Sustainable Animal Product Consumption: Possibility or Pipe-dream?
By Sapphire Jones and Natalie Kelleway
To say that 2020 has been a strange year would be a massive understatement. Putting the huge health pandemic aside, the personal lifestyle implications of COVID-19 have been drastic. Whether it’s toilet roll hysteria, mass jigsaw consumption or obsessing over banana bread — this year has taken a turn none of us could have imagined.
The coronavirus lockdown has made us consider our food supply, meal plans and shopping routine more than ever before. But have you got enough to eat? Most probably. Will we all have enough in the future? It’s unlikely. With the UN warning of “famines of biblical proportions” during / after the pandemic, now is the time to consider our options to feed the world — and what we can do to help.
Welcome to our two-part blog series on the future of food and animal product consumption.
In this post, we’ll look at the environmental impacts of animal product consumption, assessing whether adopting a diet free of meat and dairy is truly the most sustainable option.
In the next one, we’ll pause to consider potential solutions that address the key sustainability challenges posed, before delving into the role of alternative protein sources.
By 2050, there will be a global population of nearly 10 billion people. According to the World Resources Institute, feeding this population will require a 56% increase in food production and extra 593 million hectares of cultivated land. The necessity for sustainable methods of food production and consumption has never been higher. Whilst it’s easy to shift the onus onto governments and organisations to step up to the plate (pardon the pun), there is much we can do as individuals, as consumers, and as a collective force for good.
Let’s look at the problem with meat and dairy…
We’ve all heard of Cowspiracy. For those who missed this, we’ll provide a brief synopsis. The environmental case to reduce our consumption of animal products is several-fold, but the two core arguments are as follows:
1. Land use: While meat and dairy provide only 18% of calories globally, 83% of farmland is used for livestock. Yet, somehow, we justify this disparity? If everyone were to adopt a vegan diet — we’re not suggesting that you have to go to dietary extremes, but hypothetically speaking — we could reduce food’s current land use by 76% . That’s a huge amount! And when we take into consideration the land’s opportunity cost, i.e. alternative uses, the impact of livestock agriculture worsens. For example, trees could be planted to absorb carbon, the land could be rewilded to enhance biodiversity, or a circular agriculture approach could be taken to increase soil sequestration (where carbon dioxide is removed from the atmosphere and stored in the carbon pool from plant matter in the soil).
2. Greenhouse gas emissions: Livestock produce 14.5% of global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, with beef making up 41% of that figure. Alongside carbon dioxide, animals (mainly sheep and cattle) burp out an astonishing amount of methane — accounting for over a third of total agricultural emissions. While carbon dioxide is often painted as the villain of GHG, methane has 30 times more potency potential as a heat-trapping gas: of which, the implications on climate change are staggering. If you could see it, would you still ignore it?
But animal agriculture’s impact goes beyond just that:
3. Freshwater use: Agriculture accounts for 92% of humanity’s freshwater footprint; almost a third of which relates to animal products.
4. Slurry acidification and water pollution: Fertilised soils (i.e. manure) and livestock are significant sources of nitrogen pollution, both through eutrophication and atmospheric emissions. (Eutrophication is where a body of water becomes overly enriched with minerals / nutrients inducing excessive algae growth, resulting in oxygen depletion and the formation of ‘dead zones’ where no organisms can survive.)
Is consuming animal products actually that bad?
Argument one: Net zero cows?!
Yes, you heard right: net zero cows. Might it be possible to have a non-vegan diet and mitigate the impact on the planet? …Introducing the “magic bullet” of regenerative agriculture — effectively using livestock grazing methods that increase soil rotation to improve soil health and it’s potential to absorb carbon.
A five-year study into Agricultural Systems concluded that grass-fed beef can be carbon neutral. The study found that farmers adopting Adaptive Multi-Paddock (AMP) grazing strategies produced no net emissions. But what is AMP grazing and how does it work? AMP grazing requires moving cattle at various intervals throughout the grazing season. As the cows churn and fertilise the soil, they regenerate degraded grassland and increase its carbon sequestration (whilst improving biodiversity and drought resilience).
But, how viable is the ‘beef saviour’? While there is some truth to the net zero agriculture argument, further research exploring the issue found that realistic rates of carbon soil sequestration are far from carbon neutrality. In fact, they found that the largest sequestration potential from grazing management offsets just 20–60% of annual emissions from the livestock grazing sector. Plus, regenerative agriculture is rarely seen in practice —most dairy farmers use continuous grazing on the same pasture, or keep cows indoors all year round, in response to cost pressures. In the UK, these zero grazing practices have increased from 16% of farms in 2014 to 23% in 2018, questioning the feasibility of ‘net zero cows’.
Argument two: The food mile argument
We’ve all heard of this one. Local is better, right?
The food mile argument is often used to justify eating animal products — stating that food mileage (the distance that the food has travelled from farm to fork) is a more important barometer of products’ environmental impacts; local products with lower food miles limit the GHG emitted from transportation. Hence, British reared meat has a lower transportation footprint per kg and Scope 3 emissions than your avocados flown over from Mexico.
But, once again, the science begs to differ. On average, the transport of food only accounts for around 11% of its total climate impact. Goods are shipped overseas through huge, slow freight ocean liners with very low energy usage. In most cases, the largest contribution comes from domestic transport processes. Instead, experts recommend measuring a product’s carbon “foodprint” using a Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) to consider a range of factors: energy and water use, harvesting methods, packaging, storage etc. to develop a more rounded picture. Let’s take Kenyan-grown beans as an example: they’re grown using much more sustainable methods than British varieties — without using tractors, fertilising with cow manure and utilising low-tech irrigation systems…and have a lower LCA to show for it!
Argument three: Can’t we just eat “default meat”?
The default meat argument suggests it’s possible to access animal products without using “dedicated resources”. While the rather off-putting picture of roadkill cooking on an open fire springs to mind, default meat is much broader than this: it involves utilising animal products that are a by-product of agricultural systems designed to produce grains and other vegetable staples, e.g. tending pigs to feed on whey and food waste in order to keep rats away or grazing cows on land unsuitable for cultivation.
Amidst claims that default meat accounts for over half of total meat and dairy production, there is little evidence to validate this. In reality, levels of default meat are low. In the UK, post-farm food waste would be enough to make around 6kg of pork per person per year — only a quarter of what the average person consumes annually…
So, what can I do?
As an individual, there are many actions you can take to improve your carbon “foodprint” and consume sustainably:
1. Adopt a predominantly plant-based diet.
Overall, the climate case against consuming animal products is strong. Adopting a diet free of meat and dairy is nearly always the most sustainable option. Or, if you can’t imagine life without halloumi, why not try to cut down your consumption of animal products gradually? Check out the Veganuary website, for has lots of delicious plant-based meals you can try — the chickpea chilli burgers are a personal favourite!
2. Do your research.
The environmental impact of food is determined by a variety of factors: food origins, pesticides, food miles, farming methods etc. If you don’t know where to start, there are several innovative smartphone apps which serve as a great resource for eating sustainably! This article outlines just a few.
3. Buy organic.
Organic produce is grown using fewer pesticides, reducing the risk of associated human health implications and harmful environmental impacts, e.g. soil biodiversity loss and water contamination.
We’d love to hear any thoughts or reflections. Otherwise — stay tuned for the next blog in this series, where we’ll take a look at innovations in the alternative protein market.
Written by Sapphire Jones and Natalie Kelleway.
All views expressed are our own and not representative of our employer, Accenture.
