Sunday, May 9, 2010

Three times a day


•A gallon of oil per pound of beef

•Twenty-five hundred gallons of water for each pound of steak.

For every 10 pounds of healthy grain you put into a cow, you only get out one pound of meat.

Worldwide, we chop down an acre of rainforest every minute, and lose millions of grasslands acres a year, to feed and graze cattle.

Cows crap about 65 pounds a day -- that's 12 tons a year.

Factory farm runoff has poisoned the ground water in 17 states and has polluted 35,000 miles of America's rivers.

16% of the greenhouse gas methane comes from animals.

Monocroppers douse our fields with one billion pounds of toxic pesticides a year.

Short-sighted practices make the earth lose 24 billion tons of topsoil a year.

Agricultural runoff is the #1 pollutant of U.S. rivers, killing entire ecosystems and poisoning our groundwater. The EPA says we could save $15 billion worth of water treatment plants if we cut agricultural toxins.

You need more and more chemicals all the time, to get the same results.

Monocroppers get huge federal subsidies, no matter how much they produce —a total of $14 billion a year.

In 2002, the largest 10 percent of farms collected 65 percent of the subsidies;the bottom half got 2 percent a paltry 256 bucks a year.

7 percent of our farms sell 72 percent of our food.

The average American meal travels 2000 miles from farm to table.

15 percent of American kids are overweight —triple the proportion in 1980.

30 percent of American adults are overweight.

Rising cancer rates, especially in children and especially around heavy agricultural areas, show that those toxic pesticides aren't just killing bugs and soil; they're killing people.

Eating local saves up to 17 times the gas costs of food you buy in the supermarket.

The organic food market is growing at 25 percent a year.

Source list can be found at http://www.sierraclub.org/truecostoffood/discussionguide.pdf

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