Macalester covers fewer than a dozen city blocks—but how big is its carbon footprint?

Ten years ago, a team of senior seminar students set out to find what it takes to keep the college fueled for a year, adding up the carbon cost of classroom heating and lighting, overseas travel, and feeding 2,000 students three squares a day. They discovered that the campus is responsible for an estimated 19,531 annual metric tons of carbon dioxide—greenhouse gas emissions equivalent to heating more than 2,106 houses, putting 4,176 passenger cars on the road, or burning 106 rail cars full of coal.

“Compared to a lot of other colleges, Macalester already was much farther along in thinking about how to reduce that impact,” says sustainability manager Suzanne Savanick Hansen, adding that the student-led CO2 calculation since has become the benchmark for doing better by the environment. Starting in 2007, when President Brian Rosenberg signed the American College and University Presidents’ Climate Commitment, Macalester has been on a mission to make its campus carbon neutral by 2025. This is an ambitious pledge, one that calls for reducing carbon consumption by half, and using carbon offsets to cover the rest.

As the college’s sustainability program ends its first decade, Macalester Today asked five energy sector alums to talk about trends in sustainability and to share their own tips for a cleaner energy future.

Start at Home

   “The economics have changed so that fossil fuels just aren’t competitive against renewable energy and energy efficiency. Federal energy policy could slow progress down, but a cleaner energy supply is still coming.”  —Chris Duffrin ’93

With climate-change data fast disappearing from the websites of the Environmental Protection Agency and other governmental entities, it’s been a challenging period for the sustainable energy sector. But Chris Duffrin ’93, president of the Center for Energy and Environment, an energy efficiency-focused nonprofit in the Twin Cities, still sees a silver lining. “It’s frustrating that we’re seeing a lack of federal action on these issues, but what that has done is driven more of the action to a local level than ever before, and cities and local governments are much more engaged in making better policies,” says Duffrin. “The economics have changed so that fossil fuels just aren’t competitive against renewable energy and energy efficiency. Federal energy policy could slow progress down, but a cleaner energy supply is still coming.”

Duffrin got his start in the energy sector advocating for low-income utility customers at the Energy CENTS Coalition, and then spent many years at the Neighborhood Energy Connection (NEC), the St. Paul-based nonprofit behind the HOURCAR car-sharing program, In 2016, he helped merge NEC with the Minneapolis-based Center for Energy and Environment, a move that has allowed both groups to expand the reach of their expertise in home energy audits, providing $10 million in home improvement loans each year.

With residential energy accounting for 22 percent of global energy consumption, taking the following steps in your own home can make a difference for the environment, says Duffrin, no matter what’s happening in Washington:

    • Get an energy audit, and start tightening up old windows, door frames, attic bypasses, and other places where air is escaping.

    • Add insulation, a home improvement with a great rate of return, cutting your carbon load by an average of 5,692 pounds every year.

    • Swap incandescent bulbs for LEDs, which are coming down in price and can last for up to 25 years.

    • Replace old appliances with efficient Energy Star models—and recycle that old fridge in the basement, which produces nearly 2,000 pounds of CO2 every year.

Electrify Your Ride

“I’ve become evangelical on the subject of electric cars because we’ve reached the point where making a sustainable choice isn’t a sacrifice—it’s actually saving me money.”  —Sarah Clark ’86

If Sarah Clark ’86 has anything to say about it, your next car will run on electricity.

The director of program advancement at Fresh Energy, a Minnesota-based nonprofit that advocates for clean-energy alternatives, Clark is also the proud owner of a 2013 Nissan Leaf that saved her $1,700 in fuel and maintenance over the last year: “I’ve become evangelical on the subject of electric cars because we’ve reached the point where making a sustainable choice isn’t a sacrifice—it’s actually saving me money.”

