Why Do Anti-Environmentalists Fear the Earth Will Be Overrun by Cows?
In ten years of environmentally-motivated vegetarianism, I’ve had a lot of conversations about my choice with a wide range of non-vegetarians, some with valid arguments against it and some whose views are not so impressive (and plenty who just really, really like bacon). A common argument among the less, er, “bright” anti-vegetarians has been “if everyone stopped eating meat, what would happen to all the domesticated cows?”
I expect this sort of argument from the riff raff , but I never thought someone with the title of “Professor” would be quite that inane. But in this month’s edition of Foreign Policy Magazine, Professor Robert Paarlberg argues that organic farming is a bad idea because “To supply enough organic fertilizer, the U.S. cattle population would have to increase roughly fivefold.”
Five times as many cows! They’ll terrorize the populace! I can’t believe I have to say this, but nobody is expecting all farms to go organic at once. The point of the slow food movement is that our food systems need to be gradually restructured in a way that makes basic, intuitive sense, so we’re no longer wasting energy and decreasing food quality by shipping our vegetables thousands of miles for no good reason. So don’t freak out about impending doom via cow attack, just keep buying local.
P.S. I realize Paarlberg’s argument is a bit more complex than that one bit of idiocy, but it’s a long article full of inaccuracies, half-truths and general misunderstanding of the slow food movement, and I haven’t got all day.
