The Washington Post published a provocative essay on Sunday that makes the case that hamburgers are the least patriotic food you could eat on the Fourth of July.
"Why your hamburger hates America" looks at the unsavory reality behind the production of hamburger meat and buns, as well as traditional burger garnishes--tomatoes, onions and lettuce. When it comes to the beef itself, author Tracie McMillan points out that just four corporations control more than 85 percent of the meatpacking business. That means it's more likely that cattle are treated inhumanely, workers are treated inhumanely, food safety is given short shrift, and small ranchers are being driven out of business.
It's not a pretty picture, but it's even worse than that. McMillan left out two other major downsides to eating burgers: They're a threat to public health and the future of the planet.
A report released last week by the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS), "Grade A Choice: Solutions for Deforestation-Free Meat," found that Americans would improve their health and protect the climate if they replaced beef with poultry or pork--or just ate less meat altogether.
"We have a big beef with beef," says Doug Boucher, director of UCS's Tropical Forest and Climate Initiative and a co-author of the report. "The more beef Americans eat, the worse global warming gets."
By now, most Americans are aware of the health risks posed by eating beef. It's been linked to a number of potentially life-threatening problems, including coronary heart disease and breast, colon and prostate cancer. But most hamburger, steak and brisket lovers are likely unaware of the environmental problems caused by beef production.
Beef is what scientists would call an "inefficient protein," Boucher explains. It requires substantial resources to produce compared with what it contributes to the human diet. The report found that beef production uses about 60 percent of the world's agricultural land, for example, but produces less than 5 percent of the protein and less than 2 percent of the calories that feed the global population.
Cattle ranching requires huge tracts of land. In Brazil--the biggest net exporter of meat in the world--and other Latin American countries, ranchers clear-cut tropical forests to provide pasture land for their herds. This contributes to global warming in two ways. First, when ranchers cut down trees, much of the carbon they store goes into the atmosphere. Second, grazing cattle produce methane--a powerful gas that has nearly 25 times the warming effect of carbon dioxide--which is released from their stomachs and manure.
Tropical deforestation is responsible for about 15 percent of the world's heat-trapping emissions--more carbon pollution than the emissions from every car, truck, plane, ship and train around the world. As demand for beef goes up worldwide, so too does deforestation.
There are no tropical forests here in the United States, but we can play a role to protect them. If Americans curbed their beef consumption, it would help cut global demand. That, in turn, would lower beef prices, reducing the incentives to cut down forests for cattle pasture land. Lowering demand also could help cut production here at home, where beef cattle--which are mainly fattened in feedlots--account for more than a third of all U.S. agricultural heat-trapping emissions.
"There are a lot of tasty alternatives to beef hamburgers, not only on the Fourth of July, but all year 'round," says Boucher. "Why not try spare ribs, pulled pork sandwiches, turkey burgers or chicken kebabs?"
Although it may seem more Italian than American, pasta would be an even better choice, according to "Cooler Smarter: Practical Steps for Low-Carbon Living," a book published by UCS earlier this year. The book found that producing one pound of beef emits as much global warming pollution as producing 18 pounds of pasta.
Given that every American eats on average some 270 pounds of meat a year--nearly four times the global average--any reduction in U.S. meat consumption would be helpful--and more healthful.
"If we want fewer cancers, less heart disease, more forests, and less global warming," says Boucher, "we should eat less beef."
Elliott Negin is the director of news and commentary at the Union of Concerned Scientists.
Michael G. Long: Jackie Robinson on the 4th: The Prophet and the Flag
From 1990 to 2010, emissions from enteric fermentation have increased by 5.6 percent."
http://www.epa.gov/climatechange/Downloads/ghgemissions/US-GHG-Inventory-2012-Chapter-6-Agriculture.pdf
In reality, it's actually obvious that many of the commenters here simply disagree with some of its findings. And it is pretty obvious that many of those commenters know a whole ot about agriculture. And it is pretty obvious that that goal of the UCS, which Elliott Negin stated below, to drive down beef prices and drive up demand for industrial pork and chicken, could have disastrous effects for both farmers and the environment.
