In the U.S., you can buy a pack of gum for just one or two bucks.
But cleaning old chewing gum off of sidewalks and streets can cost a town a hundred thousand
dollars a year, a hidden toll the community has to pay.
In fact, pretty much everything we consume has hidden costs associated with it – especially
the meat, dairy, and eggs that make up a quarter of the American diet.
To start, there's the cost of raising the animals, which the government helps cover
by offering crop insurance, cheap water, low-interest loans, and insanely low fees for grazing on
public lands.
If the cost of these subsidies showed up on the weekly grocery bill of an average American
family of four instead of hiding in their tax statement, it would add about 10 dollars
per trip.
Then there are the health care costs associated with producing and eating the animals.
We raise them in a way that breeds antibiotic-resistant illnesses that sicken humans.
And the large quantities in which we eat them - 25 pounds of meat, 5 gallons of milk, 2
dozen eggs, and a pound of animal fats per family per week - contribute to major chronic
diseases like stroke, heart disease, diabetes, and some cancers.
If the medical costs and lost wages from all these diseases were included in the family’s
weekly grocery bill, they would add another 25 dollars.
Then there’s the potentially disastrous cost of damaging our planet's ability to sustain
us.
Only a tenth of the food livestock eat gets turned into food we can eat.
The animals use the rest just to stay alive, and along the way, they pollute our water
with their poop and our air with their methane breath … and their poop.
To feed the 9 billion animals we eat each year, we need to grow roughly 3 times as many
crops as we would if we just ate plants.
All that effort emits huge amounts of greenhouse gases, adds poisonous chemicals and concentrated
nutrients to the soil, air, and our water sources, and erodes billions of tons of topsoil
each year.
Paying for these damages up front would add a whopping 240 dollars to the family’s grocery
bill.
Of course, the average American family doesn't actually fork over 475 dollars at the checkout
counter each week, because we as a society have defaulted to paying for those costs in
other ways.
But understanding just how expensive meat, dairy, and eggs really are might lead us to
eat less of them, because an additional 275 dollars per week is enough to make even a
mouth-watering bacon cheeseburger harder to swallow.
Hey this is Henry, thanks for watching!
For some really nuanced unpacking of the strong feelings people have (in both directions)
about eating less meat, we recommend Brian Kateman’s TEDx talk and Hank Green’s video
“Why Are Vegetarians Annoying?”
(links in the video description).
This video was sponsored by audible.com, a leading provider of audiobooks including periodicals,
fiction and nonfiction.
In our research, we used the book “Meatonomics”, by David Simon, which, unsurprisingly, is
about the economics of producing and consuming meat.
It’s the first attempt we’ve seen at inclusively quantifying the hidden costs of animal-based
foods in America, and Simon includes enough solid statistics and figures to help you consider
the issue on your own (though it may not surprise you that he concludes Americans eat too much
meat and dairy).
You can get a free 30-day trial, and download Meatonomics, or any audiobook of your choice,
by going to audible.com/minuteearth.
Again, that’s audible.com/minuteearth.
And we’d love to hear your thoughts about eating animals.