Read The Kind Diet: A Simple Guide to Feeling Great, Losing Weight, and Saving the Planet for Free Online Page B

into account the fuel used for planting, watering, and harvesting of the grain a cow eats, its transportation, the energy used by factory farms, transportation of the cows to slaughter, and then the distribution of the meat to you . . . that Big Mac looks more like it’s made of fossil fuel than beef. Because the average American eats 97 pounds of beef a year, our national burger-lust requires the energy equivalent of a mere 29 billion gallons of gas!
    Cows are cute, but they are wrecking America: The meat industry is clearly siphoning off a disproportionate share of precious resources like fuel and water, but the grazing of cattle is wreaking havoc on the land itself. Cows and other livestock are wandering around on approximately 160 million acres 38 of federally owned land leased to farmers. And their innocent grazing isn’t so innocent. More than half of the topsoil of the American West has been lost since cattle started grazing 140 years ago. According to Mad Cowboy by Howard Lyman, it takes nature from 100 to 800 years to create a single inch of topsoil, and since the birth of this country, we’ve lost 6 full inches. That might just sound like a bunch of dirt disappearing, but topsoil is the incubator of life itself. Without it, no plants can grow, and without plants, all animals die. By allowing millions of cows to stomp on, poo on, and kick up precious topsoil, we are shooting ourselves in the collective hoof. When enough soil is dried or displaced, a negative spiral begins that causes rich, fertile soil to become desert. And there’s no recovery from that anywhere in the near future. Desertification from overgrazing is a global problem.
    Imagine if we stopped the damage now and what we could do with that real estate. We could be growing food for people . We could plant trees to absorb carbon dioxide and produce oxygen. We could restore natural habitats for wild animals and preserve biodiversity. Many of the world’s problems could be solved if livestock were taken out of the picture.
    And let’s not forget what happens when wild animals start to compete with the cows for this federal land or threaten the herds. One and a half million wild animals, such as bears, bobcats, foxes, mountain lions, and even domestic pets are killed each year to protect cattle. 39 In other words, we kill one animal to protect another animal only to turn around and kill that animal to feed an appetite that is killing us and the planet! How crazy is that?
    We’re messing with the ocean: Once thought to be an inexhaustible source of food, the ocean today is actually being fished out. Because there are fewer fish, we’re having to go deeper and deeper into the ocean to find them, and we’re displacing all sorts of marine creatures and plants that are essential members of the food chain in the process. Fish farming is unfortunately not the solution, since it takes 2 to 5 pounds of small wild fish to produce 1 pound of farmed salmon. 40 That formula is obviously totally unsustainable.
    We’re destroying the rain forest: It’s one thing to damage our own country, but our lust for cheap burgers is creating so much demand for beef that the South and Central American cattle industries are clearing rain forest to make room for cattle pasture. In fact, cattle grazing is the number one factor in the destruction of the rain forest, and we’re losing 2.4 acres of it per second. 41 That’s 144 acres per minute. Seventy-five million acres per year! Rain forest used to cover 14 percent of the earth, but now it covers only 6 percent. You see, every hamburger requires a plot of land the size of a small kitchen to be cleared. Is that burger worth it?
    Let’s take a look at what we’re giving up:
    Oxygen: It is estimated that the global rain forests produce 40 percent 42 of the oxygen we breathe, so think of the rain forests of the world as the planet’s lungs. By cutting them down, we are literally choking ourselves to death. Plus, by cutting and