The report also states, as a number of people commenting here have pointed out:
"Despite the greater land use needed to eat higher on the food chain, there are bene ts to meat consumption. First, meat is higher in protein than most plants, so you do not need to eat
as much to get the amount of protein necessary for a healthy diet. Second, livestock often eat things that humans cannot (or do not) directly consume: cattle eat grass, poultry eat insects (as
well as grains and fruits), and pigs will eat just about anything. ¬is allows us to produce food from land and resources that would otherwise be unusable. Cattle, for instance, are able to gain sustenance from large areas of rangeland in arid regions that are not suitable for crop production. Further, livestock o er a store of wealth and a form of food security in regions
where crop production is inconsistent (Herrero et al. 2009)."
Do you disagree with this part of the report, or only the parts that seem to identify beef as the root of all evil?
My criticism begin with your reiteration of the CW that "beef is bad for you". Based on my own study of the data, this is untrue. I'm aware of the "China Study", Ancel Key's work, and our government's wise dietary recommendations, but I'm sure that a man of your resources is also aware of the many studies, current and historical, which refute red meat and saturated fat as one of the chief causes of obesity, heart disease, and various cancers. Instead, the evidence seems to point increasingly to diets excessively rich in carbohydrates, especially those from refined flour and sugar.
I realize that the health aspect of beef is not the main thrust of your article, but when you make such unequivocal and clearly biased statements, the credibility of your article's main content, and that of the organization you work for, suffers. I have not yet studied the effects of industrial beef production on climate change, but from responses here, it seems there is a wealth of other data available on the subject than what is cited in the UCS Report.
I wish that communicators such as yourself, and the scientists you work with, would use less biased rhetoric and more evidence-based argumentation to get their message across. That would truly serve the public interest, change the tone of the discourse, and might even help to convince some people of your position's validity.
Risks: More Red Meat, More Mortality
NY Times, 3/12/12
Eating red meat is associated with a sharply increased risk of death from cancer and heart disease, according to a new study, and the more of it you eat, the greater the risk.
The analysis, published online Monday in Archives of Internal Medicine, used data from two studies that involved 121,342 men and women who filled out questionnaires about health and diet from 1980 through 2006. There were 23,926 deaths in the group, including 5,910 from cardiovascular disease and 9,464 from cancer.
People who ate more red meat were less physically active and more likely to smoke and had a higher body mass index.... Still, after controlling for those and other variables, [researchers] found that each daily increase of three ounces of red meat was associated with a 12 percent greater risk of dying over all, including a 16 percent greater risk of cardiovascular death and a 10 percent greater risk of cancer death.
The increased risks linked to processed meat, like bacon, were even greater: 20 percent over all, 21 percent for cardiovascular disease and 16 percent for cancer.
If people in the study had eaten half as much meat...deaths in the group would have declined 9.3 percent in men and 7.6 percent in women.
Previous studies have linked red meat consumption and mortality, but the new results suggest a surprisingly strong link.
Here is Zoe Harcombe's original article on the study, followed by the e-mail exchange with Frank Hu.
http://www.zoeharcombe.com/2012/03/red-meat-mortality-the-usual-bad-science/
http://www.zoeharcombe.com/2012/04/red-meat-mortality-the-usual-bad-science-part-2/
Logging operations are what allow farmers to move in. The land is cleared and roads provided. The loggers move on, the cattle move in. If they stop raising cattle, what makes anyone think they won't start raising something else they can sell?
Buy grass fed and finished beef to avoid CAFO beef and encourage smaller farmers to continue and flourish. Some beef is good for you and while it is fine to cut back to a reasonable level, taking beef off the plate entirely just creates a new set of problems.
(See how there just isn't a magic bullet solution?)
As for your argument about what is driving deforestation, logging is a factor, but cattle production is the main driver, at least in Brazil, according to Rhett Butler at Mongobay.com:
"Cattle ranching is the leading cause of deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon. This has been the case since at least the 1970s: government figures attributed 38 percent of deforestation from 1966-1975 to large-scale cattle ranching. Today the figure is closer to 60 percent, according to research by Brazil's National Institute for Space Research (INPE) and its Agricultural Research Corporation (Embrapa). Most of the beef is destined for urban markets, whereas leather and other cattle products are primarily for export markets.
