The worse thing about arguments like this one at the EPA blog, and this Post article by Ezra Klein, is that they ignore the large environmental impact differences between eating different types of meat.
Both articles argue – correctly – that it would be good for the environment if more people became vegetarians. Ezra makes a more nuanced case, pointing out that changes on the margin are helpful:
Going vegetarian might not be as effective as going vegan, but it’s better than eating meat, and eating meat less is better than eating meat more. It would be a whole lot better for the planet if everyone eliminated one meat meal a week than if a small core of die-hards developed perfectly virtuous diets.
I’ve not had the willpower to eliminate bacon from my life entirely, and so I eliminated it from breakfast and lunch, and when that grew easier, pulled back further to allow myself five meat-based meals a month.
Since Ezra acknowledges the benefits of advocating incremental changes rather than perfection, it’s bizarre that he didn’t use the words “poultry” or “chicken” anywhere in his article. Indeed, he uses “bacon” and “meat” interchangeably, as if all meat were bacon.1
But what studies have found — including a study Ezra relies on in his article2– is that a poultry-based diet has an environmental impact similar to that of a vegetarian diet, and does significantly less harm than pork or beef.
From an article in Salon discussing the same research:
Unlike cattle, chickens don’t burp methane. They also have an amazing ability to turn a relatively small amount of grain into a large amount of protein. A chicken requires 2 pounds of grain to produce a pound of meat, compared with about 6 pounds of grain for a feedlot cow and 3 pounds for a pig. Poultry waste produces only about one-tenth of the methane of hog and cattle manure.
That’s not to say chicken production is pure. The waste often contains the cancer-causing element arsenic, which is added to most U.S. chicken feed to promote growth. Plus, chicken poop frequently has mercury in it, possibly from fish meal used as feed, or from vaccines.[…]
Still, chickens are such efficient producers of protein that a study in the science journal Earth Interactions finds that Americans who eat poultry, dairy and eggs, but not red meat, are responsible for fewer greenhouse gases than those who consume a vegetarian diet that includes dairy and eggs. “Astonishingly enough,” says study coauthor Gidon Eshel, a Bard College geophysicist, “the poultry diet is actually better than lacto-ovo vegetarian.” In other words, a roast chicken dinner is better for the planet than a cheese pizza. “If you need to eat dead animals, poultry is the way to go,” says Eshel, a vegan.
It’s rare to hear this point mentioned, but it shouldn’t be. By not making this point, these eco-conscious writers fail to spread awareness about the easiest way most meat-eating Americans could make their diet better for the environment.
I don’t feel able to switch to a vegetarian diet, or a near-vegetarian diet like Ezra’s. Although I eat less meat than I used to, the largest change in my meat consumption is that I’ve been gradually switching to a much more poultry-based diet.
For example, I used to eat ham or baloney for lunch at the studio; I now eat turkey or chicken. That’s an easy change to make that accounts for about a quarter of all my meals.
The easier a change is to make, the more widespread it might potentially become, the greater the impact might be. People who want to encourage more environmentally-friendly eating should be trumpeting the benefits of changing from beef to chicken.
- For that matter, not all bacon is identical; the environmental impact of turkey bacon is presumably significantly less than that of pork bacon. [↩]
- “Diet, Energy, and Global Warming,” by Gidon Eshel and Pamela A. Martin, in Earth Interactions (2006; 10: 1-17). [↩]
This is a major reason that I eat chicken and turkey more than beef and pork. I lack the willpower to become a vegetarian (if being married to one didn’t change me, nothing will), but I can eat food that’s less energy-intensive to create, and that’s poultry. That doesn’t mean I never eat beef — I am not perfect — but my default meat for cooking at home is chicken, and that’s not nothing. (And I am raising my daughter vegetarian — frankly, at this point, she’s not gonna give me a choice — which, I hope, makes up for some of my own sins.)
I still think there’s a future in manufactured meats — we’re a few years away, but they’re getting pretty close to making meats that are edible, but that never were part of an animal. This would be a potentially significant step forward energywise and foodwise, as much of the energy used by animals raised for meat goes to making animals, not the parts of animals that can be eaten.
I think it is a wonderful idea for liberals and environmentalists to eschew beef. That means less demand and thus lower prices for the rest of us.
Once again, I love that conservatives are more worried about annoying liberals than preserving the environment for their kids. Because environmental degradation may be bad, but not if it’s done in service of punching a hippie.
Look at it this way, Jeff… It also means he’s more likely to suffer high cholesterol and heart disease, lowering his overall survival rate and lifespan; resulting, therefore, in a limiting of his ability to impact future elections and/or the environment.
So, it’s not a total loss for us “god-damned liberal environmentalist hippies”.
I’m rather pleased at the idea that liberals and environmentalists might account for enough of the population to actually drive down the price of beef.
Re: the post itself, I did not know that about poultry, though it certainly makes sense, and I tend to think of myself of pretty up on these things. It’s an important piece of the puzzle for me as someone who has way, way cut back on meat consumption but tries not to overdue it on the soy, having seen firsthand the environmental effects of increasing demand for soy worldwide. Also, it’s something that people who have no interest in going vegetarian would be a lot more willing to consider. And it aligns nicely with health concerns, as just about everything I’ve read says you’re better off with occasional consumption of lean meat than steady consumption of lots of dairy and eggs. (And cheese, not meat, is my real vice when it comes to animal products.)
