Meat The Truth

I must say it was interesting reading Comfortably Unaware by Dr. Richard Oppenlander and then watching Meat The Truth. I purposefully chose to watch Meat The Truth because I had read Comfortably Unaware and I was curious how they would compare.Both the book and documentary are about the impacts of livestock production and consumption, however Comfortably Unaware focused on both environmental impacts of meat production as well as the negative health effects consuming meat has on the human body. Meat The Truth mainly focused on just the environmental impacts. The movie was released in 2008 whereas the book was published in 2012 so the book has more updated statistics, which have only increased.

There were two main focuses I noticed in Meat The Truth: The amount of land used to raise and feed livestock and its impacts on the environment and the inhumane treatment of animals and employees. All of the statistics are mind blowing and there are so many I could never list them all in just one post. One comparison I will give you to give you a sense of how much pollution livestock create is that one cow creates more pollution than a car that has driven 70 billion km. And it's not just the animals themselves destroying our planet with their waste and methane emissions. The masses of land required to put the livestock on and grow crops to feed the livestock is mind blowing. Our rainforests are being completely depleted due to deforestation for the maintenance of livestock and livestock crops. By cutting down our forests we are losing carbon sponges and emitting more carbon only making our problems worse. The graphs above show that the countries that consume the least amount of meat are sacrificing the most amount of land solely for the production of livestock, which is a devastating concept and example of how corrupt our industries can be.

Although the inhumane treatment of animals and employees doesn't have much to do with pollution it was still important to address in the film. A lot of farms are owned by large coorporations and the farmers have little to no say of what goes on on their farms. Farmers often don't get paid enough to make a comfortable living for the work they do. Chicks are debeaked so they don't have the risk of pecking each other. Piglets are castrated with no anasthetic and I could go on

Meat The Truth was a lot of the same information from Comfortably Unaware and then some. It was nice getting another perspective on the destruction that our livestock industry is causing.