Although transportation just overtook energy generation as the leading cause of greenhouse gas emissions, plug-in vehicles like Clark’s—which make up just one percent of car sales—could help reverse the trend. Not only do plug-ins produce at least 30 percent (and as much as 80 percent, depending on your region) less greenhouse gases than their fossil-fueled counterparts, they can run even cleaner when fueled by renewable energy, such as the Xcel Windsource program that powers Macalester’s electric car plug-in station. As the cost of solar and wind energy continues to come down, the financial benefit for consumers will only improve—one reason why carmakers like GM, Ford, and Volvo are speeding up their production of electric-powered cars.

“We used to talk about how sustainability meant using less electricity, but with new technology and fuel sources, the message is now about how we can use clean energy intelligently to power the economy,” says Clark. “When GM announces that the future is electric, there’s no stopping the momentum.”

If you’re in the market for a new ride, you could get in line for the new mass market Tesla Model 3, or take advantage of the wave of first-generation electrics just off lease and ready to sell. “They’re such a great deal right now,” Clark says. “I got mine for $9,000, and it’s the best car I’ve ever driven.”

Seed a Solar Garden

“If renewable energy is seen as something that only a few people can afford, it won’t go very far.” 
—Timothy Den-Herder Thomas ’09

The cost of solar panels has come way down over the past decade—but paying for them upfront still creates sticker shock for most families who could use a break on their energy bills. “It appears expensive because we’ve expected individuals to pay for the full cost of solar up front—kind of like building your own power plant,” says Timothy Den-Herder Thomas ’09. “The whole system is really upside down.”

Den-Herder Thomas is doing what he can to put renewable energy right-side up as the general manager of Cooperative Energy Futures. The South Minneapolis-based clean energy co-op is developing eight community solar gardens around the state aimed at making solar accessible to low-income households. Using a community subscription model that allows users to immediately reduce their electric bills without an upfront cost, his startup has community solar gardens underway on the roofs of a North Minneapolis temple, the Edina public works building, and a Catholic church in Eden Prairie, with a half-dozen more Minnesota projects in the pipeline. Utilities have been using the model of passing on the cost of new plants and infrastructure to thousands of customers for more than a century, he says. “There’s really no reason we shouldn’t be using the same business model for community-based clean energy.”

Former Udall scholar Den-Herder Thomas also serves on the board of Community Power, an advocacy group that has been a major player in pushing the City of Minneapolis, Xcel Energy, and CenterPoint Energy to come together around a climate action plan. “Growing up in the New York metro area, where the divide between rich and poor is in your face, I’ve always been interested in the disconnect between the way our society works and what we need to change for it to be fair and livable and ‘sustainable,’” he says. Making renewable energy accessible to people of all income levels is a critical first step, Den-Herder Thomas believes. “If renewable energy is seen as something that only a few people can afford, it won’t go very far. But if it helps ease the burden on low-income people, it can be the start of something that works long term.”

Catch the Wind

“The energy sector has such a large impact on the environment, so I’m passionate about bringing in new voices and improving diversity in this sector.”  —Julia Eagles ’06

Julia Eagles ’06 got a ground-level glimpse of the energy industry by going to door to door in Minneapolis’s Phillips neighborhood, encouraging residents to replace old air conditioners and refrigerators through a utility-subsidized efficiency program. “I was basically a glorified appliance salesperson,” Eagles says of the gig she started fresh out of Macalester that introduced her to some of the challenges of making energy efficiency services widely accessible. “For renters, there are questions around who owns the appliances, who pays for the improvements, and who benefits from the energy savings,” making it challenging to incentivize people to make an investment that may take time to pay off, she says. “It’s one reason that renters and low-income communities are underserved by energy-efficiency efforts.”

As public policy and strategy manager for Xcel Energy, figuring out how state policies, energy rates, and public utilities regulation can work together to make sustainable energy more accessible is now her full-time job. “As a student, I would not have pictured myself working for a big utility, but it’s a fascinating time to be in the industry,” says Eagles, who has a master’s degree in public policy from the University of Minnesota’s Humphrey School of Public Affairs. “It’s an impactful place to be in terms of carbon emissions reduction.”

