Essay by Eric Worrall
“… Replacing beef with a different protein — even for just one meal — can cut the emissions footprint of a person’s diet that day by as much as half. …”
One Simple Change to Reduce Your Climate Impact? Swap Out Beef
Replacing beef with a different protein — even for just one meal — can cut the emissions footprint of a person’s diet that day by as much as half.
By Zahra Hirji
21 February 2024 at 20:00 GMT+10Next time you’re out for lunch, try playing a little game: Without looking it up, can you find the most and least climate-friendly options on the menu?
Unlike a meal’s price, the greenhouse-gas footprint of food isn’t typically spelled out. But you don’t need to ask a climate scientist to find out either. There’s one simple trick for identifying the highest impact item on almost any menu: If there’s beef, that’s probably it.
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“You don’t have to become a vegan to have a big impact on your carbon footprint,” says Diego Rose, a professor and director of the nutrition program at Tulane University. “You just have to swap out beef.”
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Beef’s footprint is especially outsized. For one, there are roughly 1.5 billion cows on the planet. About 13 million square kilometers (3.2 billion acres) of land is used to raise all that cattle, along with buffalo, and their food — one-quarter of all land used for agriculture, according to a 2017 paper in Global Food Security. Then there’s the methane. Cows and other ruminants have a unique digestive system that allows them to turn grass into fuel, but in the process their special gut bacteria releases methane, a greenhouse gas 80 times more potent than carbon dioxide in the short term.
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“In the US, most of us eat more beef than what’s considered healthy for us,” says Stephanie Roe, a climate and energy lead scientist at the nonprofit World Wildlife Fund. “So that’s low-hanging fruit because then we can improve our health outcomes in addition to environmental ones.”
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Read more: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2024-02-21/the-diet-shift-that-makes-the-biggest-impact-on-climate-change?embedded-checkout=true
I have a big problem with the anti-beef push.
There is a reason cowboys herded cows in the old West, and why the African Maasai and many other peoples still do, and why beef cattle are chosen when other crops would in theory produce a much higher yield per acre.
Cattle can be raised in harsh regions which are far too unforgiving for other farm produce.
The suggestion raising beef is taking far more land than other food production, with the implicit suggestion that land dedicated to beef production could be repurposed for other produce, in my opinion verges on a lie by omission. I’m sure some cattle land could be used for other purposes, but a lot of it couldn’t.
In places where beef production is the only option, abandoning beef would mean abandoning food – dramatically reducing the total food available for people to eat.
Even in places where other food choices are available, the anti-beef push could impact food supplies. Stopping beef production would not automatically equate to increased production of other food.
In a world where just under 800 million people go to bed hungry every night, attacking the supply of food in the name of the alleged climate emergency in my opinion should be viewed as a crime against humanity.
Planting vegetables must also include the mass of animals that must be killed to support the plants growth without being eaten. Rabbits, mice, most insects, earworms, termites killed.
And then, with no animals to put back into the soil, the soil becomes depleted… devoid of a good biome and minerals.
So fertilizer and some minerals are put back in, but just the right minerals to get the plants to produce… not necessarily the balance of minerals that would be there in a natural setting.
Full disclosure: I live in cattle country. Yikes!
This is calving season (just a few little ones so far) and that means
Bald Eagles show up to consume the after-birth. I saw one adult male
today. Some years I see 7 to 10 at a time.
Interestingly, The Wall Street Journal just had a major article about
the oversupply of pork, the high cost of beef, and the large demand
for chicken. So, one of my New Year’s resolutions is to eat more bacon.
I’m sure Gaia doesn’t care which way I get my protein fix.
There’s a reddit debate on whether fried bacon or Spam is better. I may have to try fried Spam as the price of bacon could make one squeal.
If you slice Spam very thin, fry it and burn the edges it tastes just like bacon.
Fried so it has crispy edges is the only way to go with spam
I don’t know about that…..
I remember Spam fritters from my younger days…
With lots of tomato sauce.. or course.
I think they were yummy.. maybe.
Um, bacon in the UK and bacon in North America are two different products.
Bacon in North America is usually salt cured, often with some kind of sugar like maple syrup, then cool dry smoked.
After smoking, it is thin sliced with “thick” slices being about 3/16ths of an inch thick.
Some commercial outfits add smoke flavoring instead of smoking the meat, but they’re not as good.
As far as I can see, bacon shown on BBC shows looks to be fried ham slices. Likely quite tasty, but not bacon as America and Canada know it.
