Let’s just say you wanted to devise a food system that was super polluting, inefficient, wasteful, and barbaric.
If so, you would be hard-pressed to create something worse than what America currently has.
“This is a horror show in every dimension,” says Professor Jason Scorse, who has been studying the U.S. food system for three decades. “The whole system is the worst of the worst.”
In a recent talk, he broke down what’s wrong and offered up perhaps a surprising starting point for transformation—changing how we eat. He’s not just talk; Scorse has followed a plant-based diet himself for the past several decades.
Scorse first committed to a vegan diet as a 19-year-old undergraduate at UC Santa Cruz after listening to lectures by Santa Cruz local, heir of the Baskin-Robbins fortune and Diet for a New America author John Robbins, whom Scorse describes as a hero.
“I realized the full range of environmental impacts of the industrial meat system and the incredible cruelty and barbarism that is at its core,” he says.
At Middlebury he teaches about the benefits to a plant-based food system largely through a sustainability lens—exploring impacts on greenhouse gas emissions, water use, land use, biodiversity impacts, waste, pandemic risk, and beyond—with a side of ethics.
“There is no more abominable industry in the entire world than industrial meat and dairy—it’s a disgrace and must end.”
Eating plant-based food is not deprivation. … It’s an exciting adventure that opens you to possibilities.
Water can go way further.
It takes 10 times the amount of water to grow the grain or grass to feed cows, chickens, pigs, sheep, and goats and then eat those animals than to consume the plants themselves. In the face of mounting water shortages throughout the world, that’s a simple truth. Or as Scorse, who is a trained economist, says, “It’s a basic ecological mathematical fact.”
Livestock land use breaks the brain.
Half of all arable land on the planet is used for animal agriculture, whether that’s grazing space or crops grown to feed animals, particularly cattle. The energy input and greenhouse gas output involved means all the solar and wind energy or electric vehicles possible wouldn’t be enough to offset the emissions effects of human appetite for flesh.
Eating meat drives wildlife extinction.
Even after 30 years of looking closely at the environmental impacts of chowing down on beef and pork, this fact still blows Scorse’s mind: humans and livestock make up 96 percent of the mammal biomass on Earth. Deforestation to create a home for cows means a death sentence for many other species. “If you care about wildlife, you can’t look at the current food system without horror,” he says.
Factory farms breed more than calories.
Avian and swine flus, Scorse says, make COVID “look like Disneyland.” With 80 billion animals in compromised conditions worldwide, disease jumping to humans is not a matter of if but when. “I’m not doing this to scare you,” Scorse says. “[But] it’s impossible to contain it forever.”
Confronting the scary parts is hard—and helpful.
“I don’t want to give you nightmares,” Scorse says, but he also feels obligated to acknowledge the conditions livestock are subjected to. “It’s too freaking depressing. I trust you are ethical people. You care. I can say with 100 percent certainty if you were to witness what was being done, you would be appalled. … These are our genetic cousins. They feel pleasure and pain. The things we do for convenience—taste—are unacceptable. I look forward to the day we’re righteous. It doesn’t mean we don’t kill [animals]. It means we don’t torture them. I guarantee if you could see the conditions, you would agree.”
As Scorse wrapped up the talk, he asked listeners to digest two truths.
One: Don’t fall for the narrative that eliminating meat involves some sort of monk-like existence.
“Eating plant-based food is not deprivation,” he says. “It’s rekindling and reconnecting with thousand-years-old traditions, and not modern bullshit Happy Meal [messaging] fed into our brains. It’s an exciting adventure that opens you to possibilities.”
He emphasized that it doesn’t mean salad all day, every day.
“There’s plant protein—that’s the key,” Scorse says. “I’m eating beans, lentils, and proteins from nuts, [which] can be made into all sorts of products.”
He highlighted companies doing cultivated meat and fermentation in flavorful ways, with a number employing Middlebury graduates—Upside Foods, Prime Roots, Finless Foods, Better Meat Co., Wildtype, Thrilling Foods, and Primal Roots among them.
“You don’t have to give up anything, you can choose something better,” Scorse says. “Something superior to meat and dairy! It’s not about deprivation.”
Two: vegan diets translate to power.
“Most of the strongest animals on the planet eat plants all day,” he says. “Break the mindset that vegans are soft and weak.”
See the full video of “The Future of Food.”
Master of Arts in Environmental Policy and Management
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