Already the country’s top wind utility provider for more than a decade, Xcel Energy just accelerated its investment in renewable energy, announcing plans to add 1,850 megawatts of wind energy in the Midwest over the next four years—enough power for nearly one million homes. In Minnesota alone, the utility aims to get 60 percent of its energy from renewables by 2030—a shift that many consumers are encouraging by installing rooftop solar panels, subscribing to community solar gardens, or adding wind turbines to farms. “The biggest change now, and what makes it a really interesting time in the industry, is the shift to a more distributed system where there’s more options for customers to choose their generation sources and control their energy use with advanced technologies,” Eagles says. The challenge as more customers “grow their own” energy, she says, is that utilities must “figure out ways to make that work on a system that’s been set up to deliver power one way while keeping rates fair for all customers.”

A founding board member of the Twin Cities chapter of Young Professionals in Energy, Eagles actively encourages the next generation of Macalester grads to join the industry to work toward decarbonizing the economy. “The energy sector has such a large impact on the environment, so I’m passionate about bringing in new voices and improving diversity in this sector,” she says. “We need people who can think outside their silos, and come up with better solutions for everyone.”

Prepare for Turbulence

The unpredictability of the energy market always appealed to Zach Axelrod ’06, who decided he would make it his career even before he arrived at Macalester to study economics: “As the cost of traditional fossil fuel was going up and the cost of renewable energy was coming down, I could see that at some point in my lifetime they would intersect, and it would be a lot of fun.”

But even he was surprised by the sudden turn his business took at Arcadia Power—a national company that offers clean energy services alongside traditional utility options in one bill for customers—the day President Donald Trump announced the U.S. wouldn’t live up to its 2015 pledge at the Paris Climate Accord. “We signed up more people for clean energy in the six days after that announcement than we have in any period before or since,” says Axelrod, Arcadia Power’s VP of Energy Services. “Our business jumped massively because of his policy in the other direction. People just decided, ‘Well, if our government isn’t going to do what every other government in the world has done, we’ll have to do something ourselves.’”

Over the last decade, Axelrod has seen his share of boom and bust cycles in the renewable energy sector—from working for a failed start-up to seeing the solar hot water company he started in 2009 run into roadblocks. “The way we’ve set up our grid and paid for it has operated the same way for roughly 100 years and that’s all breaking down right now,” says Axelrod. “It’s very exciting for consumers, and it’s good for the world that this is happening.”

Though he doesn’t own a car, Axelrod offsets his frequent air travel by investing in community solar. The success of the renewable economy, he says, relies on making it “ridiculously easy for people to do the right thing.” For instance, Arcadia Power allows customers around the country—renters included—to switch to renewable energy with a few clicks on its website: And ease is important, says Axelrod. “If it takes just a few minutes to make the world slightly better, more people will do it.”

Sustainability Successes

Ten years after it launched, Macalester’s Sustainability Office has plenty of successes to report, from getting more students to take public transit to having a quarter of Markim Hall’s energy needs supplied by its rooftop solar panels. Here are some other highlights:

Recycled Rec Center: When the Leonard Center was built, more than 14,000 tons of demolition waste from the old rec center was recycled or reused, keeping more than 93 percent of the debris out of landfills.

Bottle Ban: The average American consumes 167 bottles of water a year and recycles only 38 of them. Since 2011, Macalester has helped keep that plastic out of the waste stream by banning water-bottle sales and encouraging students to fill up at campus water fountains instead.

Clean Machines: Since 2013, the Mac community has been fueling electric vehicles at two dedicated charging stations powered by wind energy from Xcel’s Windsource program.

In the LEED: Macalester’s Markim Hall—the first higher ed building in the state to receive the top Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design distinction—uses 80 percent less energy than does a typical Minnesota building.

