“Producing 2.2lb of beef generates as much greenhouse gas as driving a car non-stop for three hours.” I don’t doubt that for a minute. Feed-grade corn is bathed in petroleum, as fertilizer, and then the corn has to be hauled to the feedlots, and then the beef has to be shipped to you. You’re burning petroleum every step of the way. The solution for us beef-eaters? Buy locally-produced, grass-fed beef, direct from the farmer, if you can. Thanks to David for the tip.
Comments are closed.
And believe it or not, local grass-fed beef just tastes better!
It sures does taste better. We just got a side of beef from Polyface. We also got a cookbook called the Grassfed Gourmet (by Shannon Hayes) and have cooked some pretty amazing meals. Who’d have thunk a chuck roast would be so flavorful?
Yeah, eating conventional beef is pretty bad, beef in general will be will be a luxury in the future.
CO2, and not to mention, methane; I think methane produced by cows and other “cud-chewers” accounts for as much as 2-3% of total greenhouse gases just from their burps and farts(as much as the airline industry).
Methane is an especially troublesome gas, about 20% times stronger than CO2 at trapping heat . . . you know its the methane in the permafrost and frozen deep sea methane that have a lot of scientists freaked out.
So even local beef has the potential to be bad and local beef still can be corn feed right before slaughter . . .
It would be interesting to see a comparison.
Also, if you think about it milk and ice cream must have huge greenhouse gas foot prints.
I’m just sayin’.
One more factoid:
Cows, which have doubled in population in the last 40 years to an estimated 1.3 billion worldwide, produce one pound of methane for every two pounds of meat that they yield.
Of course feeding them corn exacerbates this, because there stomachs are not designed to process corn. Messes up their immune system, too.
Thats why conventionally raised cows are soooo pumped full of antibiotics that the waste from these feed lots is literally toxic.
You can have my $.99 Whopper when you pry it from my cold, dead hands.
JS, there are other reasons to put down that whopper, aside from the environment. Those things are terrible for you! (However, they are some of the tastiest fast-food burgers, which isn’t saying much.)
Regarding the main post, this is yet another reason for a pigouvian tax on fossil fuels and carbon emissions, since such a thing would most likely make grass-fed beef economically viable (by raising the cost of corn-fed beef). I hope for this for purely selfish reasons — I’d love to get my hands on more high-quality beef.
I just read “Fast Food Nation” by Eric Schlosser. Highly recommended.
There’s a place in Harrisonburg called T&E Meat Market, where they butcher the animals in the back of the building. They don’t sell frozen meat, and supply closely follows demand (little or nothing gets thrown away). On the rare occasion I grill steak, that’s where I go to get them. No more frozen meat from the grocery store for me.
As a non-vegetarian with a lot of vegetarian friends, I’ve come to a happy medium in my life: reduce the amount of meat I eat. For me personally, I look at it the same way I look at water or energy conservation: simply reduce (I’ve also lost weight as a result of this lifestyle change).
Eating less meat is actually one of the solutions on the Inconvenient Truth website:
It’ll take a while — maybe a generation or two — before Americans get off the meat-and-potatoes-at-home-and-Big-Macs-on-the-run diet. But will studies like this actually get people to change their eating habits? I doubt it. Maybe if the US government ended subsidies to ranchers and the price of beef went up?
Alternative suggestion: Hunt and eat local wild venison. Could there possibly be any means of obtaining red meat with fewer ‘food miles’ and a smaller environmental footprint than by hunting deer?
It just makes sense. We have insane numbers of deer in most suburban and rural areas of the United States. In Lake Monticello alone, a 2004 federal study found a population density of about 1 deer for every 5 acres. This is high-quality food being produced by land that we don’t even think of as being in agricultural use. Look at the edges of the woods around the runways at the CHO airport and you will see deer in large numbers. Making the hundreds of acres of open grass on the airport’s property into dual-use land. It provides transportation infrastucture and apparantly makes meat for us as well. This is true of all sorts of land in Virginia that has some other primary use.
What is the total petroleum necessary to produce a pound of wild venison in your freezer? Assuming that you can’t hunt deer in your own backyard for some reason, let’s say that you have to drive 10 miles away to hunt and then 10 miles back with the deer in your trunk or in the bed of your truck. Say that your car or truck gets terrible milage. 20 miles per gallon. One average sized deer nets you 60 pounds of meat that you would want to eat. That’s 4.6 tablespoons of gasoline. Shoot the deer in your own backyard and that drops to zero.
Environmentally, it just makes sense. Hunt and eat wild enison. It’s also a lot more ethical to get your meat from an animal that spent it’s whole life happily in the wild before having on bad morning rather than from an animal like a pig that has been raised in a stainless steel cage without ever seeing the sun. Or a cow pushed into a tiny feedlot for weeks on end and forced to eat subsidized corn (which cows are not designed to eat), injected with antibiotics and hormones to prevent the corn diet from killing it.
Deer hunting is clearly the best way for an environmentally concerned liberal to obtain animal protein.
If you’re interested in eating less meat, and want some great recipes, I suggest the blog Eat Air for some ideas.
Fast Food Nation is an *excellent* book. Schlosser doesn’t have any discernable agenda beyond illustrating the reality and interplay between the fast food industry, meat suppliers, and health. It’s also well supported with footnotes.
~
And on Jack’s point, I sure wish that everyone who ate meat had to hunt, kill, dress, butcher, and cook an animal at least once.
Living in a county where cows outnumber people, you wouldn’t think I would have so much trouble finding local, grass-fed beef.
This is a great site to find grassfed products near you. http://www.eatwild.com/