The corn crop itself now is almost exclusively being raised for

animal feed rather than for human consumption, and in this pie chart,

you'll see that about 28.5%, of U.S. farmland is

now devoted to corn production, a little bit less, 25% to soybeans,

18.9% to hay, which of course is used for beef production and dairy,

and then 15.5% wheat, which is still mostly fed directly to humans,

although increasingly it's highly processed into baked products,

white breads rather than whole grain breads and things like that.

The next slide shows what happens to the corn itself,

36.3% of all corn raised is directly used for animal feed, cattle, swine, chickens.

Another 27.3% is now used for ethanol production,

or biofuel, and about 12.2% actually

is used then to return to animal feed as dried distillers grains,

so once you have fermented the corn to produce the ethanol, you're left with

fiber, protein, a lot of nutrients that are actually useful for

consumption, but it's hard to get people to eat dried, distillers grains, so

we first feed it to our food animals and then consume the animal.

We have already seen what happened to the poultry industry, here is the picture for

swine and beef as well, you see that as recently as 1980,

the four largest companies controlling the beef industry had

about a 36% market share by 2010, it had increased to 85%.

The four largest companies controlling pork production in 1980 controlled 34%,

of the market for pork and now they are up to 65%, one of these,

Smithfield has recently been purchased by a Chinese company and whether or

not this sale will go through at the time the recording is still up in the air.

And finally, with regard to the poultry market, we see that now in 2010,

51% of the total broiler market is controlled by just four companies.

I mentioned earlier that we are now raising and

consuming about 10 billion food animals per year in the United States,

globally, it's a little over 50 billion, so here we are,

a population accounting for 6% of the world's total, and we're

consuming about 20% of the total food animals produced for human consumption.

The broad blue line at the bottom is the beef and

veal consumption, and you can see that it peaked back in the early to

mid 1970s, and it was in about 19,

early 70s that the first big epidemiologic studies relating a high fat diet,

to increased cardiovascular disease risk were being released from Framingham, and

other similar studies, and there was an increasing concern related to high fat

consumption that lead to a modest decline in beef consumption.

A bigger change in the actual quality of the beef itself, the richly marbled

stakes that were considered, superior cuts of beef back in the 70s were

slowly being replaced by leaner cuts, but the, total consumption of beef has now,

pretty much stabled, slightly declining in the most recent years.

The next level, pork production, despite intensive advertising on the part of the,

pork industry the alternate white meat and all those other, marketing labels, there's

only been a relatively minor increase in swine production and consumption.

The big growth, accounting for most of the, increase in total meat

consumption in the United States, is in poultry, and that's the broad green swath,

the purple, the final purple line at the top showing turkey consumption,

has increased modestly, but it's really the growth of the chicken industry that

accounts for the dramatic increase in total meat consumption.

We compare how much of the American diet,

dietary protein is from animal sources versus plants and vegetables, and grains,

you see that we're really up there at about 200 pounds per year

of meat consumption, whereas the low income countries the world are,

on average at 50 pounds per person per year, and

there are many, many low income countries that are much below that.

The American Heart Association recommends much more modest intake of meats,

especially the red meats of beef and pork, and they would have us cut back to

a little over, a 100 pounds per capita per year, on average, the other industrialized

countries of the world are at about 150 pounds per head, per year.

As we look forward, projections of meat consumption vary tremendously,

China is already, matching these projections, and

by the year 2020, it's expected that there will

be about 85 million metric tons of meat consumed in China.

India, which still has a very large vegetarian and

vegan population, will have only modest increase and that's a good thing for

the planet, it's a good thing for the health of the Indian population.

But the rest of the world is,

working hard to catch up to what we currently consume in the United States.

This production of large numbers of animals for

human consumption comes with a real cost, both to the environment and to our diet.

We are consuming fossil fuels and groundwater at an unsustainable rated.

We rely heavily on synthetic chemical pesticides and

fertilizers that are polluting our soil, water and air.

The soil is eroding much faster than it can be replenished,

as I've shown in previous slides.

And our monocultures, these large, large tracks of corn and

soy bean being raised for animal feed

have severely restricted the amount of biodiversity throughout the farm belt.

