Eating Our Way To Pandemics
Our food supply is spreading diseases and destroying the environment. Fortunately, there is a way out. Let me explain.
Humans have survived their fair share of epidemics, developed vaccines, eradicated diseases, and proudly celebrated those achievements.
However, we should be ashamed of consistently ignoring the root cause of these deadly infectious diseases. In fact, we actively participate in creating the environments they thrive in by subsidizing and supporting animal farming and its abhorrent practices, and to such a degree, that from the outside it must seem as if starting a pandemic is our main goal.
Massive infectious disease outbreaks and our reactions to them change the course of history.
The time has come for that to happen again. It’s up to us to decide whether the coming changes are for better, or for worse.
The precious ‘normality’ some of us dearly miss nowadays, represented a violent death march for the vast majority of the natural world, and it pervaded our lives to the point that most of us are starting to recognize that we have developed a certain degree of Stockholm syndrome for it.
I can’t tell you exactly how hot it has to get before those currently oblivious among us realize this, but my guess is that we will discover the boiling point for epiphanies sooner than we think.
Meteorologists predict 2020 will be the hottest year since records began.
In cities, if you are within the fortunate few who have a safe place to sleep, an air conditioner, and an income to pay for both, you probably still live in a tiny space.
Whether you’re in government-mandated or voluntary self-isolation, you’re bound to feel confined. Even if the fear of a virus looming outside our door wasn’t on our mind, we can agree that spending more than a month indoors isn’t the healthiest way to live, especially if you’re alone or living with too many people.
The challenge with COVID-19 is that it is a novel coronavirus proving to be unpredictably contagious that has managed to mutate into a world humans themselves have never experienced before.
Since the industrial revolution, we have been breaking records in population and moving faster, farther, and more often than ever before, buzzing our busy selves deeper into a climate crisis. We’ve never stomped on the pedal so hard, and we’ve never hit the breaks this fast, so before we are all urged by our respective incompetent politicians to go out and rescue capitalism, we must ask ourselves some important questions.
Why should we stay indoors when we crave going outside?
Because despite the fact that we are accustomed to going outdoors often and feel it would bring us enjoyment, we are trying to protect the well-being of others, and we understand this as more important than our personal pleasure.
That might seem obvious, but remember that answer, you’ll need it later.
Where do these diseases come from?
Zoonotic diseases such as COVID-19 are infectious diseases of humans that originate in other vertebrate animals. Although we humans have experienced many of these outbreaks in the past, we have yet to learn our lesson.
“Scientists estimate that more than 6 out of every 10 known infectious diseases in people can be spread from animals, and 3 out of every 4 new or emerging infectious diseases in people come from animals.” -From the Centers For Disease Control And Prevention
Yes, that is from the now world-famous CDC which you’ll have noticed fittingly drops the P for “prevention” from their acronym.
“The majority of emerging viral diseases, up to 70%, represent zoonoses, with such prominent examples as human immunodeficiency virus/acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (HIV/AIDS), influenza, West Nile virus encephalitis, Nipah virus disease, Hendra virus disease, severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), Ebola virus disease…” -From Mandell, Douglas, and Bennett’s Principles and Practice of Infectious Diseases (Eighth Edition)
These diseases come from the commercial domestication, extremely high-density confinement, mass systematic killing, live transportation, and widespread consumption of products we take from the bodies and labor of other animal species. We keep farming animals, and harvesting pandemics.
Nowhere does this become more obvious than in factory farms.
If the WHO’s and the CDC’s jobs include preventing pandemics, I can think of no valid excuse outside of corruption or incompetence for not constantly and publicly advocating in favor of the abolition of animal husbandry, if not at the very least banning factory farms.
In the United States, it doesn’t matter how often you hear people around you claim the flesh, secretions, and eggs they consume come from grass-fed, Mozart serenaded, free-range certified, humanely-stabbed-in-the-throat farmed animals down at some wholesome local family farm their uncle owns. You can be 99% sure they are either lying to your face or have been severely misled by animal agriculture’s heavy propaganda campaigns.
You should not ask the farmer, butcher, or even worse, the Whole Foods marketing department, if they slit the throats of chickens in a humane way, for the same reasons you wouldn’t ask Shell or Exxon whether their mere existence is a growing tumor to all life on Earth or a blessing to the environment.
“We estimate that 99% of US farmed animals are living in factory farms at present. By species, we estimate that 70.4% of cows, 98.3% of pigs, 99.8% of turkeys, 98.2% of chickens raised for eggs, and over 99.9% of chickens raised for meat are living in factory farms. Based on the confinement and living conditions of farmed fish, we estimate that virtually all US fish farms are suitably described as factory farms, though there is limited data on fish farm conditions and no standardized definition.” -From “US Factory Farming Estimates”
“When we overcrowd animals by the thousands, in cramped football-field-size sheds, to lie beak to beak or snout to snout, and there’s stress crippling their immune systems, and there’s ammonia from the decomposing waste burning their lungs, and there’s a lack of fresh air and sunlight — put all these factors together and you have a perfect storm environment for the emergence and spread of disease,“ -From “Bird Flu: A Virus of Our Own Hatching” by Dr. Michael Greger M.D.
