Should We Eat Meat? Book Summary - Should We Eat Meat? Book explained in key points

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Should We Eat Meat? summary

Name: Should We Eat Meat?
Rating: 3.3 (246 reviews)
Author: Vaclav Smil

Vaclav Smil

Evolution and Consequences of Modern Carnivory

3.3 (246 ratings)

20 mins

Brief summary

Should We Eat Meat? by Vaclav Smil is an informative and thought-provoking book that explores the environmental, ethical, and health impacts of meat consumption. It offers both scientific evidence and personal opinions to help readers navigate the complex issues surrounding meat consumption.

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Diets

Table of Contents

Should We Eat Meat?
Summary of 9 key ideas

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Key idea 1 of 9

What’s in it for me? Discover the pros and cons of eating meat and how we could produce it in a more responsible way.

Ever since our ancestors hunted game together on the African savannah, eating meat has played a key role in human evolution and culture. Although a vegetarian diet can provide sufficient nutrition, meat is still superior when it comes to providing valuable proteins and fat, which is especially important for growing children.

The rise of modern technology has made it possible to produce staggering amounts of meat every year, which has led to an explosion in meat consumption around the world. Unfortunately, this has come at considerable cost to the environment. Still, vegetarianism is not the solution to these problems. As these blinks will show you, the solution lies in lowering consumption and producing meat in a more rational way.

In these blinks, you’ll learn

how eating meat played an important role in human evolution;
why mammoths were such a good target for our hunter forbears; and
why vegetarianism is not the way to go.

High-quality meat proteins are essential for human development and health.

As a kid you probably learned about the food pyramid and the importance of carbohydrates and proteins for healthy growth and sustained energy. But did you know that some proteins are better than others? They’re called high-quality proteins and you get many of them by eating animal products.

In fact, humans evolved to eat other animals. For instance, a human’s digestive tract is clearly different from that of a herbivore because it has enzymes which developed specifically to digest meat.

But how does meat fit into our diets?

You can think about eating as the process of supplying yourself with the things necessary to sustain your metabolism and maintain, as well as grow, your body. To do that you need both macronutrients like carbohydrates, fats and protein, and micronutrients like vitamins. It just so happens that meat is an excellent source of both macro- and micronutrients, and proteins in particular.

For example, the high-quality protein in meat is essential for young children and serves a crucial function in brain growth. In addition, the energy per gram of fat in meat is more than double that of carbohydrates, clocking in at a whopping 39 kilojoules per gram as opposed to 17.3 for carbohydrates. Meat is also a superb source of iron, which is important because iron deficiency is a major global issue, affecting up to 1.6 billion worldwide. It can lead to impaired brain development and even maternal death.

But despite all the beneficial aspects of including meat in your diet there are some drawbacks. Meat production has a negative impact on the environment. That’s because the per-capita supply of meat available in many nations is higher than the average grown adult weight of 65 kilograms to 80 kilograms. This is an issue because the agricultural processes tied to meat production use a lot of energy and incur a variety of other costs. We’ll find out more about these in later blinks.

Meat played an important role in human evolution.

Have you ever noticed how prevalent meat eating is throughout history? It’s not a coincidence. In fact, meat served a crucial role in human evolution.

For instance, while historical meat consumption has fluctuated, purely vegetarian societies are few and far between. That’s because most cultures saw meat as an indicator of privilege and social status – a reasonable association, given that meat played an important function in the evolution of the human species, and especially our brains. All that protein and iron helped us grow bigger and better grey matter.

Increased meat production and consumption are symbols of the transition to modernity.

OK, so all this evolution happened millennia ago, but there has been a more recent evolution, and it all began in the nineteenth century.

Why?

In the twenty-first century, meat is produced on a huge scale.

For thousands of years domesticated meat production was done by either a farmer making use of grasslands in the country or by practitioners of mixed farming who integrated animal husbandry and crop production seamlessly into one another. But these methods are mostly a thing of the past.

Today, we have a systematic chain of meat production from breeding to raising to slaughtering to processing to distribution.

Large-scale meat production means large-scale problems.

Does the acronym CAFO ring any bells? It stands for Confined Animal Feeding Operations – the kind of production plants that churn out all that cheap meat to meet demand.

Factory-style farms in affluent countries began producing chickens raised on standardized feed after World War Two. Then the method was used to farm pigs, and spread from wealthy countries to Asia and Latin America. Today this method of animal production dominates everywhere but Africa. CAFOs even play a role in cattle raising, but almost exclusively in the United States and Canada.

Feeding animals in factory farms is big – and often inefficient – business.

It’s simple enough to see that more animals mean more feed. But did you know that fodder is the main reason that meat is so environmentally costly?

That’s because modern meat production in CAFOs and feedlots depends on a steady and cheap supply of compound feed, a standardized composition of carbohydrates enriched with proteins, the most common of which is corn, with protein being primarily supplied by oilseeds – soy in particular.

Feed production threatens soil, water and the atmosphere.

Consider the fact that a pig will eat about 300 kilograms of feed before it’s slaughtered. That means as much as 500 square meters is needed to grow the crops necessary to raise one pig! On top of that you need tons of nitrogen to fertilize the crops, and lots of energy to produce that nitrogen in turn.

As a result, large-scale meat production has dramatically reshaped land use. For instance, most people are unaware of the extent to which domesticated animals dominate the zoomass, the mass of all terrestrial vertebrates other than humans. Even in huge, heavily populated countries like the United States, animals raised for meat weigh as much as the human population of the entire nation! About a quarter of the ice-free continental surface of the Earth is used for livestock grazing, and one third of all arable land produces feed crops for them.

Meat alternatives all have limitations.

So, you’ve seen how meat production plays a role in global warming and deforestation. But what’s the alternative? Is not eating meat the only option? Maybe not.

If the number of vegetarians increased, that would help, but given the centrality of meat to our diet this wouldn’t be a wise move. For instance, a vegetarian diet can be as nutritious as one that includes meat but it requires more effort. That’s because vegetarians are hard pressed to ensure their diets include enough metals. Since one kilogram of vegetables isn’t nutritionally comparable to one kilogram of meat, it’s much easier to achieve a balanced diet by eating meat, especially for a young child.

The best solution is to continue producing meat but to do so rationally.

The truth is, current levels of meat production and consumption are not fixed. Although eating huge quantities of meat has become a mass phenomenon, it doesn’t have to remain one. We don’t even need to sacrifice our vital protein intake to do this.

That’s because there are other fantastic sources of protein beyond meat, like dairy products and eggs. While these can’t replace meat entirely, they can certainly put a dent in our consumption.

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What is Should We Eat Meat? about?

Should We Eat Meat? (2013) helps you navigate the ethical dilemmas behind your hamburger with a broad and objective assessment of meat production and consumption. Should you stick to grass-fed beef or take up veganism to save the planet? These blinks will give you all the facts you need to make your own informed decision.

Who should read Should We Eat Meat??

Meat eaters and vegetarians alike
People looking for objective information about meat consumption and production
Anyone concerned about the Earth’s future

About the Author

Vaclav Smil is an interdisciplinary researcher combining the fields of energy, environmental studies, population change, food production, nutrition, public policy, technical innovation and risk assessment. He teaches at the University of Manitoba where he is a distinguished professor emeritus and was listed as one of Foreign Policy’s 2010 top 50 global thinkers.

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