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The Meat Experiment

by Mike Thompson, 9/21/2022

For the past twenty-five years I have been participating in a nutrition experiment, and I can now say the following with great confidence: We humans do not need to eat meat.

That short statement should be qualified a bit. "Twenty-first century humans living in countries with modern food distribution systems (transportation, grocery stores and/or farmers markets, refrigeration) do not need to eat meat" would be more accurate. While it was not the case historically, the modern-day availability of a wide variety of foods during all seasons has made meat eating obsolete in many parts of the world, including the United States.

The Meat Experiment started in the late 1990's when I read "Diet for a New America" by John Robbins [1]. The fundamental principle on which the book is based is that more than enough protein is contained in non-meat dietary sources (grains, nuts, seeds, beans, vegetables, fruits, berries) to support good health. The proteins from which our bodies build muscle, organs, skin, hair, fingernails, etc. are constructed from amino acid building blocks, broken down by our digestive systems from the foods that we eat. Our modern diet, with an abundance of variety that was unavailable a century ago, contains all the amino acids that we need to form these proteins without needing to eat meat.

Well, I thought, one can find a book that will claim most anything under the sun. This sounds like it might be too good to be true. How can I be certain? Thus began The Meat Experiment: I just stopped eating meat one day to see what would happen.

I found that, at least initially, not eating meat is about as simple as it sounds - you just eat a little more of everything else instead. If dinner is pot roast, potatoes, carrots, bread, and salad, then you eat everything except the pot roast. If you're dining out, you scan the menu for the non-meat options, of which there are almost always at least a couple these days. However, if you end up in it for the long haul it will require buying some vegetarian cookbooks and learning new recipes. I'm very fortunate that my wonderful wife, Jane has been willing to make the extra effort to adjust the dinners that she cooks to my non-meat regime.

And it does require some self-discipline when you're longing for a favorite meat dish (like maybe a cheeseburger!), or you smell barbecue cooking on your next-door neighbor's grill. On the other hand, I'm not very disciplined when it cones to food, yet I've managed to eat my way around the temptations.

For the first couple years of The Meat Experiment I ate absolutely zero meat. Then I began to eat a very small amount - one slice of turkey at Thanksgiving dinner, or an order of fish and chips at a seafood restaurant when there were no vegetarian options on the menu - consuming under one pound of meat per year. As of 2022 I probably eat a serving of meat about once per month, with my annual consumption now around two to three pounds. The USDA estimate for annual meat consumption by Americans in 2017 was 144 pounds [2], so my consumption of meat is currently about 2% of the national average.

During the course of this twenty-five year experiment I've been very active physically, continuing to hike, backpack, play soccer, and surf as before. In my 50's I took up competitive paddling, and after five years of training and competing I became the US National champion at flat water sprint canoe (an Olympic sport) in my age bracket. Later I took up outrigger canoe paddling and was the total points winner for my age division in the PNWORCA (Pacific Northwest Outdoor Racing Canoe Association) 2018 winter race series. In 2022, at age 67, I rowed around Whidbey Island. In 2024, at age 69, I bicycled 500 miles over 10 days. All this says that, while many believe an athlete's protein needs reqire eating meat, The Meat Experiment has proven otherwise.

So why might one choose to stop eating meat? Because the world we're now living in is very, very different from that of our meat-eating ancestors.

Today most animals that are slaughtered to produce meat are raised in "factory farm" settings, where they're fed crops such as corn and soybeans that were grown for the purpose of meat production. It takes about ten pounds of grain to produce a pound of meat this way, which means that we're wasting 90% of what was grown when we choose to eat animals rather than eat plants. This modern method of meat production comes with huge costs in terms of water and energy, and it produces a vast amount of animal waste including methane, a greenhouse gas. In order "to help raise the attention of both the technical and the general public to the very substantial contribution of animal agriculture to climate change and air pollution, to land, soil and water degradation, and to the reduction of biodiversity...", the United Nations' Food and Agriculture Organization titled their recent presentation on the meat industry "Livestock's Long Shadow - Environmental Issues and Options." [3]

What's the scale of the meat industry's livestock versus all of the planet's wild animals? Here's an absolutely stunning statistic that I recently found in a BBC article on world population [4], which was written on the eve of the human population reaching eight billion.

Terrestrial Vertebrates by Total Weight.

The animals that we humans have domesticated, mostly for the purpose of eating, outweigh all of the wild land animals by a ratio of sixty-seven to one! And we humans, now in our vast numbers, outweigh all of the wild land animals by a ratio of thirty-two to one.

Note that the class terrestrial vertibrates includes such species as humans, cows, pigs, dogs, cats, deer, bears, squirrels, birds, and lizards. It does not include insects (which have exoskeletons rather than backbones) nor any of the creatures of the water such as fish, crustaceans, or whales.

Here are some population numbers, by species [5] [6] [7] [8].

Yes, there are now eight million humans, and one and a half million cows, for every thirty Polar bears.

If you're like me, having grown up believing that the wild part of the planet is large compared to the part that's dominated by humans and our animals, these numbers come as a big shock. But during the past hundred years most of the planet has been converted to human purposes, and the wild animals that haven't yet become extinct are now hanging on by a thread. Within the last century the tables have been completely turned, and the choices we humans make from here forward will determine whether or not the natural world will continue to exist in any meaningful way on Earth. We can make our footprint on this planet considerably smaller by minimizing our consumption of meat.

[1] Robbins, John (December 11, 2012). "Diet for a New America: How Your Food Choices Affect Your Health, Happiness and the Future of Life on Earth (2nd ed.)". HJ Kramer/New World Library. ISBN 9781932073546.

[2] "U.S. Per Capita Availability of Red Meat, Poultry, and Seafood on the Rise". USDA.gov. https://www.ers.usda.gov/amber-waves/2019/december/us-per-capita-availability-of-red-meat-poultry-and-seafood-on-the-rise/. Retrieved September 20, 2022.

[3] "Livestock's Long Shadow - Environmental issues and options". FAO.org. Retrieved September 12, 2022.

[4] "How many people can Earth handle?" BBC.com. https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20220905-is-the-world-overpopulated. Retrieved September 12, 2022.

[5] "Most Populous Animals On Earth". WorldAtlas.com. https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/most-populous-mammals-on-earth.html. Retrieved September 12, 2022.

[6] "American Bison". Wikipedia.org. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_bison. Retrieved September 20, 2022.

[7] "How many polar bears are there?" WorldWildlife.org. https://www.arcticwwf.org/wildlife/polar-bear/polar-bear-population/. Retrieved September 12, 2022.

[8] "Blue Whale". Wikipedia.org. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_whale. Retrieved September 20, 2022.