Across nearly twenty yards of industrial sized grills are charred burgers, pulled pork, and hot dogs, all cooking in hasty succession. The meats carry a familiar smell across the sunny festival grounds, one inseparable from an American summer holiday experience and adding to the immersive allure of Dover’s annual Firefly Music Festival. Music festivals have become a staple feature of the lavish American summer experience. Growing from smaller roots, most large music festivals are now owned by a handful of massive booking and ticketing corporations like LiveNation and AEG Live. These organizers place festivals with strikingly similar lineups and corporate vendors in nearly every major city, as well as many rural areas across America. People of all ages flock to festivals like Firefly in the summer months for their slice of the adventurous experience that is advertised. The picturesque photos and media promoting these events, which tap into the ideal of the ‘American dream’, provide insight into the discrepancy between the American ideal and the irresponsible and unsustainable realities lurking behind this façade.
The integral pairing of grilled meats with music festivals across the country gets at a deep irony of the free-spirited, hippie package deal offered by festivals like Firefly for the not-so meager price of hundreds of dollars a ticket. Young people wander the grounds wearing flower crowns and twirling hula hoops. Yet at the heart of the American music festival culture lies a classically American pattern of over-consumption which carries harmful effects for our planet. Meat consumption lies prominently at the center of this sustainability issue illustrated at music festivals.
Eating meat is an American emblem, repeated ceremoniously at cookouts, Thanksgiving dinners, block parties, and nearly every other public gathering you can think of. It follows that animal agriculture corporations, like Tyson and Smithfield, are some of the most profitable, high profile, and politically influential companies in the country. Their power and influence are just the beginning of understanding how animal products, despite massive sustainability and ethical concerns, have become so deeply intertwined in American consumerism. Animal agriculture is one of the largest contributors to climate change and at the heart of Americans’ mockery of vegan and vegetarianism lies an inability to confront or question the costs of this tradition.
Transitioning to renewable energy sources is frequently espoused as the most effective immediate action to combat climate change. It is simultaneously a plan of action that does not necessitate direct action from the majority of Americans. Converting to wind and solar power, however, is estimated to cost ninety trillion dollars over twenty years, and would not reduce a large quantity of carbon dioxide and methane emissions.
The reason for this is that animal agriculture, not fossil fuels or transportation, is the leading cause of climate-threatening emissions and a less attractive yet primary cause of climate change. Dr. Sailesh Rao shows in a Global Sensitivity Analysis (GSA), that animal agriculture, the breeding of animals for meat and other products, is responsible for 87% of human-made greenhouse gas emissions.
In preparing animals for slaughter and human consumption, the industry emits 51% of all global greenhouse gases, accounts for 85% of US water consumption, and is the leading cause of global deforestation according to a studyreleased by the United Nations in 2006. Decreasing the size of the animal agriculture industry by eating less meat would lighten all of these problems.
At the source of these issues is a resource problem. Today’s massive animal agriculture industry requires massive amounts of land and water. One of the primary reasons for clear-cutting forests, like the Amazon, is animal agriculture. About 18 million acres of land are cleared worldwide each year for animal agriculture, according to a study published last year. In total, livestock covers more than 45% of earth’s total land.
In addition to clearing land for breeding and raising sites, land is co-opted to grow corn, which feeds cows at a cheaper rate than their natural diet of grass. About half of all grain produced in the world is used to feed livestock, according to a Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) study published in 1994.
Habitat destruction, land conversion, and the coinciding depletion of native food sources make animal agriculture the primary cause of species extinction, which is occurring an estimated 1,000 times faster than extinction rates prior to humans’ presence. Aside from animal agriculture’s indirect methods of species extinction, native species are often hunted by farmers if they are perceived as a threat to profit margins, sometimes even at an incentivized rate.
Animal agriculture is also the leading cause of oceanic dead zones, areas with reduced levels of oxygen due to nutrient pollution, which make dead zones uninhabitable and almost entirely devoid of marine life. Excess nutrients run off from pesticides and herbicides sprayed on feed crops, poisoning waterways. DDT, a toxic chemical long illegal prior to the time of the study, was found at levels detrimental to aquatic life in 31% of agricultural streams. Commercial fishing simultaneously devastates ocean life as for every pound of fish caught, up to 5 additional pounds of marine species are caught and discarded as waste. It is estimated that at the current rate of over-fishing, there could be no fish in the oceans by 2048.
All of these sustainability issues surface in everyday diet choices, and are clearly on display at places like Firefly, a possible point of a massive change in public diet. The huge crowds and social media attention that music festivals garner offers an opportunity for these events to utilize the social behavioral concept of a “nudge” to shift the conversation about eating meat, and perhaps change mainstream dietary habits and biases.
Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein’s 2008 book, Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness, defines the social behavioral concept of a nudge as, “any aspect of the choice architecture that alters people’s behavior in a predictable way without forbidding any options or significantly changing their economic incentives.” The aim of a nudge is to influence behavior without mandates or coercion. To qualify as a nudge, “the intervention must be easy and cheap to avoid.” An example in a public health context would be as simple as moving healthier foods to eye level at a supermarket. Banning less healthy items, or imposing a sugar tax for example, would not qualify as a nudge.