Saving Leftovers: Once a week, volunteers from Cafe Mac’s Food Recovery Network collect leftover dining hall food and send it to the local meal program Loaves and Fishes. Food waste also gets a second life: it’s collected as feed for pigs.

Efficiency Mode: Facilities Services has retrofitted many buildings, outdoor walkways, and parking lot lights with LED lighting, already saving  $92,000 to date. By 2022, the college is projected to save more than $1 million from energy efficiency projects put in place since 2015.

Trees for Travel: The average study-abroad airline flight emits about a metric ton of CO2. Returning students are encouraged to look for ways to reduce that impact by participating in events such as tree planting. (Macalester College Student Government, the Center for Study Away, and the Sustainability Office are seeking more opportunities in this area.)

Zero Waste: To reach its goal of Zero Waste by 2020, Mac added recycling and composting bins alongside its trash barrels in 2013. To prevent a big garbage pile-up on move-out days, trash bins are made scarce, forcing students to recycle, donate, or trade what they no longer need.

Smart Landscaping: Native plants and porous pavers around Markim Hall and the Janet Wallace Fine Arts Center aren’t just pretty—they’re also designed to prevent storm-water runoff.

Laura Billings Coleman is a regular contributor to Macalester Today.

Facing fears about a warming planet, a new generation of college students chooses activism over anxiety.

By Laura Billings Coleman

During finals week last December, Helen Meigs ’21 decided to ditch her schoolwork and travel to Washington, D.C.

A new Democratic majority had been elected to the House of Representatives, and Meigs wanted the chance to witness history as a diverse crop of freshman lawmakers like Ilhan Omar and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez were sworn into office. But she also wanted to lend her voice to a chorus of nearly 1,000 young people from around the country who were gathering to demand that the 116th Congress do what its predecessors had failed to do: halt the pace of carbon emissions and commit to building a greener and more sustainable economy.

“I had this whole big internal quandary asking myself whether I should risk my grades and go on this trip, or if I should stay on campus and concentrate on my schoolwork,” says Meigs, an international studies major and environmental studies minor from Portland, Oregon. “But in the end, I realized I just had to go, because if we don’t solve this climate emergency, then what does my GPA even matter?”

Meigs is part of Macalester’s chapter of the Sunrise Movement, a national youth-centered campaign to move America to 100 percent clean energy by 2030 and to make climate change the leading issue of the 2020 presidential campaign. Though she’s always had an interest in social justice issues and the great outdoors, Meigs never expected that concern about the climate would come to dominate her college experience. But when the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released a special report in October 2018 warning that in just 12 years, the planet could reach a tipping point from which it may never return, Meigs—like many in her generation—quickly found her calling.

“I had the realization that if we don’t solve this crisis, every other issue and injustice around the world will be exacerbated by the changing climate,” she says. “It’s beginning to feel like thinking about our futures is pointless if we don’t solve this problem. This is not something I intended to do when I came to Macalester, but when I think of what I’ll do when I graduate, I just can’t picture myself doing anything other than trying to stop this crisis.”

A New Degree of Urgency

Worries about what will happen to a warming planet aren’t confined to college campuses. In fact, headlines about extreme hurricanes, catastrophic fires, melting sea ice, and other signs of our climate crisis have given rise to new words like “solastalgia,” a neologism to describe the pain of living in a threatened environment. Mental health professionals also use the terms “eco-anxiety” and “climate grief” to describe a deep sadness about the landscapes and resources already at risk, as well as a distressing sense of powerlessness about preventing many of the worst-case scenarios the scientific community predicts. While this anguish affects people of all ages, the rise of high-school activists like Sweden’s Greta Thunberg, and the success of recent youth climate strikes around the globe, suggest that Generation Z is especially hard hit by these anxieties. In fact, a 2019 Gallup poll found that 54 percent of 18- to 34-year-olds worry “a great deal” about global warming, while only 38 percent of those aged 35 to 54 share the same concerns.

