Beef: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly
Do we have to be vegetarian to slow climate change?
Did you know that in the 1850s in the US, pretty much every family had a cow?
In fact, the word cattle etymologically comes from chatel, old French for “property.” Having a cow was the definition of wealth and status. You definitely did not want to kill your cow to eat it unless you were very, very well off. Since the invention of burgers in 1904 at the World’s Fair in St Louis, cows and beef have taken on a very different symbol. Today, McDonald’s can make 2,000 cheap quarter pounders out of just one cow. Just look at how our consumption of beef per person has skyrocketed since the beginning of the 1950s in Asia. Per capita, cattle consumption has almost tripled in 50 years.
4.5 kg or 10 pounds of beef per person per year is equivalent to almost a quarter pounder burger a week — and that is on average for the entire Asian population, young and old.
The question is: is this really a bad thing?
First of all, let us try to learn a bit more about this great animal — the aghnya in Hindu culture, meaning “that which may not be slaughtered.” There are almost 1.4 billion cattle in the world, according to the FAO — 100% of which are domesticated. There are no more wild cows since the 17th century. The activity that a cow most enjoys is eating — each day, it will eat for about 8 hours and can digest up to 20kg or 40 pounds of food daily. This, of course, also means that some has to come back out again, and a single cow can produce 10 tons of manure a year. That is a lot of poo. Globally, it is the US which produces the most cattle, a quarter of which are dairy cows, and the rest are from beef herds.
Now that we understand what we are eating, is it bad that we are eating so much of it? To answer this question, we are going to look just at the impact of beef on the climate. Of course, many other types of analyses can be made, but for now, let us look at the greenhouse gas emissions involved. Indeed, 26% of global emissions are related to food. So looking at our plate is a good place to start reducing our impact.
At the University of Oxford, professors Joseph Poore and Thomas Nemecek published in 2018 an incredible meta-analysis, consolidating data on the environmental impacts of 40 food products covering 38,000 farms. For beef, they analyzed 106 studies across all five continents.
Based on this study, if we compare a chicken burger with a beef burger, well, there is really no competition: beef emits way more than chicken. On average, the numbers are 6kgCO2e per kg (or 6 lb CO2e per pound) of chicken vs. 60kgCO2e per kg (or 60 lb CO2e per pound) of beef. We do not all have to be vegetarian to lower the impact food has on the climate. And if we look even closer, not all beef is equal: beef from Latin America emits more than beef from Europe.
Let us take a closer look at why this is. There are several steps required to get a burger from the farm to McDonald’s, including changing the land into pasture (LUC, Land Use Change), growing the feed, running the cattle farm, processing the meat, transport, packaging, and retail.
As we can see, on average, most of the emissions — 66% — come from the farm: mainly from application of fertilizers and enteric fermentation. This enteric fermentation is an anaerobic process (without oxygen), which is what is happening when cows digest — they burp methane.
This data, however, also tells us that we can reduce 27% of beef’s impact by making sure no deforestation was involved in raising the cow (LUC, Land Use Change). It is primarily the extent of deforestation that makes the geographical differences in emissions between continents. The more trees we cut down, the more CO2 we are putting back in the atmosphere.
Chickens, on the other hand, incur much less deforestation, as less land and feed is required, and there are no methane emissions from burping, as they do not have an anaerobic digestive system like cows.
To sum up:
· Our consumption of beef had risen in the last 50 years, increasing GHG emissions with it, making food represent 25% of all GHG emissions.
· On average, beef emits much more than other forms of protein, 10 times more than chicken, for example.
· More specifically, beef emissions depend heavily on how the farm is run: an industrial deforestation ranch or a small family-run cattle farm?
The good side of all this is that understanding more about what we eat can make a difference. Every time we decide to skip the kg of beef, we are saving the planet on average 60 kgCO2e (or 132 lb CO2e). That is the equivalent of what two trees can absorb in a year or the same as what is emitted after 300 km by car.
And if you are worried that you might not be as strong as before with less red meat, well just remind yourself that being as strong as an ox required eating nothing else but grass.