I’ve been cutting down on the beef just because beef seems to raise hell with my metabolism these days. I like fish, actually – go figure, I was only born about 20 miles from Boston – but there’s issues with how the fisheries are being treated these days. My contribution there is that I’ve sworn off swordfish. Don’t get between me and a plate of fried clams, though. I’ve got a bottle of tartar sauce and I know how to use it.
The idea that less large herbivores are good for the environment due to methane excretions, land erosion, etc, leads to some curious questions:
1) Were the settlers that wiped out millions of bison (and 10s of millions of potential offspring) in the west unwittingly helping the environment? If so, should we recognize that monumental achievement with maybe a nice statue or museum, or something?
2) Should we study all the enviro benefits of killing off the large populations of wildebeests, elephants, giraffes, etc.?
TAS runs a blatantly racist blog. I would suggest banning him from this site.
From an animal-rights point of view, though, you need to kill a lot more chickens than beef for the same amount of meat.
The nice thing about chickens is you can raise them at home, which is a lot more difficult to do to with cows unless you live in a very rural area indeed. Plus, eggs.
I’m with mythago. Beef is worse on climate change, but chicken is way worse on grounds of animal suffering. This is partly because a huge number of chickens have to suffer for one cow worth of meat, and because the conditions of factory-farmed chickens are really horrendous.
Wow, he sure is a nasty piece of work.
We don’t usually ban based on external behavior. Let me check with the other mods.
My fantasy about the ethics of food is to get all my animal based food products from a farm with free range chickens that run around leading happy chicken lives until their heads are cut off (quickly and humanely) and get to raise some of their eggs. Unless they show that they’re not interested in chicks by completely ignoring them. Then they get relieved of the burden by having all the eggs collected. And one or more slightly perverted cows that enjoy being milked. I also don’t see why the calf has to be taken away: just let the calf finish milking and collect what’s left. The calf will gradually be weaned, leaving more and more milk for the farmer. Probably a really expensive way to do things but I can pay and would, if I could find it.
Then, of course, there are the ethics of vegetable based foods. Factory farming of grains and vegetables is probably actually more humane in that it involves exploiting fewer humans (with economy of scale you can use more industrial level farm equipment for example). On the other hand, there are problems of monoculture and deforestation, so it’s not that simple. I probably don’t know enough to even try to really eat vegetables ethically.
Finally, I’m going to probably start a fight with this statement, but I don’t see a problem with genetically altered food except that Monsanto is a bunch of idiots that aren’t doing it well. It’s not like people haven’t induced mutation with radiation and otherwise messed with the genes of plants for many years already.
Neil #10: It gets worse, in that battery chickens actually have a lower carbon footprint than free-range chickens, for the same reason they’re cheaper. So buying free-range chicken involves prioritising animal welfare over environmental concerns. Not that I’m saying it’s wrong in this case – just something to think about.
Dianne, as a biologist I’m with you on GMO foods. People can’t seem to separate the science of GMO (which has great potential to feed hungry people and reduce the environmental impact of farming) with the business practices of agribusiness (which take food out of the mouths of hungry people, and don’t give a damn about the environmental impact of farming). People think that GMOs are the same as monoculture, industrial farming, and oppression of indigenous people, but they’re not. They just often show up in the same places.
Honestly, that this is omitted doesn’t surprise me in the slightest – for most places promoting a vegan/vegetarian diet, ideology takes precedence over facts, and they’re only making an issue of environmental impact because it’s convenient to their cause in the first place.
The *real* problem isn’t that people are eating meat. The *real* problem is that 6,500,000,000 of us want to eat meat, drive, etc. The biggest step anyone can take for the environment, far and above any lifestyle change, is a vasectomy or tubal ligation.
formerlyLarry – technically, megafauna have no real impact on carbon balance, or have a positive one, because in order to exist they require enough habitat and vegetation to fix all the carbon that they eat.
I actually kinda agree with Jake and co. GMOS can be potentially good except Monsanto’sa bunch of assholes who patent seeds and make third world farmers depend on equipment-there’s this for instance:
http://rpi-fff.blogspot.com/2010/04/social-implications-of-green-revolution.html
So buying free-range chicken involves prioritising animal welfare over environmental concerns.
My guess, having not seen the numbers at all, is that the difference is fairly small compared to the total impact of humans on the environment. Maybe once we’ve gotten rid of SUVs, figured out a way to fly planes on electricity, get all or most of our electricity through low carbon sources, etc we can worry about the impact of free range chickens, but is it really big enough to worry about now? (I could, of course, be entirely wrong about the impact…feel free to say so…especially with numbers to back it up.)
