Vox Populi
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Dan Brook: The Cost of Meat
Meat is much more expensive than most people realize. When it comes to meat, we pay for it many times over. Here are a dozen major ways we pay for meat and it’s busting our personal, local, national, and global budgets.
1. We pay for meat at the cashier when we buy it in markets and restaurants. People who eat plant-based diets save an average of $750 per year. Some of the healthiest, tastiest, most compassionate, most sustainable foods are plant-based and inexpensive: rice, beans, lentils, carrots, potatoes, onions, tomatoes, beets, squash, tofu, peanut butter, pasta, and others.
2. We pay for meat through massive government subsidies, money that could be allocated in productive ways that help people, animals, and the environment, such as organic agriculture, food programs, and education about plant-based diets.
3. We pay for meat through massive environmental destruction, including air and water pollution, soil degradation, wasting resources, deforestation, species extinction, and more. The livestock industry is a leading cause of nearly every environmental problem.
4. We pay for meat through our climate crisis, which affects all countries and all species. The livestock industry is the leading cause of climate change, resulting in record heat, melting glaciers, rising sea levels, submerged coastlines, evaporating lakes, extreme weather events, droughts, wildfires, floods, spreading disease, ocean acidification, the destruction of infrastructure and other property, higher insurance rates, environmental refugees, and other disasters, making tragic instances of hunger, ethnic violence, terrorism, and war more likely.
5. Animals pay for our meat — their formerly-living bodies — through their abuse, torture, and death. This happens every single day to billions of animals, despite the fact that we can survive, indeed thrive, on plant-based diets. They deserve better.
6. We pay for meat when workers on factory farms and in slaughterhouses, disproportionately people of color, get repetitive stress injuries, amputations, nightmares, PTSD, antibiotic-resistant diseases such as MRSA, and other health threats. As the most dangerous jobs in America, some workers also tragically, though unnecessarily, die there.
7. We pay for meat through inefficiency and wastefulness. According to a study in Science, meat and dairy account for only 18% of calories, but 33% of fresh water withdrawals, 56% of air pollution, 57% of water pollution, 58% of agricultural greenhouse gas emissions, and 83% of farm land. Beans, lentils, rice, wheat, vegetables, and fruits are much more efficient, inexpensive, healthy, socially just, and sustainable.
8. We pay for meat by paying higher prices for water, fuel, crops, and other resources, which get inefficiently diverted to the wasteful and inefficient livestock industry. And for those at or near subsistence level — about a billion people — these higher prices result in higher levels of hunger and starvation.
9. We pay for meat through heart disease and heart attacks, various cancers, strokes, obesity, diabetes, hypertension, kidney disease, gout, etc. and also doctor visits, surgeries, and medicines to treat these serious health problems as well as the pain, suffering, and loss of productivity as a result. In the U.S. every year, there are about half a million open-heart surgeries at a cost of $117,094 on average for each heart bypass surgery, totaling over $58.5 billion per year, regardless of whether those people survive or not. With heart disease the number one killer by far, many do not survive.
10. We pay for meat with shorter lives with more disease. Vegetarians and vegans live longer than meat-eaters, extending their healthy lives by 7.8 years on average.
11. We pay for meat by having it deplete our spirits. We know what we are doing to animals is wrong — especially to cows, pigs, chickens, turkeys, and fish — and most of us don’t want to watch it or know too much about it because it’s absolutely and disgustingly horrifying. This weighs on our conscience, even when we are not explicitly thinking about it or directly involved in it.
12. We pay for meat by creating the conditions for pandemics to arise. Whether it is the Spanish flu or Covid-19, swine flu or bird flu, AIDS or MRSA, Ebola or others, all of these and other deadly diseases that have become epidemics or pandemics originated in exploitative human interactions with animals, costing us millions of lives, trillions of dollars, and untold suffering. Wouldn’t it be better to stop the next pandemic before it happens?
The costs of meat are impoverishing and killing us. We can save a lot by ditching meat and dairy, while creating a more compassionate, healthy, just, and environmentally-sustainable world.
Copyright 2021 Dan Brook
Dan Brook, PhD teaches in the Department of Sociology and Interdisciplinary Social Sciences at San Jose State University, is on the Board of San Francisco Veg Society and the Advisory Board of Jewish Veg, and is the author of the free Eating the Earth: The Truth About What We Eat and editor of the non-profit cookbook Justice in the Kitchen.
Vox Populi 
In 1900 there were a million people and a million cows in the State of Florida. Today there are still about a million cows (1.2) and now 22 million people with 1000 moving here every day.
