Joyce D’Silva
Compassion in World Farming
Godalming, Surrey

SIR – Producing animal protein is costly in terms of land and water use. A cow needs up to ten kilograms of feed to produce one kilogram of meat. A pig needs around five kilos and a chicken around three. The best part of the world’s maize and soyabean crops goes to feeding animals.

Separately, before poor farmers start buying seeds from big Western seed companies they should try some basic technologies such as crop rotation, green fertilisers and agroforestry. Those techniques, which are being implemented in many African countries, have the potential to increase yields and do much more to preserve the environment than planting large areas with one or two hybrid seeds.

Ernst Bertone Oehninger
Getulina, Brazil

SIR – Why not provide incentives for countries to curb excess consumption using phased-in tradable quotas? Countries failing to bring average consumption to below 3,000 calories a day could buy entitlements from grossly under-consuming countries, which could invest the proceeds in targeted grants aimed at eradicating the hunger that needlessly afflicts a billion people.

Andrew Macmillan
Scansano, Italy
Ignacio Trueba
Madrid

Moreover, an increasing proportion of the population is living in cities, and dollar for dollar city-dwellers eat more food and especially more processed foods than their country cousins. They also tend to be richer and able to afford pricier food, such as meat. So meat demand will rise strongly. In 2000, 56% of all the calories consumed in developing countries were provided by cereals and 20% by meat, dairy and vegetable oils. By 2050, the FAO thinks, the contribution of cereals will have dropped to 46% and that of meat, dairy and fats will have risen to 29%. To match that soaring demand, meat production will need to increase to 470m tonnes by 2050, almost double its current level. Output of soyabeans (most of which are fed to animals) will more than double, to 515m tonnes.

Overall, the FAO reckons, total demand for food will rise about 70% in the 44 years from 2006 to 2050, more than twice as much as demand for cereals. But that is still less than half as much as the rise in food production in the 44 years from 1962 to 2006. So according to the FAO’s Kostas Stamoulis, producing enough food to feed the world in the next four decades should be easier than in the previous four.

Their apparent dim-wittedness has made sheep a byword for stupidity and mindlessly following the crowd. But scientists have discovered that the creatures are far more intelligent than they are given credit for.

Sheep have the brainpower to equal monkeys and, in some tests, even humans, researchers found.

They have advanced learning capabilities, are adaptable, can map out their surroundings mentally and may even be able to plan ahead.

In some states, as violent as he likes. Farmers, for the most part, are merely expected to abide by industry standards—that is, to treat their livestock as other farmers do. Lifelong confinement in small cages and using a hot blade to trim a chicken’s beak, for example, are widely permitted as customary agricultural practices. (A handful of states, however, have recently prohibited certain confinement systems.) Acts of violence or mutilation are typically illegal only if they are unnecessary and out of the ordinary. Because stomping on a calf’s head is hardly a tradition in animal husbandry, Ohio prosecutors could try to press charges, but at worst the dairy farmers will get slapped with misdemeanors. To face a felony charge for animal cruelty in Ohio, the perpetrator has to abuse a companion, laboratory, or zoo animal.

Federal law has very little to say about the treatment of livestock. The Animal Welfare Act applies mainly to research animals. The Humane Methods of Slaughter Act requires farmers to knock out livestock with a single blow, shot, or electrical charge before being butchering them, but the law only governs slaughterhouses, not farms. (It also doesn’t apply to poultry, which represents more than 95 percent of slaughtered animals. You’re free to kill your chicken any way you like under federal law.) The 28 Hour Law of 1873 requires that farm animals get five hours of R & R for every 28 hours of train transport, but few cattle ride the rails these days.”

There are dozens of reasons to become a vegan, but just two should suffice: Raising animals for food 1) destroys the planet and 2) causes those animals to suffer. Factory farms are the worst offenders, but even the best-run animal operations can’t get around the fact that livestock are the largest contributors to global warming worldwide and that the same amount of land used to feed one beef-eater can feed 15 to 20 vegans. Animals are terribly inefficient machines for turning plants into food, and an inefficiency of this scale is disastrous. The animal welfare argument is even simpler: While there are limitless ways in which humans are different from nonhuman animals, one thing we share with most is the ability to feel pain. Since I consider it unethical to cause you, dear reader, undue pain, there’s no reason—other than simple preference for my own species—to have a separate standard for mammals, fish, and birds.

But what if we could find an animal that thrived in a factory-farm cage, one that subsisted on nutrients plucked from the air and that was insensate to the slaughterhouse blade? Even if that animal looked like a bunny rabbit crossed with a puppy, it would be A-OK to hack it into pieces for your dinner plate. Luckily for those of us who still haven’t gotten over the death of Bambi’s mother, the creature I’m thinking of is decidedly less cuddly. Biologically, oysters are not in the plant kingdom, but when it comes to ethical eating, they are almost indistinguishable from plants. Oyster farms account for 95 percent of all oyster consumption and have a minimal negative impact on their ecosystems; there are even nonprofit projects devoted to cultivating oysters as a way to improve water quality. Since so many oysters are farmed, there’s little danger of overfishing. No forests are cleared for oysters, no fertilizer is needed, and no grain goes to waste to feed them—they have a diet of plankton, which is about as close to the bottom of the food chain as you can get. Oyster cultivation also avoids many of the negative side effects of plant agriculture: There are no bees needed to pollinate oysters, no pesticides required to kill off other insects, and for the most part, oyster farms operate without the collateral damage of accidentally killing other animals during harvesting. (Relatedly, although it’s possible to collect wild oysters sustainably, the same cannot be said for other bivalves like clams and mussels. These are often dredged from the seabed, disrupting an entire ecosystem. For that reason, it’s best to avoid them.)

Meat and dairy get over 73% of the subsidies, but are the second smallest recommended category for consumption. The second largest category recommended (grains) gets about 13% of subsidies. Fruits and vegetables apparently get less than 0.5% of subsidies.

It is worth noting that these nutritional recommendations already reflect the fact that government bureaucracies are in the pocket of the farm lobby.

On Monday, Huntington Meat Packing Inc. recalled a whopping 864,000 pounds of beef thought to contain a particularly nasty strain of E. coli bacteria called O157:H7. Coming shortly after the recall of 248,000 pounds of beef by National Steak and Poultry on Christmas Eve—and dozens of other scares over contaminated beef and pork—this latest news reminds consumers yet again that the mass production of meat can be very dangerous indeed.

Consumers who still have an appetite for burgers and sirloins have been pushed toward alternative food sources. In particular, they’ve started to seek out more wholesome meat from animals raised in accordance with their natural inclinations and heritage. According to Patricia Whisnant, president of the American Grassfed Association, there’s been a dramatic rise in demand for cattle reared on a pasture diet instead of an industrial feed lot. Grass-fed beef should account for 10 percent of America’s beef consumption overall by 2016, she says—a more than threefold increase from 2006.

The comparative health benefits of grass-fed beef are well documented. Scores of studies indicate that it’s higher in omega 3s and lower in saturated fat. But when it comes to E. coli O157:H7, the advantages of grass-fed beef are not so clear. In fact, exploring the connection between grass-fed beef and these dangerous bacteria offers a disturbing lesson in how culinary wisdom becomes foodie dogma and how foodie dogma can turn into a recipe for disaster.