PhD, of Stanford University—a biochemist who is most frequently associated with the invention of microarrays and their use in studying gene expression, and he should be familiar to the readers of PLoS as a driving force behind open-access journals. But these are only two examples of his many successes, which span the worlds of topoisomerase, HIV integration, protein microarrays and post-transcriptional regulation.
Read more about Dr. Brown below the fold.
Dr. Brown has taken an 18-month sabbatical to work promoting reducing meat consumption as the most practical and cost-efficient way to solve the climate crisis and hunger. Here he is giving one of his no-B.S. talks at Leaders Preserving Our Future: Pace and Priorities on Climate Change, sponsored by The World Preservation Foundation in London.
Animal farming is by far the most environmentally destructive identified practice on the planet. Do you believe that? More greenhouse production than all transportation combined. It is also the major single source of water pollution on the planet. It is incredibly destructive. The major reason reefs are dying off and dead zones exist in the ocean—from nutrient run-off. Overwhelmingly it is the largest driving force of deforestation. And the leading cause of biodiversity loss.
And if you think I'm bullshitting, the Food and Agricultural Organization of the UN, whose job is to promote agricultural development, published a study, not knowing what they were getting into, looking at the environmental impact of animal farming, and it is a beautiful study! And the bottom line is that it is the most destructive and fastest growing environmental problem.
Band-aid solutions addressing both hunger and climate change will only work short term. To solve the problems we must dig to the fundamental practices driven by our myopic profit-driven industrial food system.