"Brazil is today the world's largest exporter and producer of beef. Much of its expansion has taken place in the Amazon, which currently has more than 80 million head of cattle, up from 26.6 million in 1990 and equivalent to more than 85 percent of the total U.S. herd. The Brazilian Amazon has more than 214,000 square miles of pasture, an open space larger than France."
For more information, see: http://www.mongabay.com/brazil.html
agricultural land were developed in the global tropics, and 55 percent of this land came from intact forests (Gibbs et al. 2010). A further 28 percent came from previously disturbed forests (Gibbs et al. 2010). In the Latin American tropics, that new agricultural land was overwhelmingly turned into cattle pasture—about 42 million hectares, versus only about 7 million hectares of cropland. In the Amazon basin of Brazil, the largest
tropical-forest country, more than 75 percent of the deforested land had been turned into pasture by 2007 (May and Millikan 2010; Bustamante, Nobre, and Smeraldi 2009)."
http://www.fao.org/docrep/015/an894e/an894e00.pdf
And here was a summary of it that was recently featured on the HP:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-lawrence/feeding-the-world-rio20-conference_b_1610340.html?utm_hp_ref=food#comments
Mr. Negin's discussion of the UCS's report and the links to it are valuable additions to the discussion that has been well under way.
This is perhaps one of the biggest misunderstandings people have about farming ecology. In a desire to get rid of the cow, they want to substitute plants that require tillage. No long-term example exists in which tillage is sustainable. It always requires injection of biomass from outside the system or a soil-development pasture cycle. To think that plants which require tillage can build soil like perennial pasture indicates environmental absurdity."
--Joel Salatin
,
No reason to snigger at me with your lecture. When I see a 400 plus person, I worry about their state of mind and diet. You fail with your lecture for obtaining good cuts, obviously some do not a have the choice or could afford.
Try to be polite to a poster next time, run along now...
"...some of the media and blog coverage of these studies would have you believe that scientists had given a green light to eating bacon, butter, and cheese. But that’s an oversimplified and erroneous interpretation. Read the study and subsequent studies more closely, and the message is more nuanced: Cutting back on saturated fat can be good for health if people replace saturated fat with good fats, especially, polyunsaturated fats. Eating good fats in place of saturated fat lowers the 'bad' LDL cholesterol, and it improves the ratio of total cholesterol to 'good' HDL cholesterol, lowering the risk of heart disease. Eating good fats in place of saturated fat can also help prevent insulin resistance, a precursor to diabetes."
http://www.hsph.harvard.edu/nutritionsource/what-should-you-eat/fats-full-story/
In reality, the vast majority of GHG's from beef production are attributed to land use changes that don't even apply to beef production in North America! So much for the patriotic argument.
And in reality, the vast majority of "agricultural land" being used for beef production is not well suited for any other purpose. Cows turn inedible grasses, often on land that isn't even arable, into food. Amazing that the above report is either oblivious of that, or is shamefully misleading people.
There are very real problems with manure lagoons, but the enteric emissions argument (methane from cow farts) has been thoroughly debunked over and over again. Climate change only applies to new sources of GHG's. There are roughly the same amount of ruminants now as there were long before the advent of animal agriculture, so the enteric emissions argument is easily falsifiable bunk. As Eliot Coleman and others have pointed out, it is nonsense. If you want to look at new sources of methane, you should probably look at rice production, a far more significant source.
Cattle grazing on public lands decimates native vegetation, destroys wildlife habitat including vital riparian areas .
And yes I have gone to a no beef diet and the improvement in my health is quite noticeable, before you dismiss it, try two weeks no beef for yourself.
You're thinking of monocrops. Modern wheat, corn, soy, and rice are having a vastly more profound negative effect on the environment.
And no, amazingly enough, I don't work for the American Cattleman's Association. I'll respect you enough not to accuse you of working for Monsanto.
http://www.soilcarbon.com.au/case_studies/pdf/08TL_SCCPPP_En.pdf
Beef production uses more agricultural land than all other food sources combined.
