A couple of years ago, while attending a seminar in Shanghai, during lunch break, I found myself next to a German lad who was nibbling at the meager vegetables in his lunch box but avoiding the larger portions of shrimp and steak.

He was a vegetarian, he told me, and that revelation surprised me to a degree, for I was more inclined to associate vegetarianism with elderly Chinese women with Buddhist sentiments.

As a matter of fact, in my college years I read a book on evolution that said Westerners are constitutionally more carnivorous than Easterners, because their intestines are considerably shorter than the guts of their Asian counterparts.

The extra length, according to the book, make us better herbivores, like sheep. That’s true most of the time in human history.

That German lad probably hinted at a paradigm shift in recent years.

An article in the latest issue of DE Magazine Deutschland, which I receive regularly from the German Consulate General in Shanghai, served to enlighten me a bit on this issue.

Titled “Controversies concerning food ethics and quality have already affected restaurants,” the essay revealed that a recent survey of 2,000 Germans found that 60 percent of them said they tried to eat less meat.

Another study found that those with higher levels of education and higher incomes tend to eat less meat, suggesting that significant meat consumption is now more a trait of the less affluent.

In addition to vegetarians, there is a rising number of flexitariers, semi-vegetarians who takes a more flexible view of their diet: mainly plant-based, with occasional inclusion of meat.

Polluted food chain

The essay points out that flexitariers’ choice is mostly politically motivated, for by eating less meat they are expressing their disapproval of diverting farmland to the growth of fodder for domestic animals.

That reduces land for vegetables and other crops.

Clearly, we need to regain control of our food for a host of other reasons.

As Karl Weber says in his “Food, Inc.: How Industrial Food is Making Us Sicker, Fatter and Poorer — And What You Can Do About it,” the food industry expends great effort and money to ensure that consumers don’t know how it operates.

For instance, factory farms often subject livestock to horrible living conditions, feeding them poultry excrement, hormones, antibiotics, feathers, and cement dust.

“In just one hour in the United States, more than one million land animals are killed for food,” the book reveals.

The packaged food items, nearly all overprocessed, involve liberal use of additives, flavorings, preservatives, colorants, and other chemicals, leading to serious consequences. Obesity is now a US$100 billion annual problem in the US alone, with other countries quickly catching up as KFC’s and McDonald’s franchises mushroom.

As the food business desires to be very secretive about their recipes, it finances a strong US lobby that has enabled the passage of various “food disparagement” laws (also known as “veggie libel” laws).

These effectively suppress any questioning of the industrial food practices that compromise the environment and human health.

“If we ate like humans have eaten for as long as anyone has kept historical records, almost nothing in the supermarket would be on the table,” the book observes.

Inadvertently, the author also points to the solution: the choice of banishing some supermarket food from our table actually lies with you and me.

Average people could be quite helpless in a crisis like the 2008 financial meltdown, where the regulators (former or future investment bank chiefs), financial experts (consultants to financial institutions) and the Wall Street robber barons all clamored for bailouts.

Regain control

But in the developing food crisis (for crisis it is), we can still effect change by making conscientious food choices, particularly by refusing to eat some foods.

If we recognize that meat production is increasingly an industrialized process, reducing intake of meat and dairy products can be a very sensible move.

Many meat and dairy products that Americans consume come from factory farms, where mammoth facilities confine thousands of animals in dirty pens or sheds. Huge amounts of waste leach into the groundwater. Some animal feed contains “offal such as brains, spinal cords and intestines.”

According to Weber, “An estimated two-thirds of all US cattle raised for slaughter are injected with growth hormones.”

When we imagine the factory farms where the chickens and animals are confined for life in cramped spaces where they can barely move, can we still marvel at the “immortal hand and eye” that “frame thy fearful symmetry”? Is this part of nature’s Holy Plan? Have we not reason to lament what man has made of other species?

I think of Confucius, who sometimes went fishing, but always with a rode and line; he would never use a net. He sometimes went out shooting, but he would never shoot at a bird except on the wing.

The relentless pursuit of efficiency has blinded profit-seeking capitalists to any large purpose beyond money.

Their refusal to see their greed as the root cause of the problem enables them to continue to flirt with “solutions.”

Take bio-fuel, a much-hyped alternative to fossil fuels.

While millions of people around the world starve, the United States insists that its farmers divert 40 percent of their annual corn crops to produce ethanol, an inefficient biofuel that does little to alleviate the energy problem.

Who will feed us?

As environmentalist Lester Brown found out, “The grain required to fill a 25-gallon SUV gas tank with ethanol would feed one person for a full year.”

This willful degradation of the environment will continue, for ethanol is now a sacred cow of the enormously powerful US farm lobby. Corn subsidies totaled US$56 billion between 1995 and 2006.

I observed in my review of “Green Gone Wrong” two weeks ago that the growth of plants for biofuel is also destroying the last tracts of tropical rainforests in Indonesia and South America.

As is often the case with technical solutions, the cure is often worse than the disease.

In China, with entrenched advocacy for deepening urbanization, there have recently arisen concerns over our food security and who will grow food for us in the next decade.

Could the industrialized, large-scale factory farming practice in the West save Chinese farming?

The industrialized efficiency that has been achieved at devastation of the environment, soil, and human health?

We can no longer equivocate on this, for China’s traditional farming, based on intensive cultivation, is being steadily undercut by considerably cheaper and often subsidized foreign imports.

That’s in addition to the problems of migration of the labor force, and persistent calls to urbanize.

As the book reveals, the food production and distribution system worldwide are responsible for approximately one-third of global warming due to change in land use, dispersal of methane and nitrous oxide, and greenhouse gas emitted in transport.

In this context of overall environmental degradation, we as individuals can be part of the solution and make a difference, by exercising individual food choice: opting out of the destructive factory-produced food system, buying local and in-season produce (if you cannot plant for yourself), cutting down on meat, and choosing small portions.