“Adults have trouble understanding climate change in its radical sense, which is that it’s the greatest global health threat of the twenty-first century,” says Bruce Krawisz ’74, a retired physician who now researches and writes about the health effects of climate change. “But when you talk to younger people, they get it—and they have reason to be worried.”

Environmental studies and psychology professor Christie Manning, who teaches a course called “Psychology and/of Climate Change,” says that while the scientific literature about “climate anxiety” is just beginning to emerge, she and her colleagues see anecdotal evidence of the condition every day. It comes from students who question whether it’s ethical to have children or wonder if they really have time for graduate school if the predictions about a 2030 tipping point prove true. “Another thing I observe in my classes is the confusing disconnect between the scientific data telling us what’s happening, and the beautiful fall day with blue skies and the nice breeze,” she says. “The signals we’re getting from science don’t match the signals we may be getting from the world.”

That disconnect is even more pronounced in the world of politics, where Donald Trump’s election in 2016, and America’s subsequent retreat from the historic Paris climate accord and other environmental protections, suggest there’s little political will for turning the tide. “When people in power are saying, ‘Calm down, quit worrying,’ that actually magnifies the distress for many young people,” Manning says. “The data say we should be taking action now, but that’s not necessarily what students are seeing from the adults in their lives.”

“Frustration really isn’t a deep enough word to describe how students are feeling about their future,” says Roopali Phadke, environmental studies professor and chair, who believes the political climate may be fueling students’ growing interest in coursework that connects to climate change. To meet the demand, her department offers a specialized study path devoted to climate change and policy, while many departments are featuring climate-related content in courses such as “Moral Psychology,” “Language and Climate,” “Energy Justice,” and “Environmental Politics and Policy.” “We’re seeing more and more students attracted to these classes—in part because climate is so interdisciplinary, but also because they’re not only interested in learning about climate science,” Phadke says. “They want to connect that with the tools to change the policies that we have in place.”

In fact, while climate issues in the media can often divide along partisan lines, among Macalester students there’s consensus that the status quo is no longer sustainable, says political science instructor Michael Zis, who helped design a “Sustainability for Global Citizenship” seminar and taught “Environmental Politics and Policy” this past fall. “What I’ve observed is that there’s no room for skepticism anymore. Even among the most conservative students, the debates are not about the science, or whether climate change is happening, but over the merits of competing paths proposed to address it.

“But what I’m also seeing is a shift toward greater support for more radical or drastic action,” he says. “A few years ago, you might have heard students express support for privatized or marketbased or incremental solutions, but with the climate strikes we’re seeing and the Greta Thunberg effect, there’s a lot more interest in protest and public acts that can move the needle.”

Activism Over Anxiety

To cope with climate anxiety, mental health professionals often recommend becoming more active in the search for solutions—an approach to self-care that seems to be part of Macalester’s DNA. “I have to laugh when I hear that because at least a few of my students say activism is what they really do at Macalester, and they fit their classes in around that,” says Manning.

One of the most visible signs of student climate activism has been the Fossil Free Mac (FFM) movement, a student-led initiative urging the Board of Trustees to divest from private oil and gas partnerships over the next 15 years. In response to FFM and the college’s Social Responsibility Committee proposal, the board voted in October to continue and expand work to reduce Macalester’s carbon footprint, and to approve new investments in private oil and gas partnerships only when the Investment Committee believes the investment is reasonably likely to result in a net reduction of greenhouse gas emissions.

“It took seven years for that one step,” says Sasha Lewis-Norelle ’21 (Madison, Wis.), one of the students who led the charge. Though he’s frustrated Macalester hasn’t joined the ranks of universities and colleges that have committed to full divestment, he’s inspired to do more when he graduates. “I’d love to keep working in environmental justice, and Macalester has taught me to think more critically about things,” he says. “I think those skills are going to be really important when we’re dealing with issues as intricate and systemic as climate change.”