Our 80 year old stands of grass attenuated with wetlands and woods on Treasure Hammock Ranch in Indian River County brought solely to you as part of Florida’s Cattle Industry, comprise a “carbon sink” of the first order. The story of what’s wrong with the world is not a simple one, and will not be solved by getting rid of animal agriculture. There are lands throughout the world where you can’t grow “good stuff” for human beings, where ruminant animals by their eloquent digestive tracts can convert roughage and complex carbohydrates into beautiful proteins and products. The benefits to land, water, and air of cattle ranches in Florida have been researched and established through the Archbold Biological Research Foundation on Buck Island Ranch near Lake Placid, FL by Dr Hilary Swain. So don’t just take it from me when I say cows are a good thing for the State of Florida and the world in general and I’m sorry for how many beautiful ranch lands and how much of Natural Florida have been lost to uncontrolled growth and development in this state because of those 22 million people who have arrived. Come for a visit, I’d be glad to show you these things first hand, and regret I can’t include pictures in this post.
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Thanks, Sean. You are probably aware that over 95% of the cattle raised in this country live in “factory farms” which are extremely damaging to the environment as well as cruel to the animals. The idyllic raising of animals you describe is mostly a thing of the past. I was raised in cattle country in Texas, and I have respect for the cowboy culture, but it doesn’t exist anymore for the most part.
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Excellent post – thank you Dan.
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Thanks, Violet. Love your website.
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I’m so glad, thank you so much.
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Thanks Violet!
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Thank you for this excellent, intelligent article! I have always been an animal lover and feel so much better now that I am plant based and I am aligned with my values. I am also the healthiest I have ever been! My lifelong asthma, painful heartburn, IBS and unexplained hives all disappeared. All of which I went to medical doctors for years where they prescribed drugs that just did not work. So sad that most medical doctors are not trained in preventative medicine. I am also shocked that most people have no idea how environmentally destructive animal agriculture is. Our planet is in big trouble if people continue eating animals at the rate they are now. It is 100% not sustainable for our growing population.
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Thanks for your thoughtful comment and I’m so glad you found plant-based health!
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Dan, thank you so much for this superb article. The typical American meat- and dairy-centric diet is responsible for the destruction of our ecosystems as well as the generally poor health of Americans. Most people are not aware that huge subsidies flow to multinational corporations like Cargill, Smithfield, and Tyson that basically have the monopoly on industrial production of animals and their slaughter. They reap the profit while leaving others to bear the “outsourced” costs – pollution, health problems, greenhouse gas emissions, and pandemics, just to name a few. Here is an excellent background (https://foodprint.org/issues/raising-animals-industrial-system/).
Fewer people yet are aware that we taxpayers are tapped $38 billion a year to subsidize these operations (https://www.veganjusticeleague.com/).
The solution is to break away from our indoctrination and the mythology that meat and dairy are actually good for us. They aren’t. The typical American diet gives us the typical American diseases: heart disease, certain cancers, diabetes, etc.
A plant-based diet gives us abundant good health while reducing our footprint in every way – water, greenhouse gas emissions, land use, etc. Plus, it just feels good to know you are not causing the suffering of sentient beings.
Thank you again for this excellent article. I’ll be referring to it again and again in my advocacy work!
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Thanks so much for your thoughtful, fact-based response, as well as for the good work I’m sure you do!
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Excellent article. True and extremely important. We’re a vegan family and Thank G-d enjoy good health and moral inner peace for the reason you wrote.
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Good health and inner peace… lovely!
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Thanks so much / todah rabah!
May you live to 120!
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Meat is not healthful, which is why vegetarians and vegans live longer with fewer deadly diseases than meat-eaters. And whatever you want to say about wild game, it’s not what 99% of Americans are eating 99% of the time, so this issue is basically a distraction.
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Culling prey animals is necessary to maintain the health of the wild lands; in Pittsburgh, hunting is not allowed in the parks and deer are destroying the forests and gardens. However, hunting is not a substitute for public policies which encourage veganism and discourage factory farming. We cannot have 7 billion people killing wild animals for food.
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What a privileged, white supremacist place you come from. Only a white supremacist would presume that indigenous peoples, their customs and diets are inferior. Eating meat is how most people of color and indigenous folks survive. Shame on you, racist.
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Did you know that people of color in America have a higher rate of veganism than white people?
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Well done. I love my plant-based diet.
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Thanks! You are doing what’s best for personal, public, animal, and environmental health.
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thanks, Dan. I didn’t know this fact. I wonder why this is so? Anyway, it’s great to see you on Vox Populi, both as a writer and as a reader.
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I’m happy to be here
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