To add insult to injury, we are running out of antibiotics due to animal agriculture’s reckless habit of bombarding factory farms with them in order to keep their suffering victims alive longer, growing faster, and dying more profitable. This has effectively converted their operations into public health hazards akin to virus boot camps of proven pandemic potential.
“In some countries, approximately 80% of the total consumption of medically important antibiotics is in the animal sector, largely for growth promotion in healthy animals” -World Health Organization (WHO)
After a visit to a factory farm, no imagination is needed to picture the opposite of social-distancing, transparency, and pandemic prevention.
“More than 200 million animals are killed for food around the world every day — just on land. Including wild-caught and farmed fishes, we get a total closer to 3 billion animals killed daily. That comes out to 72 billion land animals and over 1.2 trillion aquatic animals killed for food around the world every year.” -Sentient Media
“Livestock health is the weakest link in our global health chain,” -Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations
What can we do to stop this?
1. At the very least, boycott animal products.
Animal farming is destroying us. It’s a bloodied wrecking ball to the environment, its products are on average horrible for your personal health, and as we have learned, our non-essential habit of eating them endangers public health by creating countless breeding grounds for infectious diseases to form and plague us with further outbreaks and quarantines.
Why should we stop eating animals when we crave their butchered body parts and stolen secretions?
Because despite the fact that we are accustomed to eating them often and feel it would bring us enjoyment, we are trying to protect the well-being of others, and we understand this as more important than our personal pleasure.
Animal farming is the greatest moral atrocity of our time, and we are all complicit.
To consume non-human animals always involves hurting them, it involves non-consensually violating the bodily autonomy of others for personal pleasure or profit. It requires knowingly exploiting the fact that they are born into confinement as the most vulnerable and innocent among us, only to then fatally betray them at the slaughterhouse line.
To hurt or kill someone else when completely unnecessary is the definition of cruelty. To pay others to hurt and kill fellow animals simply because they were born the wrong species and we want to commodify them is therefore cruel seeing as it is always violent and needless.
There is no justification for it as proven by the existence of healthy, functioning, and ever-growing numbers of people who live vegan.
To clarify, I am not talking about changing the habits of Inuit, lions, or our ancestors, my goal is to motivate us who have sufficient housing, food access, and security to make conscious choices about what we consume.
It’s a twist of the shopping cart for you, but a world of difference for the animals, our environment, and our health.
Humans are not inherently cruel, but some of us might not yet be fully aware that we’ve been taught to be that way. We’ve been raised by societies that often heavily discriminate others based on trivial differences such as species, race, sexual orientation, religion, and socioeconomic status when in reality, all that truly matters and warrants respect is that we are incredibly similar in the sense that we share the capacity to feel pain, and the desire to be happy, safe, and free.
If you need some inspiration, here are 5 easy budget recipes to start with:
2. Protest, pressure our representatives, vote better, and run for office.
We must fight to end all subsidies to animal farming (meat, dairy, eggs, fishing, corn, soy, etc) and redirect this money towards helping farmers transition towards growing plants instead.
If you thought Jeff Bezos was greedy, know that animal farming is using 83% of farmland to produce just 18% of calories in the global food supply while producing 60% of agriculture’s greenhouse gas emissions. Keep in mind this doesn’t even include what we do to sea-life.
Unsurprisingly, and just like their oil giant counterparts in the energy sector, animal agriculture lobbyists also have a deadly corrupting grip on politics around the world, most notoriously in the United States, Brazil, and the European Union. I bet I won’t be the first or last person to remind you that we desperately need to get money out of politics.
3. Build community. Take care of, and educate each other.
The challenges we face require us to extend our circles of compassion and create a sense of global community and citizenship beyond our religions, nationalities, races, species, etc.
We face incredible obstacles. Naomi Klein points to a high tech dystopia, George Monbiot walks us through the climate crisis, Glenn Greenwald warns us of growing surveillance, and Bernie Sanders gave us hope as he proves our politics are rotten.
In the end, it is clear to me that the only way out is probably through, but definitely together, and it seems like we are finally starting to realize it.
I hope you are feeling happy, healthy, and calm.
We keep us safe.
If you feel the need for a momentary escape from reality, I understand, these are difficult times for everyone. For that purpose, I have designed a little world-trip that you can use to soothe your climate and pandemic anxieties from home.