Never before in human history,

have people had to pay as little at the grocery store as Americans pay today.

On average, about 10% of our disposable income now is spent on food,

of course that varies tremendously, very poor low income people, especially those

who are dependent on Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits,

the SNAP program, spend a much larger proportion of their disposable income,

but on average, we now spend about 10%.

The reason we spend so little,

however, is that much of the true cost has been externalized, as I mentioned earlier.

These externalities include, the depletion of fossil fuel, water, soil, and

biodiversity, the pollution of resources by the products of fuel combustion,

pesticides, animal waste and fertilizers, and the economic,

social and health costs to communities in lost property values,

lost quality adjusted life years, sickness, loss of work days,

all of that adds up to an enormous true cost of our current high meat,

high fat, high sugar, high sodium diet.

The amount of water that is required for producing different parts of our,

food intake, shown in this slide, and it's really quite remarkable,

when you see how much water is required to, maintain a high meat diet.

The calculation of water requirement, of course, includes that needed to,

irrigate the, animal feed production of corn and soybeans,

as well as the actual, needs of the animal itself during its life cycle.

In addition to water consumption, we return again, for

a moment, to the problem of greenhouse gas production.

This slide is a very interesting way of looking at the challenge,

it was put together by the CIA,

the real CIA that is the Culinary Institute of America, which laid claim to,

the acronym CIA decades before the Central Intelligence Agency was formed.

So, in this graph, you see in the foreground, the orange, red

graph are the relative greenhouse gas emissions per 100 gram

of protein, and starting at the far right,

you see a relatively modest contribution of greenhouse gases.

For the protein that is in lentils, a big jump up for

the amount contained in milk and dairy, and then dry beans, tofu,

eggs and chicken actually relatively modest compared to,

lamb, beef, cheese production, and pork.

The green bars, the green column, represents the greenhouse

gas production emissions per thousand calories of product.

So again remembering that one gram of protein, has four calories in it,

if you're focusing on protein production you're really more worried about

the quality of protein than you are about the calorie count, but,

nonetheless they parallel reasonably well expect for

this little place with farm salmon where they're more, greenhouse gasses

emitted in the production of 1,000 calories of salmon protein.

But the real big contributors are shown when you look at the relative greenhouse

gas emissions per total weight of product measured here in kilograms,

lamb is basically almost off the chart, beef, very high, cheese and

pork, pretty high, and farmed salmon, also quite high.

The decisions that we make is we choose what to eat, can be reflected in a variety

of different ways, of course we are guided by taste and nutrition, culture and

all those other determinants of what we choose to eat, but increasingly people

are paying attention to the footprint on the environment, as measured either by

a carbon footprint or by how many greenhouse gasses are being emitted.

One of the fascinating things about the work of the Culinary Institute of America,

is the fact that, people, in America,

are ignorant about two major things that really drive our dietary choices.

First of all, many people think that the only source of protein is from animals,

and of course, there are very high quality proteins available in grains,

fruits and vegetables, in fact, the only essential amino acid that is not,

readily available in a vegetarian diet where you have to

pay a little attention to what you eat, is lysine, and lysine,

of course, is abundantly available in meats and dairy, so people get

the idea that if you have to pay attention to lysine maybe that's really,

the only source of protein to trust is that that comes from animal products.

The other big myth, that needs to be exploded, is that we need a lot of

protein in the diet, the actual average daily requirement for an adult,

is about 50 to 55 grams of protein, and that's really on the safe side, probably,

it's more like 40 grams of protein, and you need protein on a regular basis,

there's no place in the body that protein is stored other than skeletal muscle, and

you don't want to start breaking down skeletal muscle every time you're a little

short of amino acids that are needed to produce all of the other enzymes and

protein components of the body so we need protein on a regular basis but

we need it in modest amounts.

The average American is now consuming about 110 to 115 grams a day,

in other words, twice what we need.

If we could cut back by 50% irrespective of what

your pallet tells you to purchase from this array of animal products,

you can see it would have a major impact on greenhouse gas production.

Food Production, the Ecosystem, Diet, and Public Health II (Lawrence)

An Introduction to the U.S. Food System: Perspectives from Public Health

Meet the Instructors