Cows

As an American society, we are grown into a culture in which our lives center on the best ways of getting cheap, fast, and delicious food. One of the American delicacies that satisfy that criteria is beef. According to the National Institutes of Health, Americans eat three times more beef than most European and developing countries. In accordance, American appetite for meat may not be as innocent as it seems and has proven to have a detrimental effect on our environment. Let’s start with the anatomy of a cow. The cow’s digestive system calls for a diet that consists of grass. United States farms instead, use the cheapness of corn to mass feed these cows. This is a major problem because when cows are not being fed the necessary food, they release methane through excretory processes. Methane has 21 times the polluting effect than nitrogen according to the Environmental Protection Agency. Speaking of nitrogen, fertilizers and manure that the tending of cows includes, all includes the omissions of nitrous oxide. And US cows produce 500 million tons of manure each year, resulting in two-thirds of nitrous oxide that is released being from cows. Moving onto the effects of America’s beef consumption on our own population, the consumption of beef can have many negative heath consequences. According to Harvard’s School of Public Health, red meat consumption has been linked with cardiovascular diseases such as high cholesterol, high blood pressure, diabetes, and heart disease. By cutting down our consumption of meat and adding more fruits and vegetables to our diet, our health as a society would improve vastly and ensure that our percentage of preventable causes of death decrease. In relative to other countries, Americans spend a lot of money on livestock feeding, almost double on how much we feed ourselves as a country. We spend about 30 percent of our land on livestock agriculture. By potentially turning that land into the production of plant-based agriculture, we