Challenging existing systems in innovative ways is another approach Macalester students are applying to environmental challenges, says Margaret Breen ’20 (Minneapolis). She’s a member of the Youth Climate Intervenors, a group of Macalester students working to oppose Line 3, a proposed tar sands oil pipeline through northern Minnesota. Making the case that their generation will be disproportionately affected by climate change, and the environmental damages that would be caused by a tar sands oil pipeline spill, the group petitioned for and earned party status by the Public Utilities Commission in 2017. While the state Supreme Court just declined a request to hear indigenous and environmental groups’ complaints about Line 3’s environmental review process, the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency denied a key water permit for the pipeline. Those losses and wins are teaching Breen and her teammates what it takes to be effective climate activists for the long haul.

“Worrying about the future can be paralyzing, because there’s this feeling that nothing we can do is bold or impactful enough,” she says. “But it’s been really empowering and exciting for me to be part of a community of people imagining what climate justice will look like, and learning where I’ll need to focus my energy in the future.”

Major youth-led climate strikes have also mobilized large numbers of Mac students and recent graduates, including Marco Hernandez ’19, who spoke on the steps of the Minnesota State Capitol during a September 2019 climate strike that was expected to attract 2,000 students. Instead, more than 6,000 attended. “I spoke about how I’m originally from Richmond, California, where the second-largest refinery in the state of California resides,” he says. When the refinery caught fire in 2012, gas prices across the country shot up, but Hernandez saw that the health impacts were concentrated among his neighbors, “black and brown people who were filling up the hospitals, getting sick and having respiratory problems. That was the moment where I started to make the connection to environmental discrimination.” That issue now drives his work as an environmental justice organizer for COPAL MN, a Minneapolis organization focused on uniting Minnesota’s Latinx community through grassroots democracy.

Anticipating the ways that communities will have to cope with climate-related impacts and emergencies has also become a growing focus for cities. Kira Liu ’17 contributed to this effort when, while a student in Roopali Phadke’s class, she worked on a NOAA-funded project with the City of St. Paul called “Ready & Resilient,” showing residents how to look out for one another in the face of possible climate emergencies like flash floods, icier winter roads, and more mosquitoes. Learning how communities will have to come together to cope with climate-related problems is what now inspires her work as community engagement coordinator at Climate Generation, the organization founded by Arctic explorer Will Steger, which focuses on collective action to combat climate change. “It’s no longer enough to act individually, because it’s going to take all of us, standing together, to develop climate solutions and create a more equitable society,” she says.

Seeing how much energy and enthusiasm Liu and other Mac alums are bringing to the climate crisis is one way that Christie Manning manages her own climate anxiety. “What I see is that Macalester is giving students resources and tools to practice their skills, be more effective in their activism, and to raise their voices in really important ways.”

Although there are days when it’s distressing to talk to her classes about what will happen if the earth warms another degree, Manning says, the critical thinking they’re bringing to the climate emergency is cause for hope. “There are also these moments of silence where they sit back and absorb and say, ‘Okay, I understand what we’re facing here psychologically. I understand what we’re facing as a species.’ And then they lean forward and ask, ‘What’s the path forward? Can we talk more about solutions?’ Those are the questions you really want your students to be asking.”

Laura Billings Coleman is a regular contributor to Macalester Today.

Can you love animals and eat them, too?

Originally published in Mpls/St. Paul magazine, October 2008

Though I’ve been a meat-eater most of my life, I’ve always been squeamish about its preparation. I prefer not to touch bacon until it’s been burned to a crisp. Thanksgiving morning finds me shaking a 30-pound bird over the sink so I don’t have to stick my hand in the carcass and pull out the nasty bits. I prefer cuts of meat that have been euphemized so that I don’t have to consider where they came from – chicken tenders sound tastier than breasts, chicken drummies more desirable than thighs. While Andrew Zimmern travels the globe partaking of delicacies derived from brains, guts and goo, I would drive many miles out of my way not to.