* Nearly 60 percent of the world's agricultural land is used for beef production, yet beef accounts for less than 2 percent of the world's calories.
* Beef makes up about 24 percent of the world's meat consumption, yet requires 30 million square kilometers (11.6 million square miles) of land to produce. Poultry (34 percent of global meat consumption) and pork (40 percent) each use less than 2 million square kilometers (772,000 square miles) of land.
* Beef production is an inefficient use of food resources. Chickens need to consume 2 kilograms of grain to produce 1 kilogram of meat. Pigs need 4 kilograms. For beef cattle the ratio is 10 to 1.
Livestock production has global impacts.
* Tropical deforestation is responsible for about 15 percent of the world's global warming emissions and adversely affects the planet's biodiversity.
* The expansion of meat production, epecially beef, has been a major driver of deforestation over the last 20 years, responsible for about 45 percent of the heat-trapping gases produced by deforestation.
* Cows produce extensive amounts of methane during the digestive process, a potent heat-trapping gas that exits the cow from both ends and causes about 23 times as much global warming per molecule as carbon dioxide. Large amounts of manure are also a leading cause of water pollution.
*Again, if you understood what rangeland is, you would know how laughably ridiculous it is to compare the acreage used in beef production to the land used for pork and chicken. Have you ever taken a drive through the country and noticed the cows grazing on the hills as you drive by?
*Beef requires no grain at all. The side products of grain production, such as defatted meal and silage, are often used for feed. There is certainly lots of room for improvement in how we produce beef.
All agriculture, plant and animal, has global impacts. Beef production can actually increase soil vitality, increase organic matter in the soil, increase biodiversity (particularly native pollinator habitat), increase soil structure, increase soil retention and water tables, and sequester carbon. Plant ag, all plant ag, operates at a deficit.
*So don't by beef from the tropics. And by the way, the 15% figure is simply not true. It comes from a number of basic errors, including ascribing all land use change in the tropics to beef production, when in fact logging and shift cultivators are both responsible for more than beef production, which usually comes after.
*Again, that isn't true.
The enteric emissions argument has been thoroughly debunked over and over again. It is easily falsifiable bunk. Climate change only applies to new GHG's. The number of ruminants now is roughly the same as it was long before the advent of animal agriculture, so your argument is blatantly false. If you want to look at new sourcers of methane, look at rice production.
"World ruminant numbers are still increasing after a temporary pause in the late 1990’s. This temporary pause is most likely a result of a turn down in the wool industry and subsequent reductions in wool sheep flocks around the world (Figure 2). For the time period 1979 to 1999 the large ruminant equivalent population increased at the rate of 9.15 million head/year but since 1999 the growth rate has increased to 16.96 million head/year. / In the global balance of methane, ruminants accounted for 15.7% of global and 25.7% of anthropogenic methane production."
http://www.news.ucdavis.edu/search/news_detail.lasso?id=9336
http://www-naweb.iaea.org/nafa/aph/stories/2008-atmospheric-methane.html
This is why me, and many other Americans (and people in general) are not as excited or concerned with the global warming movement.
You lecture us like little children with doom and gloom apocalyptic rhetoric and expect us to fall in line and worship your suggestions as though they are gospel.
What you should be doing is working on better ways to produce beef; ways that don't feed the corporate machine (and the resultant inhumane treatment of the labor force), ways that don't endanger our natural environments and habitats. If you did, I'd be right there willing to help.
We eat beef. That's never going to change. And all your bitter words will not serve to lead us to your cause. You will only further alienate us unless you offer better solutions.
There are no "bitter words" in my blog. And Boucher's report does offer better solutions: Eat less meat, especially beef.
Declining is not a complete cessation. As long as one person eats beef, my assertion carries weight. I know for a fact that I will continue to eat beef, as will many, many others I know.
And how convenient that you ignore the terrible conditions under which chickens are raised in corporate farms/chicken hatcheries.
I don't need people to tell me to eat less meat. I know how much is good for me, and how much exercise is needed to counter the beef I do consume.