Canada also has a product we call Canadian bacon in the USA. Canadian bacon are pork tenderloins salt cured and lightly smoked.
Spam tastes more like ham when it has soaked in a couple changes of fresh water to draw out the salt.
The same goes for removing salt from corned (salt) beef.
A major problem in America is that during the past thirty years, many of the commercial makers of bacon now sell wet bacon that is full of water.
A huge difference in the product that causes the bacon to spit in the pan when bubbles of water flash to steam and spray the cook.
I buy my bacon from a farmers outlet that sells dry bacon genuinely smoked. The price per pound is much cheaper as I am not paying for additional water content. This bacon is sold by the flat and comes in a cardboard box, not a sealed plastic wrap.
At school – UK 1950s – our infamous school-dinners had SPAM fritters on the menu, accompanied by a thin, red liquid which was called ‘tomato sauce’. This resulted in my life-long hatred of SPAM.
Spam has been called a lot of things. I don’t recall ever hearing “delicious” being among them.
peeps like that are usually smokers that don’t keep their houses clean
the trick is to by the mess-packs of cuts and trims bacon for about half the price, they have about 1/4th the sugar and half the salt in them and bake up awesome. I personally just cut the packs into sixths then freeze them in bags then nuke thaw em and let em sauna in the fry pan for a while.
somewhat interesting. What ate these “mess-packs of cuts” of which you write?
To quote Burt Reynolds “do the letters F O have any meaning to you “
If you’re gonna eat beef ya gotta eat beef
Ha my favourite food champion :-).
He didn’t round it off with a waffer thin mint 🙁
Ha – where’s Monty Python when we need it?
He actually doesn’t look that fat lucky bugger, apparently he just eats light salads in between his food challenge youtube meals.
How about a steak instead of the Dagwood Bumstead burger?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e0qk9kOBw00
That looks more like a half raw roast beef.
This Texan steak looks the part.
“And how do you want your steak Sir?”
“Slap some butter on it’s horns and run it through the kitchen at a high lope.”
At a famed Japanese restaurant, I ordered steak.
The chef came out looked at the orders and slapped a steak on my plate.
I grabbed my knife and fork and started cutting. He snatched the meat back off my plate and told me he couldn’t allow that.
Instead he overcooked my steak and I left my unhappy opinion in the tip and comments.
It’s not the burgers that make you fat. It’s the buns and the fries. Since he’s only eating one bun for that whole stack of burgers, I wouldn’t expect that to make him fat beyond the sheer quantity.
Mr. Creosote!
Foxtrot Oscar?
I cut beef every time it’s on my plate. I even have a special Beef Knife to do it. Makes it Far easier to consume
I live in an area which is 99% pastoral. The only crop farmers can grow succesfully is grass, so it is all beef (and dairy) and sheep. Yumee. And all that manure is good for biodiversity.
Cattle farming is highly efficient when done of the right land.
Natural grasses that grow most of the year. Use lower grade hay in winter if needed..
No huge costs for seeds and planting of crops.
Very little input in the way of chemicals. (just animal pest controls)
Cattle farming also greatly reduces weeds and the need for fertilisers.
Also, dairy cattle , at least in my region ted to be on land that has the right climate but is often a bit hilly and sometime rocky or sometimes prone to flooding…
… this is also land, that while fertile, would be difficult to reliably grow crops on.
That is the point… at least where I have seen, most beef, lamb, dairy etc is grown on land that is probably not suitable, or difficult for crop use.
Close to where I live we have just had a large wildfire (grass pine forest and scrub land) close to Christchurch city
The Mayor was taken for a helicopter flight to see the damage his comment “where it has been grazed it did not burn ”
I would hate to see the destruction if we removed all grazing animals from our grazing lands
These eco nut jobs think all beef is raised in feedlots, they are important pasture management creatures we need more of them not less
you are 100 % correct in your comments. Sheep will take it even dryer than cattle
All land-based food, plant and animal, is basically carbon neutral because every carbon atom in it has recenrly come from the atmosphere. That includes feed lots. Methane is irrelevant because in the atmosphere it quickly breaks down.
The other issue – land use – is highly relevant, because farmers generally try to get the best yield from their land, and that means they grow crops where crops will grow economically, and grass for grazing on the rest. The idea that an inner city greenie knows better than a farmer about this is absurd.
We need to keep eating meat in order to maximise farm production. Meat is how we humans eat grass.