All of this is a long way of saying I was a little out of my comfort zone one recent afternoon as calf wound its tongue around my wrist, and up the length of my forearm.

“These guys are very interested in the world –they like to check out everything,” my host, Catherine Friend, says about the four Jersey – Holstein – mix calves that seem intent on joining us for a nature walk on her farm in the Zumbro River Valley, about an hour southeast of the Twin Cities. The calves are three months old, with heads that just reach my hip. They’re the same height as my four-year-old, the reason I’m here in the first place.

A few weeks before the visit, this particular son surprised me by asking where hamburgers come from. When I told him, he wasn’t just appalled–he refused to believe it. “No way!” he said. It’s true, I told him, adding that milk, cheese, butter, bologna, and those frozen IKEA meatballs he likes so much are among the foods that come from that single four-legged source. “You mean McDonald’s?” he asked, still unable to comprehend the terrible truth.

He’s hardly alone in his blissful ignorance about where food really comes from. “It took me years, and a farm, to finally link a livestock animal’s life with my own,” says Friend, the author of several books for children and adults. In her latest book, The Compassionate Carnivore, she argues that pasture walks like the one we’re taking would be an excellent way to promote health – both for humans and the animals who give their lives for our dining pleasure.

Americans eat more meat than anybody on earth, packing away approximately 200 pounds per person in 2005, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture which forecasts that we’ll add another 20 pounds of it annually by 2016.

An unabashed animal lover, Friend is also an unapologetic animal eater who admits to having survived graduate school on a steady diet of fried SPAM. She is also a “sustainable farmer,” who along with her partner, Melissa, is responsible for the care and feeding of the 35 ewes and more than 70 spring lambs gamboling in a lovely grove of box elder trees nearby. In spite of her obvious affection for the sheep–she calls out their assigned numbers as if their first names and compares the animal’s sturdy shoulders to that of “little football players”– later this year, when they reach their full weight of about 120 pounds, she fully intends to send them to the slaughterhouse. “This is what we do for a living,” she explains. “We’re shepherds.”

The subtitle of her new book– How to Keep Animals Happy, Save Old McDonald’s Farm, Reduce Your Hoof Print, and Still Eat Meat – seems intended to reassure rather than enrage the estimated 93 to 98 percent of Americans who make meat a regular part of their diet. In fact, Americans eat more meat than anybody on earth, packing away approximately 200 pounds per person in 2005, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture which forecasts that we’ll add another 20 pounds of it annually by 2016.

The vast majority of the animals that come to our table are raised on large-scale factory operations and are not afforded the same creature comforts you’ll find at Friend’s farm, where about four dozen chickens wander freely, snacking on bugs and dozing in the sun. Ninety-eight percent of the eggs we eat come from chickens crammed several to a small cage, while 95 percent of the hogs raised in this country spend their entire life cycle indoors, according to the USDA.

Aside from the obvious ethical concerns about raising animals this way, the health and environmental consequences of factory farming are beginning to make even the most dedicated meat-eaters a little queasy. What does it mean to our own health when, as the Union of Concerned Scientists points out, 70 percent of the antibiotics sold in the United States are used to treat healthy livestock? What do we make of the 2006 United Nations report revealing that our growing appetite for meat is a major contributor to greenhouse gas emissions? And just how mad are those mad cows anyway?

While recent bestsellers such as Eric Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation have turned that kind of data into dinner-party conversation, Friend comes to the table at a slightly different angle. Unlike The Omnivore’s Dilemma author Michael Pollan, she’s not against corn. “We aren’t huge fans of corn and we don’t feed our lambs very much, but on our farm it’s a challenge to raise entirely grass-fed lambs,” she explains. And unlike Barbara Kingsolver, author of Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, she’s not suggesting that we all try growing our own food. Friend’s painfully funny 2006 memoir, Hit by a Farm, makes it clear that not everyone is cut out for agriculture.

