Cow-culations - Solaine Bardin

Most of us have thought about what food we eat at some point in our lives. But have you ever thought about how your eating habits could affect the planet? If you haven’t been living under a rock for the past five years, you know about the attention food is getting right now. There are so many different diets to try, whether for health reasons or environmental, and quite honestly it can seem intimidating. In this article, I’m going to help break down for you how your food choices impact the Earth and how you can make easy choices to do your part. Today, we are going to talk about meat.

Disclaimer before I start: there is no one dietary plan that works for everyone, in fact, it’s funny that I’m writing about this because I need meat to supplement my diet. I have mild anemia meaning I need to consume more iron-rich foods to maintain healthy levels. For those who have health concerns like me, it is important to keep in mind these nutrition requirements before trying to change your diet.

Now, onto the fun part. First things first, the meat you choose can drastically change your effect on the planet. For example, cows are a lot of work. To put things into perspective, each 1 kg of beef you eat (edible weight of produce output) is about 20 kg of food input meaning the cow had to proportionally eat 20 kg of food to supply that piece of meat. Compare this to other meat choices like pork, where 1 kg is only about 7.3 kg of food input, and chicken which is about 2.8 kg of food input per kg of output. Main takeaway: cows . . .kinda suck. But this isn’t even the full story: choosing meats with more energy-efficient modes of production is also important.

For land requirements, cows require an average (for 1 kg of each protein) of 245 m2, which is four times as much as pork at 90 m2 and almost 18 times as much as chicken at 14 m2. Once again, notice the dramatic change from cow to the other meat choices. As for water, 1 kg of beef is about 750 kg of water compared to 175 kg for pork and just 50 kg for chicken.

Now, sure, some people might say that cows are larger and provide more meat but let’s do some cow-culations ;). For 525 kg of beef, post-cutting, there is about 250 kg of retail beef left. Already, the mass has been halved. So, if every kilogram of that 250 kg of retail beef requires 750 kg of water then that’s about 187,500 kg of water. Compared to if we get 250 kg of chicken which is about 84 chickens, that’s about 12,600 kg of water.

Remember, a lot of these animals are raised in Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs) which pack thousands of animals in a very small area and have them live in close proximity to each other, their food, water, and waste. This often leads to disease which is why many of these meat products are fed antibiotics -- and this can propagate extremely dangerous antibiotic-resistant bacteria which could pose a threat to humans.

Finally, this increased consumption of problematic meats has and only will increase with time and development. Since 1950, global meat production has increased by 5x, per capita meat consumption has doubled, and this is just the beginning. The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) estimates that as nations become wealthier, more industrialized, and more developed, total meat consumption will nearly double again by 2050.

The main message here is that being conscious about what you eat, doesn’t necessarily mean you have to cut out all meat. Make thoughtful, well-researched choices for your health and the health of the earth, and at the end of the day, that’s the best we can do.

Source: The Science Behind the Stories ENVIRONMENT