Civilization seems to be turning against cattle, but maybe civilization shouldn’t get too carried away. The standard argument in recent years has been that producing corn to feed cattle is too destructive to the environment, the cattle themselves are clogging the atmosphere with methane and the beef that results, well, eating that stuff is like begging for a heart attack.

However, the Iowa Hunger Summit last week was a reminder that there are other perspectives. Not everyone lives in a place where your next cheeseburger is always less than five minutes away by car.

The opening session of the fourth annual event – the opening act of World Food Prize week – featured Kevin Watkins of Elanco Animal Health and Terry Wollen of Heifer International. Some organizations get involved in charitable work by sending money; these two cooperate in sending protein.

Watkins presented scary statistics about how the world will need to double its food production by 2050. That almost sounds like another reason to eat the grain ourselves instead of running it through cattle to create more expensive, harder-to-store food. After all, the great civilizations developed around the ability to grow crops like barley and wheat.

But then Watkins complicated the issue. He cited studies that have compared people who get almost all of their calories from plant-based foods with people who also have some animal-sourced food in their diets. The latter group experienced better growth in their children, stronger math and reasoning skills, increased initiative and greater resistance to disease.

Then Wollen talked about how Heifer International tries to help poor people make the best use of donated livestock. They’re encouraged to keep animals in paddocks instead of letting them roam free, and to use the manure as compost.

The system also involves using large bags stuffed with manure to produce methane as a household fuel. This sounds like a “Saturday Night Live” skit, but at least there’s no monthly bill.

Obviously, the Heifer International and Elanco approach is for developing nations, not us. Nobody is saying that Iowa, for example, should be divided up into paddocks and dotted with manure bags. We have built this state on the idea that a few people with 16-row planters can handle the agriculture while the rest of us do other things that civilization also needs. Visit a typical Iowa farm and try to imagine it broken up into paddocks and vegetable gardens. Come back to Des Moines and try to imagine everyone here producing their own food.

There are drawbacks to the path we took. It always has seemed obvious that concentrating production also magnifies problems. When every family had its own chickens, it wasn’t hard to keep the place clean. When you put hundreds of thousands of chickens together, eventually you get a nationwide recall of eggs.

But let’s say we’re always going to need places like Iowa to feed places like New York City, and that meat should be part of the diet. Clearly, New Yorkers need all of the reasoning skills they can get.

We’re still left with the problem of constantly increasing food production for the world’s booming population. Better health doesn’t help with that challenge. Actually, it makes the challenge greater.

But for now, in honor of the World Food Prize, let’s end on a positive note.

The last time he visited Indonesia, Watkins said, he tried to get hard numbers about improvements in nutrition and health made possible by Heifer International and Elanco. However, none of the people targeted by the project wanted to talk about that. “They wanted to talk about hope and dignity,” he said.

“One man told me that for the first time he was able to feed his family, and to help his neighbor, too.”