Though she’s well versed on the health and environmental concerns that come with conventionally-raised meat, Friend says that’s not why she wrote her latest book. “My main interest is in the well-being of animals,” she says, calling out to one of the three llamas that protect her flock from animal predators. “I know it seems odd, but this is how farming works–we work our butts off to keep our animals alive and healthy, and then we kill them.”

To critics who wonder why she hasn’t become a vegetarian, she argues that meat-eaters have more impact on the lives of farm animals by “remaining at the table” and using their muscle as consumers to force more humane farming practices. After all, she says, the increase in vegetarians–about 5 percent of the US population, according to estimates she cites– hasn’t decreased the demand for meat which has grown by almost 25 pounds per person in the past 25 years.

“But as carnivores, because we’re responsible for [the animals’] deaths, we’re also responsible for their lives,” she writes. It’s a paradox, she adds, that most people seem to appreciate. A 2004 Ohio State University survey found that 81 percent of respondents believe the health and well-being of livestock animals is just as important as that of pets.

Improve farm animals’ lives in the following ways, Friend says, and the positive side effects will also include improved health for those who eat them:

First, she says, “pay attention.” Though clever marketing tries to convince us that protein springs fully formed from the freezer section, there is carnage involved: almost 8.9 billion animals (not including fish) are butchered every year to feed us. Since that number may be difficult to grasp, Friend, a former economist, performs a rough calculation in her book, dividing that number by 300 million Americans (minus the 5 percent who don’t eat meat) and then multiplying the results by 80 years, and arrives at 2,500–the number of livestock animals butchered for each meat-eating American in his or her lifetime. Eating less meat wouldn’t kill us–or nearly as many of them. As Friend points out, the 16-ounce steak that’s common in many restaurants is in fact 300% larger than the serving size recommended by the USDA.

Second, she says, “Waste less.” According to Friend’s research, Americans throw 22.5 million pounds of meat in the garbage every day–the equivalent of 15,000 cows, 36,000 hogs and 2 million chickens. “No one–no one–can feel good about these numbers,” she says.

Perhaps predictably, Friends suggests replacing some of that factory-raised meat on our plates with the lamb chops and chicken breasts raised on sustainable farms like here—though she’s not the only one making this suggestion. Various sources from the Sierra Club to New York Times food columnist Mark Bittman have been promoting this sort of change, and the menu options are improving apace. Even a small but growing number of fast food chains such as Chipotle and Burgerville have been eschewing factory-raised meat in favor of animals raised without hormones or antibiotics.

Less predictably, Friend suggests going meatless more often, a campaign the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services has promoted since 2005, when its “Healthy People 2010” report showed that vegetarians typically weigh less than meat-eaters and suffer from lower rates of type 2 diabetes and other diseases.

I quite enjoyed my visit to Friend’s farm, and when I got home I was still ruminating on what I saw there. The little calf that nipped at my backside nipped at my conscience a few days later as I stood in the grocery meat aisle, comparing the conventionally-raised sirloin at $4.99 a pound with the grass-fed variety priced at $10.99. I swallowed hard and thought about how happy that calf and his buddies looked. So I bought the expensive stuff, but less of it than usual. It was, I must add, delicious.

Something similar happened on a rotisserie-chicken weeknight, after my family had picked through the breast meat. Holding the bird’s rib cage over the garbage can I thought of the chickens I’d seen on Friend’s farm, and as I paused to consider what I was doing, I realized there was still food attached to the bones. I believe it’s called “dark meat.” Chicken salad the following evening was great– plus it was practically free.

My farm tour helped me connect the dots between where animals live and where I do. This month while we’re taking in the last of the fall colors, I plan to take my kids on a pasture walk of their own at one of the growing number of sustainable farms that are glad to sell their products directly to people like me. It’s time to teach my kids what McNuggets look like when they’re still on two legs.
This article was originally published in Mpls/St. Paul magazine, October 2008