Are you ready for another lockdown? We may be headed that way. According to a recent study published in the journal Science Advances, increasing animal agriculture elevates the risk of zoonotic diseases, which are animal-borne and transmissible to humans, like COVID-19. So let’s do our part to thwart future pandemics — and save animals — by going vegan.
The demand for efficiency in food production is rising with our booming population. Factory farming is our misguided attempt to increase output. This type of agriculture keeps animals confined to small, filthy enclosures — perfect breeding grounds for zoonotic diseases. Many health-conscious people get flu shots and wear masks without realizing that their lunch meat is a piece of the pandemic puzzle: Dependence on animal agriculture contributes to the creation of 3 out of every 4 developing infectious illnesses in humans.
It’s estimated that every year, zoonotic diseases cause about 2.6 billion cases of human illness and millions of deaths worldwide. Some notable zoonotic illnesses include AIDS, avian flu, swine flu, SARS, MERS, Ebola and Zika as well as, of course, COVID-19. A team of researchers just published two papers in Science offering solid evidence that the COVID-19 pandemic originated in a caged animal — and was transmitted to humans — at the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market in Wuhan, China.
It’s not like we haven’t been warned. The World Health Organization, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations and the World Organisation for Animal Health have all predicted that pandemics will continue to emerge as long as humans exploit animals for food and profit. Yet we keep twiddling our thumbs instead of doing something about it.
The climate catastrophe is also cooking up trouble for human health. Warmer temperatures cause surges in diseases like dengue fever in Southeast Asia and Lyme disease in North America. And as global temperatures rise, viruses and bacteria sealed up in glaciers and permafrost could be released and infect animals. For example, a heat wave that thawed permafrost in northern Siberia in 2016 was blamed for an anthrax epidemic that killed a child and affected at least seven others.
According to the United Nations, a global shift toward vegan eating is vital to combat the worst effects of the climate catastrophe. And at the 2022 United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP27), experts advised world leaders to get serious about carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping greenhouse gases in order to stop the global average temperature from increasing. But attempts at reducing greenhouse gas emissions aren’t focusing enough on our unsustainable, inhumane food-production system — even though, by some estimates, animal agriculture is responsible for more such emissions than all the world’s transportation systems combined.
With the world heating up and pathogens crawling out of the ice like zombies, why are our leaders still opting to expand meat production? The U.S. Department of Agriculture recently announced that the Biden administration is investing $73 million in 21 grant projects through the Meat and Poultry Processing Expansion Program. But if we were to invest in vegan foods instead, we would easily spare millions of animal and human lives. There are already plenty of vegan options, from chickpeas and tofu to vegan meat, on grocery store shelves. And looking toward the future, several companies are creating lab-grown meat using a sample of animal cells. Research at the University of Oxford found that compared to the production of conventional beef, producing lab-grown meat might emit 96% less greenhouse gas. That’s the direction we need to go in, or we might end up like all the animals we consume — dead. We are what we eat.
The COVID-19 pandemic showed us that each person can make a difference in confronting a global problem. So let’s consider going vegan a fundamental duty to our international community. After all, tofu never caused a pandemic.