Of course it’s also dependent on the agricultural practices used, land change aspects, etc.
One should consider all fossil inputs, for example the use of diesel for planting, cultivation, harvesting, the use of propane for grain drying, use of ammonia, urea, ammonium sulfate, etc., as fertilizers, and all of the transportation fuel used for distribution, as well as plastic for packaging, etc.
Without fossil carbon many or most people would actually starve.
“inner city greenie”
like in Chicago?
News Tip
https://thehill.com/policy/energy-environment/4480345-chicago-sues-oil-companies-for-impacts-of-climate-change/
better late than never ? Hasn’t that train already left the station ?
There is also a lot of agricultural produce that cannot be consumed by humans. Live stock can consume much of it and turn it into meat.
This is just one more factor among many that are routinely and wilfully ignored by the anti-meat brigade. I don’t believe any estimates of the “climate footprint” of meat consumption.
The numbers are, ab initio, about as meaningful as the concept of equilibrium climate sensitivity to CO2. A meaningless value that falls out of a spreadsheet model they have constructed for a system they don’t understand. The model constructor can argue that “you’ve got to start somewhere”. Maybe, but that doesn’t mean authoritarian societal changes should be made, based on such models.
Veggie people often cite that 1/3rd of produce is discarded.
To reach that number, they have to include the waste produce sold to cattle, pork, goat and chicken producers.
I don’t know whether sheep producers purchase or are given waste produce, so I didn’t include sheep.
And then of course they don’t want to discuss what happens to the beef if it is not consumed. Should we kill them? But that’s wasteful. Should we let them live a long life that is not threatened by dying for meat? What happens to that land in the meantime? 😉
No you have to keep them to produce the natural, organic fertiliser to grow your organic plant crops. What’s that you say… methane?
Shop them off to India. They will be treated reverently there.
In India the people took aged decrepit cows across the river to the jungle to become meat for tigers and vultures (where I lived in central India).
Cattle have advantages over sheep and goats in certain locations, but according to the Ivanovich et al paper discussed last year, sheep and goat meat production produces slightly less than half the methane of beef.
Sheep and goats are better adapted to dry conditions than cattle, but are more susceptible to large predators and can’t walk as far in a day to find water.
Sheep have the additional benefit of producing fibre.
Adding watering points and removing large predators such as eagles, bears, coyotes, wolves and the big cats would allow ready substitution.
Poultry and pigs produce an order of magnitude less methane per kg of meat, but tend not to do well on rangeland. Replacing cattle with intensively grown poultry or swine would require massive increases in grain production (just like crickets).
btw, the Nobel committee still hasn’t sent that letter 🙁
Sheep are just animals looking for new and novel ways to die 😉
Many of them take ocean voyages from Australia to Middle East destinations and expire before arrival.
But being sheep, they don’t glom on to the fact that they could have achieved the same outcome without taking a long ocean voyage.
Ahh, you have worked with them, too.
Banjo Paterson wrote about that many, many years ago.
The advantage of eating fat lambs is that you can beat them to the punch.
Since methane is NOT a “climate” (or any other kind of) “problem,” who cares about how much methane is produced?!
We need to stop playing their game.
But it will be cool to have a Nobel Prize which doesn’t have to be shared with the riff raff.
In the American West, DNR (Department of Natural Resources) wardens now better understand that mountain lions prefer mountain sheep and goats over chasing antelope or elk.
Outside of Las Vegas along the Nevada-Utah border one can often see mountain sheep as one drives from Las Vegas into Utah.
How do I tell these fools that I don’t give two hoots about my “carbon footprint “ !
It is totally and absolutely unimportant to me what my carbon footprint is.
Can you find the most and least climate-friendly options on the menu?”
I don’t give a **** which is the most “climate friendly” item on the menu.
“Climate friendly” is an idiotic and totally meaningless term.
Totally agree; it’s my life, my world and my choice . .
Had a similar argument in a vegan (don’t laugh – the food is rather good) when I asked why they were trying to replicate the food they didn’t eat (i.e. burgers, sausages and bacon). I was lectured on “carbon footprint”, I replied that if he looked at the carbon footprint of the avocados and soy on his menu and compare it to the lamb steak I’d had the night before, from an animal raised and slaughtered on a farm 5 miles from where I live, He might find it interesting. I’m banned from going there now.
Veganism is just another one of those “identity” fads.
