Nearly three-quarters of everything on the average American plate is processed, packaged, shipped, stored, and/or sold under refrigeration. The United States already boasts an estimated 5.5 billion cubic feet of refrigerated space—a third polar region of sorts. Equal to what 244,444,444 domestic refrigerators (at 22.5 cubic feet on average) could hold. This is an almost unimaginably large volume: the tallest mountain on Earth, Everest, occupies only roughly two-thirds that amount of space from base to peak.
According to the most recent statistics from the Global Cold Chain Alliance, the world’s chilled and frozen warehouse space increased by nearly 20% between 2018 and 2020.
There are approximately 22.7 billion broiler chickens living out their five-to-seven-week spans on Earth at any moment, compared with just half a billion house sparrows or a quarter of a billion pigeons. Those chickens are also double the size and five times the weight of their preindustrial ancestors, giving them a combined mass that exceeds that of all other birds on Earth. The team of researchers behind these calculations used them to suggest that the layer of chicken bones currently piling up in landfills around the world is, in fact, an ideal marker of the Anthropocene.
Chickens may be a signal to future geologists, but environmental scientist Vaclav Smil suggests that cows might perform that role for aliens. Meat and dairy animals so vastly outweigh all other vertebrates that “if sapient extraterrestrial visitors could get an instant census of mammalian biomass on the Earth in order to judge the importance of organisms simply by their abundance, they would conclude that life on the third solar planet is dominated by cattle.” In aggregate, livestock make up 62% of all mammals on Earth; humans, at 34%, account for most of the rest. Everything else—dogs, cats, deer, rabbits, whales, elephants, bats, and even rats—only adds up to the remaining 4%.
Livestock takes up nearly 80% of global agricultural land; cattle ranching is responsible for the deforestation of an area more than double the size of California in the Amazonian rainforest alone.
Fish are notoriously hard to count, but according to the best estimates, their numbers have decreased by half over the past fifty years.
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The staple crops of subsistence farmers — banana, breadfruit, potato, and so on — do not require refrigeration. What, then, could the problem be...
...Close enough.