Resistance is fertile

Full disclosure - I am not a vegetarian. I am eating biltong as I type this. (If you don't know what biltong is then you don't know what South Africans know!) I must confess I love the taste of a nice steak, or a juicy burger. I am a failed vegetarian, but I have been trying for 30 years, and will keep trying. In recent years I have become comfortable with just reducing my meat intake as opposed to eliminating it altogether. But what are my reasons?

Well there is the efficiency angle - cattle especially require huge amounts of land and water to produce meat which is very inefficient in a world with growing carnivoracity (yes that is a word). Then the methane that they burp in large quantities is one of the largest greenhouse gas contributors around. My thousands of regular readers will be expecting me to head off on a rant about greenhouse gas emissions, but I am going to surprise you here... for me the main reason to reduce meat demand is antibiotic resistance. Around 70% of the world's antibiotics are fed to livestock. The reason for this is that cattle are often crammed into limited spaces, which become unhygienic and rife with disease. Antibiotic use allows farmers to increase their yields and ensure the world doesn't run out of Big Macs, however the downside is that these environments are an optimal breeding ground for bacteria that are antibiotic-resistant. Why is this an issue?

Since the discovery of penicillin around 100 years ago, antibiotics have increased the average human lifespan by 23 years! They are arguably the most important medical discovery ever and have had a massive impact on the general health and wellbeing of pretty much everyone. As an example, during World War 1 it was not uncommon for soldiers to die of minor injuries that became infected in the awful trenches of Europe. By the time World War 2 reached it's peak, Penicillin was saving thousands of lives that would otherwise have been lost. A world where bacteria are resistant to our wonderful antibiotics is too scary to contemplate. This is a world where a tooth infection can kill you, and surgery becomes a survival lottery.

According to the WHO "A lack of effective antibiotics is as serious a security threat as a sudden and deadly disease outbreak". I know the Covid pandemic has desensitised a lot of us to this kind of speak, and to the WHO itself, but this risk cannot be ignored.

Bringing it back to climate change for a minute (I couldn't resist!) - an interesting related note here is that most of the antibiotics fed to cattle pass through their systems and end up in the soil where they destroy the soil microbiome, resulting in a significant reduction in the soil's ability to sequester carbon.

I'm not saying that modern medicine won't one day be able to step in and fix the growing problem of antibiotic resistance - I certainly hope so! - but for now the problem is simple. We eat too much meat collectively as a species. Perhaps it's time to revisit 'Meat-Free Mondays' or try one of those new plant based burgers? Plant based biltong may be a bridge too far though..

Until next time!

Doug

aka The Regeneralist