Deardorff’s journey to veganism began at the age of 20 on a family dove-hunting trip (“It was the weirdest experience I’ve ever had,” he says), and culminated with a bad experience with a chicken burrito. “I’d known there was something very wrong in the world for a long time, but I didn’t know what it was,” he says, remembering how the injustices finally became clear. In the nine years that followed, Deardorff spent four working for People’s Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) and the last two as the leader of UCSC’s only vegetarian organization. “Becoming vegan is the most fundamental change I’ve made in my life, and will probably be the most fundamental change that I will ever make in my life,” he says.
The McDonald’s demonstration is one of several that his group has held to expose the corporation’s cruel treatment of animals. But while today’s message is one mostly of animal welfare, Deardorff is leading a broader vegetarian movement up on campus.
“Students come to UCSC knowing the school is supposed to be a leader in sustainability,” he says. “But if you look at certain things—like serving meat—they aren’t doing a great job of being sustainable.”
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Campus Crusader Pictured here with fellow Banana Slugs for Animals members at a February demonstration outside of McDonald’s, UC Santa Cruz student Eric Deardorff (second from left) is leading the movement to reduce meat consumption on campus. Photo: Kelly Vaillancourt
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Four other UC schools—Berkeley, Davis, Santa Barbara and San Diego—have adopted Meatless Monday, a movement sponsored by a non-profit of the same name that advocates for cutting meat out one day a week. Meatless Monday has also caught on at countless universities outside of the UC system (and elsewhere, such as in all 200 schools in the Baltimore, Md., public school system), but has yet to become a fixture at UCSC.
Banana Slugs for Animals recently helped UCSC Dining Services coordinate the first meatless dining hall day—a test run at the Crown/Merrill Dining Hall where students could choose from entirely vegetarian and vegan breakfast, lunch and dinner selections.
Deardorff has spent the months since tirelessly pressuring dining administrators to make meatless dining hall days a regular thing. According to Candy Berlin, program coordinator for UCSC Dining, the school will have its second trial Meatless Day at the College 8/Oakes Dining Hall during the week of Earth Day.
“This is easy to change and it’d be received well,” says Deardorff. The group is also busy with its Cage Free Eggs campaign, for which they’ve gathered over 2,000 signatures asking the school to switch to 100 percent cage-free eggs, and circulating other petitions like PETA’s Meat’s Not Green, which asks industry producers to put warning labels on animal products (think “WARNING: This product is a primary contributor to global warming!”).
While Deardorff mans the movement at our city on a hill, superstar Sir Paul McCartney is campaigning for a meatless day on a much larger scale. McCartney, with a little help from his daughters, runs Meat-Free Monday (supportmfm.com), an organization with the same goals as the similarly monikered Meatless Monday. The well-known vegetarian spoke about the need for Meat-Free Mondays before the European Parliament (EU) in late 2009.
Much like Earth Day founder Senator Gaylord Nelson once asked Americans to set aside one day a year to pay tribute to our planet, the Meatless and Meat-Free Monday campaigns are asking conscious Earthlings to forgo meat one day a week as a favor to our planet.
$200 Hamburgers
Back at the McDonald’s, a young woman takes a pamphlet from a BSA member. “You know, I agree with you, but I only have $2 for lunch today, so this is what it’s going to be,” she says.
Jennifer, one of the protestors, frowns as the girl walks away toward the Golden Arches. “It’s cheap, but it’s subsidized in other ways,” she says, raising her voice over the wind.
In fact, while the menu price may be as low as a dollar for a fast-food burger, the actual cost is closer to $200 when hidden costs are taken into account, according to Raj Patel, author of “The Value of Nothing.” The hidden costs are varied and extensive. From large water subsidies for the agriculture industry to the long-term costs these products incur on public health (meat consumption is linked to high rates of heart disease, obesity, certain types of cancer, and more), the true cost is externalized into society.
“When I drive by McDonald’s and see the big banner—1 Billion Sold!—I think, ‘how many heart attacks were produced from those 1 billion burgers?’” says Robbins. “’How many animals were tortured? How much harm has happened to the environment? How many people haven’t been able to eat because the grain that could’ve fed them was fed to the animals whose flesh was put into those burgers?’”
In strictly environmental terms, Robbins refers to the hidden cost of water used in the industry. “We don’t pay for it at the cash register or at the restaurant, but we pay for it in our taxes and the likelihood of a drought,” he says. “Water is Precious” is the sign we see on restaurant tables in Santa Cruz, but most Cruzans would be shocked to learn how much water is required to produce their steak dinner. Robbins points to a study by Soil and Water Specialists at the University of California Extension in 1978 that found that it takes 5,214 gallons of water to produce one pound of California beef.
“I ask people to look at it this way,” says Robbins, plunging into an arithmetical example. Let’s say you shower everyday, he says, and that your showers average seven minutes long, totaling 49 minutes of showering a week. He rounds that up to 50 minutes, and poses that the flow rate in your shower is two gallons per minute (on the higher end for Santa Cruz County).
“At that rate you’d be using 100 gallons a week for showering,” he continues. “That is 5,200 gallons a year to shower—the same amount required to produce one pound of beef. You would save as much water by not eating one pound of beef as you would by not showering for a whole year.” That’s a big steak, or, depending on your tastes, maybe four McDonald’s quarter pounders.
This number is contested, however, and differs depending on which expert or study you refer to. A more common figure than 5,214, which Robbins expounds upon in his book “The Food Revolution,” is about 2,500 gallons of water per pound of beef. This was the amount concluded on by the late Dr. Georg Borgstrom, the former head of the Food Science and Human Nutrition Department at Michigan State University, and very close to the 2,464 gallons determined by The Water Education Foundation after analyzing data from hundreds of experts in their report “Water Inputs in California Food Production.” In their book “Population, Resources, Environment,” Stanford University professors Paul R. and Anne H. Ehrlich claim that it takes between 2,500 and 6,000 gallons to produce one pound of beef. On the flip side, cattlemen associations use figures as low as 840 gallons.
Regardless, the amount of water needed to produce a pound of beef is strikingly higher than the amount needed to produce a pound of fruits or vegetables (between 19 and 70 gallons), the 25 to produce a pound of wheat or even the 250 needed for a pound of soy. Meatless Monday, which is an initiative of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, claims that by not eating meat on Mondays, an individual can save enough water to fill his or her bathtub 22 times each week.
“You see people who are environmentalists trying to conserve water washing their cars less often, installing low flow sinks and toilets, drought resistant landscaping, and legislation passing requiring low flow shower heads and so forth,” says Robbins. “These are all prudent and helpful measures, but all combined they don’t even compare to what you save by eating one less hamburger.”
Here, in this comparison, lies the hang-up for environmentalists today: You can abide by as many green tips as you want, but if you are eating meat, you are still participating in the most detrimental practice. “The simple fact is that you can’t be a meat-eating environmentalist,” says Deardorff, matter-of-factly. “It would be going against everything that environmentalism stands for.”
Family Farms and Other Pseudo-Solutions
A main point of concern Deardorff has with dining services at UCSC is the emphasis they put on buying local and organic, while making what he considers to be a minimal effort to do what would be most sustainable.
And he’s right. Buying local foods is a positive trend—especially in Santa Cruz, where we are lucky enough to have a delicious bounty of foods growing—but it’s a meager environmental effort when compared to going veg. A 2008 study at Carnegie Mellon University titled “Food Miles and the Relative Climate Impacts of Food Choices in the United States” found that eating no meat one day a week reduces personal greenhouse gas emissions more than eating an entirely local diet all week long.
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