Nudges at music festivals have a potential to aid in shifting away from American over-consumption of meat and animal products due to the mass attention these events attract and the green living ethos they attempt to pervade. Imposing nudge interventions at music festivals, grocery stores, or restaurants could include imposing any placement, promotion, or pricing element that quietly nudges patrons towards buying items that replace animal products. Festival attendees or grocery shoppers could be coaxed in this manner to make decisions which are more beneficial to the environment. Ideally, the good feeling one gets from making a sustainable purchase creates a positive feedback loop which makes the shift away from meat satisfying or at least less stigmatized.
The ramifications of a widespread social behavioral campaign to reduce meat consumption would be extremely valuable in combatting climate change. Each day, a single person following a vegetarian diet will save over 1,000 gallons of water, 45 pounds of grain, 20 pounds of CO2, and 30 square feet of forest. A mainstream departure from the meat-loving tradition of American events would scale these numbers up massively, with far-reaching benefits for the future of the earth’s ecosystems.
Unfortunately, the animal agriculture component of climate change is largely ignored by environmental agencies such as Greenpeace and The Sierra Club because of the criticism these organizations would receive for opposing an industry as powerful and ingrained into American lifestyle choices as industrial agriculture. Instead, these organizations and policymakers choose to focus on point targets for pollution like big fossil fuel corporations.
While it’s easy to blame global warming on corporate greed, to recognize a responsible path forward requires realizing the ways in which the climate crisis reflects our habits and choices. It’s a problem that cannot wait for policy or industry but a rather one that can be partially solved through consumer behavior by drastically reducing purchasing rates of animal products.
Even with this knowledge of the consumption of meat’s major role in climate change, some of the smartest people I know still refuse to entertain the prospect of eliminating meat from their diet. Why is that? There are common myths, perpetuated by the animal agriculture corporations, that for decades have solidified animal products as keystone pieces of nutritious health. Some of these myths include for example, that meat is essential to building muscle. In reality, the largest nutrition study ever conducted, frequently dubbed the ‘China Study’, found that consuming high amounts of casein, or the main component of animal protein, increases one’s likelihood of developing cancer. The dairy industry has similarly perpetuated the myth that milk is essential for improving children’s growth, a basis for the ‘Got Milk?’ campaigns, yet one simultaneously without any basis in per-reviewed research.
At the root of the climate crisis is a consumerist crisis. In order to build communities committed to and invested in long term solutions to climate change, there must first be drastic grassroots decrease in the quantity of goods that a community consumes. The constant consumerism that runs deep in the roots of climate change is visible beyond dietary habits in energy consumption, for example. Decreasing American reliance on these deeply ingrained aspects of daily life will require that consumerist culture take a backseat to sustainability and responsibility.
Shifting away from the quantity of American meat and dairy consumption represents an opportunity for individuals and communities to demonstrate an ability to eat with the consciousness of sustainable living. Only by incorporating sustainable practices, such as adopting a plant-based diet, into one’s routine, can sustainable communities grow and shift the tides away from the consumerist culture that, unfettered, will continue to run alongside climate change.
Arriving twenty minutes late to a friend’s birthday party, I say quick hellos and give hugs as I make my way to the kitchen with homemade cauliflower wings I made for the potluck. The table is covered in other dishes, nearly all vegan, a clear tell of how few people there eat meat. A large group of those gathered there were members of a food co-operative, which values habitual sustainability through plant-based diets, locally and ethically sourced food, and elimination of waste. This community group reaches beyond communal farming and meal-sharing, their stewardship ethos permeates into all aspects of their members’ lives, so that even at this potluck celebration, without being a member of the co-operative, I am able to see its effects on my friends’ value for sustainability.
The emphasis on a plant-based diet that Newark’s Down-to-Earth Food Cooperative supports, represents a community’s commitment to sustainability. This commitment was forged and strengthened through members’ commitments to plant-based diets. Why aren’t more community groups formed around a concept of sustainability that includes dietary avoidance of animal products?
Our fast-moving capitalist society employs workarounds and a lack of regard for not only the food we eat but anything we consume. To achieve widespread valuing of sustainability over consumerist impulses, we as a country must first overcome this pervasive lack of reflection. In “Consider the Lobster”, David Foster Wallace’s essay on the thoughtlessness and carelessness that drives animal consumption, he shows the ways in which linguistics allow people to feign ignorance to the realities of animal agriculture. The labeling of cow meat as beef and pig as pork, two larger animals assumed to be more sentient, allows one to distance themselves from reckoning with the industrial process that raises pigs and cows for their products.
Recognizing the presence of a thoughtless consumer culture is paramount before achieving mainstream forward progress on animal agriculture’s role in the climate crisis. By becoming more aware and thoughtful about food, switching to plant-based dieting can be more easily recognized as environmental consciousness. Taking the fight against climate change into our own hands at the grocery store has the potential to slow the most dangerous effects of animal agriculture and demonstrate that consumers are willing to sacrifice product for sustainability.