Meat is bad

The first chapter of the new book Carnivore Chic starts with a re-telling of the author's experience on the floor of a meat-packing plant. I say "re-telling" because the experience was related a few years ago in a magazine feature.
The story illustrates a couple of reasons for some people's aversion to meat: animal cruelty and shitty labour relations.
The lousy treatment of workers is, of course, a problem in all of capitalism. So it's not going to be included in my list of meat "cons." But the list does start with ...
1. Cruelty. The PETA crowd have got something right. This is something we should be concerned about.
2. How about climate change? Apparently, livestock accounts for more than one-third of all methane emissions in the United States.
3. Then there's water quality. Too much livestock means a heavy impact on a region's water table. All that manure has to go somewhere.
4. A link between out-of-control livestock sectors and desertification/deforestation has been raised by the UN's Food and Agriculture Organization.
5. And there are those who contend that meat is bad for your health. Vegetarians are less likely to get heart disease, for instance, since their diets are low in cholesterol and tend to be low in fat.
On the whole, though, I'll have to side with the carnivores. The health argument seems weak, as meat yields many health benefits and the cholesterol/fat concerns are only concerns if you eat too much meat. The environmental concerns are real but manageable. The cruelty issue needs to be addressed, always, but surely there are ways of addressing it other than denying ourselves animal protein.