As someone involved in producing beef, I get a lot of questions prompted by Cowspiracy. Full and immediate disclosure: I've not yet prioritized seeing the flick, which is what I tell anyone who asks me about it. But, I'm familiar with some of it's content from the info it has put on the web, and from what questions it's raising in my circles.
Were I to watch it, perhaps I could devote a whole post to the film, but others already have done this better than I ever could. After all, discussion that it has prompted is long overdue. And anyway, I don't have much interest in going to bat for the beef industry--even grassfed beef--because it's such a complex matter, and one producer's practices can have widely different environmental implications than the next.
In fact, that's what I want to explore instead: how when we talk about where food comes from, and where its production lies on the spectrum of destructive to regenerative, the initial answer will always be "it depends."
That answer may seem fuzzy, but it serves to invite further inquiry that ultimately generates a more precise answer. Contrast it to "all beef is bad," or "vegetarian diets are better for the planet," because that's where the imprecision begins. As I see it, the trouble is not that we're asking the wrong questions about diets but rather, we're asking the right questions at the wrong scale.
Consider that for an individual wondering if he should buy a pound of beef to cook for dinner that night, the tendency for the global beef industry to destroy rain forests to plant monocultures of soy or pasture to feed beef cattle matters little, unless he has no knowledge of the origins of his beef and may risk, for example, buying US-raised beef fed Brazil-grown corn. (To my knowledge, most feedlot-finished US-raised beef cattle eat US-grown commodity crops, but I digress).
Because what "it depends" on are questions of how the animal from which that flesh was derived lived in its environment. What it ate, and where that feed came from--how that feed, whether grass or hay or grain, interacted with its environment. The degree to which the animal was able to live as its species evolved or was domesticated to live. Were his stresses natural or unnatural? Where did his water come from, and where did his manure go? Could he play?
These questions can only be answered through a knowledge of one's bioregion--and a knowledge of one's ranch. Cliche as it may seem, this is one reason why "buy local" matters: the more distance between ourselves and a product's place of origin, the more proxies we rely on for knowledge, and the more the specificities of how land and animals were treated can get lost in the fray.
(That's why certifications like Fair Trade and Organic for crops like coffee and cacao are so important, and so perilous. When we choose to trust those certifications we are handing over a bit of our ecological agency in exchange for tasty if not addictive foodstuffs. I write this while sipping coffee. I've got a long ways to go, too.)
At its heart, buying local isn't about doddling around at farmer's markets asking growers how they cook their collards. It's about expressing your interdependency on your land and community instead of on governments and corporations, and it's about your birthright as a human animal seeking to procure sustenance from its environment. It's an act of moral and political sovereignty, and one that we give up every time we rely on sweeping generalizations masquerading as helpful data instead of looking more deeply into our surrounding landscape.
"It depends" can be a paralyzing answer for many. Depends on what? I contend we are in an epidemic of ecological illiteracy at the local level--the level that matters most. Many people have little knowledge of their bioregions--by which I mean a baseline understanding of native weather patterns, vegetation, wildlife, their soils, their watershed, the crops produced with the lowest inputs, and the implication of those crops on the surrounding vegetation/wildlife/watershed.
But humans don't like asking questions we can't easily answer swiftly and cleanly, so we frame our questions--typically, by asking them very generally--'til we find an answer. Returning to my example, a quick Google search exploring whether or not one should eat beef will generate a lot of infographics and statistics surrounding how much beef Americans eat, how much water is used to produce one pound of ground beef, the emissions associated with raising cattle, and so on.
This data creates the illusion of specificity, but it's typically considered from taking the average from a data set at the industrial, national, or global scale.
Worse, it only speaks to what it can measure. Industrial agriculture is an economy of scale, meaning every input input and output is tracked and measured with a degree of precision that would leave many of us dizzy. So even though the FAO has recently been heralding the far-and-away value of smallholder farmers for productivity, diversity, and sustainability, the data we most often see about a given crop comes from land grant universities (funded by large scale ag - that's the deal) dealing in a scale beyond what most of us are required participate in.
In other words, the Demeter-certified biodynamic smallholder farmer down the road who is raising a hundred species with zero outside inputs while growing soil and increasing biodiversity doesn't often get measured, and won't make it into the citations in a Huffington Post article being circulated on your news feed.
Considering an entire nation or planet would only really be useful if you were trying to serve dinner to a whole nation or planet that night--forsooth, a role many technocrats have taken on as their own. But when you're asking because you want to feed yourself or your community, the scale of inquiry is profoundly different, and the process of finding answers and the answers themselves must both change. Beyond "it depends" is a series of considerations, yes, but all of them are available to your investigation. Sometimes we have to get off Google and get into our surrounding environment.
To be clear, I'm not impugning the utility of data as a whole. Far from it. Rather, I am acknowledging that it's our jobs as grown adults to distinguish between what data is purported to be relevant to a given decision, and what actually IS relevant. Most of us are not in the business of crafting law and shaping policy. And while ideally we'd all have some dealing in these matters, the scale of inquiry most relevant on a daily basis concerns how we feed ourselves from our surrounding landscape. With that as a lens, we can engage policy much more effectively than from a descending level of specificity.
Making this distinction requires a familiarity with our bioregions so we can apprehend what is important to consider (coho salmon spawning? diverse habitat for groundnesting birds?), and so we can make decisions that enhance rather than degrade our environment.
This really matters quite a bit, because how we eat shapes our environment like almost nothing else. Agriculture is arguably the single greatest force that defines not only our planet but our social structures. It can be a tool of unimaginable destruction and oppression, and incomparable restoration and sovereignty. And whether we are producers or strict consumers, we are all practicing agriculture. (Unless you're a purist neo-primitivist hunter-gatherer, in which case more power to you, but you'd better be wearing buckskin and not cotton).
This is all easy for me to say, because it's easy for me to see. My vocation as a manager of a herd of 100% grassfed cattle in a conservation context lends the privilege of thinking about this all the time--it's my bread and butter (or my beef and marrow, if you will). Fortunately, we have a growing list of customers who choose to practice their ecological agency by buying our beef, and I enjoy the opportunity to serve as a bit of a liaison. They asked the question at the right scale, run into "it depends," and pursued it further.
When they begin to raise questions about water use, they learn that we water off of native water only--creeks half the year, and that our grazing practices store water in the soil to recharge the aquifers we draw from the rest of the time. When they mention the acreage required to produce beef vs. vegetables, I remind them that we're grazing hilly grasslands, one of the planet's most threatened landscapes with a value of it's own and that don't lend themselves to tillage agriculture anyhow.
When they wonder about where our feed comes from, I can say, look around. It comes from here, and no where else. We manage our forage and our stocking rate accordingly. When they ask about methane, I can show them research exploring the relationship between global atmospheric methane and the rise and fall in numbers of ruminants over the years and discuss the difference between gas cycling and gas production. And as for good ol' CO2, our grazing practices store carbon in the soil, and I can explain how.
When we dismiss an agricultural venture wholesale through unwillingness to forge our ecological agency, we undermine the livelihoods of those doing it differently and we compromise the specific land and animals that would benefit. "It depends" shouldn't paralyze us--it should invite us to reclaim our birthright as knowledgeable and active agents of change for the betterment of our home bioregions. If we want to address our big global problems, we have to start with what we can know and love and touch and eat. I can't imagine anything more encouraging than that.