It is a way for losers to feel good about themselves. Those that wear hair shirts feel that they are morally superior.
Vegan’s just another word for nothin’ good to eat.
From the Beer and the Wheel – “vegetarians”, an early word meaning “bad hunters”.
Always remember, It is not a lie … if you tell it to a Vegan.
Ah, here’s the rub. According to NASA satellite images, a land area the size of the USA has greened over the last 20 years due to the increase in atmospheric CO2 (380ppm to 420ppm), particularly round deserts which are shrinking and in dry zones because more CO2 means less water needed and faster and healthier plant growth. Commercial greenhouses maintain a concentration of around 1 000ppm for this reason.
Additionally grain crop yields have surged.
It’s a contradiction to promote eating of more plant food, encouraging more farmland to be rewilded, whilst at the same time demanding reduction of CO2 which will kill off plant growth and animals using it as habitat, expand deserts, and reduce plant based food.
Funny lot the climate loons.
_____________________________________________________________
When is this going to be exposed for the bullshit that it is?
That must be another problem with beef 🙂
The “climate movement” has produced more bullshit than all the bulls that have ever existed.
It has been exposed. Unfortunately, those kind of people don’t read WUWT.
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2023/03/06/the-misguided-crusade-to-reduce-anthropogenic-methane-emissions/
Producing meat is carbon neutral. If producing ethanol is carbon neutral, then meat production is the same. Methane breaks down to CO2.
It is chemically and biologically impossible for a cow or a pig or any other creature…
… to put out more “carbon” than they take in.
All animals are carbon neutral.
Burning wood in power stations and stoves instead of coal or gas is carbon neutral too – and its CO2 emission isn’t a greenhouse gas.
Ending cattle grazing is not just bad for food supply, it’s also bad for the environment. Prairie birds happily co-existed with grazing cattle for most of the last two centuries. Now prairie bird populations are crashing because we’ve converted millions of acres of rangeland to grow corn for idiotic biofuels. We are using over 25 million acres, most of which was rangeland and pasture to grow corn for biofuels. There is little or no net energy gain from biofuels. It takes about a gallon of ethanol to grow and process enough corn to make a gallon of ethanol. This is a real,environmental disaster happening right now, but biofuels are “green” so neither the media nor the environmental groups wil,talk about it.
Indeed, we did an article a while ago about an ecologist who orchestrated a massive elephant cull to save the African Savanah, but later realised he had wrought untold destruction for nothing – the grassland needed to be grazed and trampled. He dedicated much of the rest of his life to telling people what a disastrous mistake he’d made, and how important grazing was to grassland health.
“because we’ve converted millions of acres of rangeland to grow corn for idiotic biofuels. We are using over 25 million acres, most of which was rangeland and pasture to grow corn for biofuels.”
Source , please .
I know a lot of farmers and ranchers , none of whom have done this .
Professor Diego Rose ; you ‘just have to swap out beef’
Where do these people come from ?!
They are assuredly in a world of their own . .
It is my personal assessment that these zealots are out of touch with reality. They are not unlike the people who can’t define an “assault weapon,” but want to ban them.
Pity the poor cows. We love and treat them as our own children and, when The Time Comes, they give their entire being so as to sustain and prolong ours
In our sugar-induced insanity we throw all the best and most nutritious bits away
We actually pick out and selectively eat the part that:
While we make the exact same kindergarten mistake and feed excessive amounts of the ‘cow waste’ to our pet cats and they suffer the exact same fate – obesity and renal failure
While the part of the cow we were supposed to eat, the part we evolved to eat, is regarded as toxic slime/grease and is diligently burned, destroyed, landfilled and tipped down the drain..
never mind that for now. Explain ALL the wrongs in the image at the top.
There is actually one one – he’s wearing the blanket. ##
Isn’t that an odd thing to be doing while out walking in a desert, esp considering what you learned in kindergarten, and positively know, about deserts?
## It wasn’t actually him personally. He is continuing a tradition that goes back 10,000+ years (more than that in Australia)
The goat is the clue.
I prefer a ribeye or prime rib with plenty of nutritious fat (no trimming it off and leaving it on the plate, it’s delicious).
“A bloody segment of muscle tissue from a castrated bull.” A. E. van Vogt, The Weapon Shops of Isher.
Read up on what does make you go blind . . .
You don’t like beef, you don’t like sugar, it seems like you don’t like carbs. I rather curious what your diet looks like, Peta.