I’m also fine with GMOs in principle, just not okay with Monsanto, et al, in practice.
re: free range vs. factory farming in terms of carbon footprint, I wouldn’t just wave it away, given that a lot of people think the way we get our food is a major contributor to global warming, but I also think you need to consider the issue of quantity. If you eat as much free-range chicken as you would factory-farmed chicken, probably the net impact on the climate is larger. But if you’re reducing your total meat consumption and choosing free range when you do eat meat, you probably could still reduce your net impact. I don’t know exactly where the tipping point is – once a week? once a month? – but it’s out there.
Mokele @15, this may come across as hostile and it absolutely isn’t meant as such, but actually the best thing one can do for the environment is to stop living. Not having offspring certainly avoids adding more people to the world, but if I jump off a bridge, I am reducing my carbon footprint to zero, forever. (That said, I applaud the fact that you’re not making the silly argument that it’s perfectly OK to have biological offspring as long as you only have one or two.)
SeanH @13, I’m not following how battery chickens are cheaper than free-range. They’re cheaper because they require less space, certainly.
I lack the willpower to become a vegetarian
Well you lack the “willpower” for a weight loss diet too, so what do you expect?
Mythago #19: They’re also cheaper because they take less energy to produce. Embarrassingly, I can’t find the data right now – it was in the G2 section of the Guardian, where they’d found that, pound for pound, battery chicken had the lowest carbon footprint of any meat. I recall it being significantly lower than free-range chicken, but I might be wrong about that. And of course nobody has any reason to take me at my word when I can’t show the data, so my claims should probably be disregarded unless someone else has similar numbers.
B. Adu–can you, um… I assume that’s not a shot at his weight, but my brain is failing me. What did you mean? Am I sarcasm fail?
Anyway, if it was a shot at his weight, please don’t, kthx, and if it wasn’t then I apologize for bothering you.
SeanH @21, if you find the data I’d be interested to see it – I’m wondering how that translates to smaller operations.
Here’s an article. The difference isn’t huge, until you get to organic chicken.
I haven’t hunted up the actual research.
I’d guess that smaller operations are worse in terms of carbon footprint, since there is likely to be more fixed overhead per chicken.
On the other hand, factory chicken is probably worse from an environmental justice and local environmental effects perspective, as well as the animal cruelty perspective.
mythago,
I don’t think it is accurate that suicide is the most effective method of decreasing one’s carbon footprint. The most effective way of decreasing your carbon footprint is to convince other people to reduce their carbon footprint or to develop technology to help people reduce their carbon footprint. If you kill yourself, you reduce the total human carbon footprint by a few billionths or so (assuming you are an average American), but if you convince a hundred other people to reduce their carbon footprints by 5%, you achieve 20 times as much reduction. It is sort of like voting. Your single vote is effectively worthless, but if you convince a hundred other people to vote, that is worth a little, and if you convince a hundred other people to each convince a hundred people to vote, you start to have an effect. Dieing is like a single vote. Activism is where the real effectiveness is.
True effectiveness, then, would seem to come from mass homicide. Kill yourself, save the planet for a moment…kill all your neighbors, save the planet for a day.
True effectiveness, then, would seem to come from mass homicide.
But really efficient homicide would cause extinction, which is kind of anti-environmentalist too. Probably better to stick to recycling.
Why is it anti-environmentalist? If the measure of true environmentalism is reducing humans’ carbon footprint(s), then Robert is right. Convincing people to recycle doesn’t stop my use of oxygen, food, water, sewage systems – while being dead reduces those to zero for each person who dies.
I’m not really advocating mass suicide/homicide as much as questioning the idea that morality and size of carbon footprint are directly correlated. I especially have trouble with this idea in the context of a world where certain people – like, say, women – are encouraged to take up as little space and create as little burden on anyone else as possible. I’m hardly the first or brightest feminist to notice that a lot of the burden of ‘saving the earth’ gets dumped on women – wash diapers! eat less! stop breeding, you cows!
Well, since from a human centric perspective one of the major reasons to reduce one’s carbon footprint is to decrease the amount of human suffering and death that will result from another century of run-away CO2 production and the resulting global warming, killing billions of people to cut CO2 production in half seems like a piss-poor solution.
From an extinction event perspective, killing off all humanity would certainly be a net gain (if all humans dropped dead tomorrow, the number of species driven into extinction over the next century would certainly be lower than the number of extinctions under even an ideal shift to a net 0 CO2 economy and a stable land use situation). But since an extinction event is only a bad thing from a particular human perspective, there would be nothing around that would take satisfaction in the extinction event ending. And, of course, the extinction event perspective does not trump the other moral concerns with killing off all of humanity.
However, reducing the total human carbon footprint is a rather major moral concern if you are willing to extend your moral perspective to a long enough window. The amount of human suffering that global warming can be expected to cause over the next century or two is quite substantial. If it can be prevented by relatively minor human suffering (at the “eat less red meat” level of suffering), that seems like a decent trade. Of course, the “eat less red meat solution” is relatively minor compared to the “switch all of our power sources away from fossil fuels” solution particularly since the problem with red meat is that it uses lots of fossil fuel derived energy, so if you fix the fossil fuel problem you fix the (global warming related) red meat problem.
@ Mandolin,
Am I sarcasm fail?
Yep.
Sorry.
Well said, Charles.