The ‘emission footprint’ of eating beef is precisely zero, nil, nada, nichts.
My wife and I are both carnivores. Buy most of our beef – grass fed – from a local farm. Known them for 20 years. They farm mixed arable and livestock, and have done there for over 300 years. They note that you can of course graze livestock where you cannot grow arable; and that having always practiced what is known now as “regenerative farming”, rotate, and use cow and sheep shit to enrich the soil.
They were recently assessed as carbon neutral.
Close down the industrial farms yes, but support real farms.
And nota bene, the devastation caused by arable farming (hear ye, any vegans reading this) is appalling; poisoning the soil, wholesale slaughter of small animals, birds and insects and flora. So get off your high horses, with your “It’s not ethical to eat meat”.
Homo sapiens (never mind our precursors) have been around for c250k too 300k years. Until 6000 years ago, meat was our staple, with seasonal roots, fruit and berries when waiting for the next kill. No meat. No Homo sapiens.
From the BBC
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-67917294
It also discovered that humans’ ability to digest milk and other dairy products and survive on a vegetable-heavy diet only emerged about 6,000 years ago. Before that, they were meat-eaters.
“Climate dieticians” can push off. Oh and going carnivore seems to have stopped my wife’s “terminal” bone cancer in its tracks.
Don’t give them any ideas …
I live on the west coast of Scotland famous for grass fed beef and dairy. The clay soil combined with the high rainfall make it useless for growing anything but grass unless within 2 miles or so of the coast. So its beef and dairy or revert to woodland.
Missing a herd of elephants in the room here. Methane is COMPLETELY MEANINGLESS to the “climate.” It’s “absorption bands” are completely overlapped by water vapor, which means no additional “infrared absorption” will take place due to methane “emissions.”
There’s more, but not even necessary.
As most of us know, whenever you feel run down from overwork or stress, a nice thick, charbroiled fresh chuck burger revives your body and spirit.
Perhaps there should be consideration of the entire food production industry. For example, of all the food produced approximately 60% of food ends up in landfills. It’s not the food production that is wasteful is trying to consume it all before it spoils.
https://www.epa.gov/facts-and-figures-about-materials-waste-and-recycling/food-material-specific-data
I think the “nutritionists” are sucking up to CAGW devotees, and are influenced by vegans. They do not care a bit about actual farming, or actual food cycles. And of course, they do not care that methane is a bogus issue, as what happens in isolation does not happen in the real atmosphere, as CH4 and water vapor absorption bands overlap.
The importance of beef protein, indeed all animal protein, being identical to Human protein, is it contains all the essential amino-acids required by Humans to build/repair/replace tissue particularly nervous and muscle tissue. Very important for the young. It is why meat-eating Human brains developed way beyond the brains of other vegetarian primates. Eating other animals means we don’t have to eat each other.
In order to get the same range of amino-acids from plants, requires the consumption of a wide selection and quantity of plant material. This is why prey animals spend most of their day foraging and eating and have specially adapted and very long digestive systems to extract amino-acids and other nourishment from their food.
Plant-eating animals concentrate protein in their bodies so mass for mass it contains more nourishment than the plant matter they ate.
Human vegetarian diets would require far greater land use, more food processing and additives to concentrate protein and provide the necessary nourishment. More energy, more water, more farming. It is why the notion of eating insects is being broadcast. It is not as people have assumed, the consumption of actual creepy crawlies, but the addition of animal protein derived from probably specially bred, genetically modified and farmed critters, to factory made food based on plant material so it can resemble meat and have a higher nutritional value.
In Britain the topography is such, rolling landscape, water meadows, hilly moorland, that a lot of land is unsuitable for grain or vegetable crops but is ideal for cattle and sheep. Pigs and chickens require little land and will eat just about anything.
In South West France much of the land is unsuitable for crops being mountainous with thin topsoil, rocky and thick clay just below, but ideal for sheep, goats and fowl particularly ducks.
I find that Climatrons see the world down the wrong-end of a telescope and don’t really understand the environment – which they yap on about continuously – at all, or the reality of life. They believe everything can be changed to fit their demands. It’s a mental illness in my view.
and the ironic thing is that meat chickens have a higher feed conversion efficiency than the creepy crawlies.
When I choose what I want to eat, I am sane enough to know that the choice will not affect the weather. For those who think otherwise they are free to make irrational decisions their whole life but it may be a short life if critical thinking isn’t part of their tool box.
Vegetarians should stop eating my food’s food.