View Full Version : Skip the cheeseburger, save the planet
Studies show (http://www.salon.com/2014/07/21/giving_up_beef_can_do_more_to_save_the_planet_than _giving_up_cars/) you may be doing more damage to the planet by eating beef than by driving.
My take is that eating cheeseburgers does nothing to the planet, although killing off all the cows may decrease the environmental impact. Of course, if that is our goal, killing off all the people would have the biggest impact. I vote we keep our cheeseburgers and our neighbors.
I just had a great burger for lunch.
The cow was raised 1/4 mile down the road from me, eating almost entirely grass from land here suitable mostly for pasture. It was slaughtered and processed right on-site by our USDA-inspected mobile meat-processing facility, the first such in the nation.
So, while eating factory-raised corn-fed beef that gets shipped across the country may indeed be a bad idea all around, if you eat local you may find yourself on the positive side of the equation. The land my beef was raised on isn't suitable for much else, the cost of raising and processing the animal was minimal, the transportation costs were non-existent, and keeping that land in active agricultural use by raising and distributing local food products from it saves it from being cut up into 5 acre hobby farms for the part-time/vacation/trophy-home crowd, which would increase the amount of impervious surface, reduce the quality of our wetlands, further stress our aquifers, etc. etc.
So, beef is what's for dinner too.
ApatheticNoMore
7-22-14, 4:52pm
I don't eat meat unless it's grass fed either, I really don't. Often it's from California, though not always Southern California, though there is grass fed meat that could be had in Southern Califiornia as well if it would be better if I only got that meat. Red meat maybe once a week. I usualy don't even bother to eat poultry very often at all as I don't much like it. And yes I eat fish maybe 2-3 times a week like they say - even though I worry about the contaminants and only buy fish that aren't endangered. Whether that red meat has too high a carbon impact I have no idea!!! I do have to wonder if getting people to switch to chicken (often raised in unbelievably horrible conditions) or fish (much of it WAY overfished by this point) will really help anything.
I find myself at the supermarket recently agonizing "fish species that is less sustainable that I'd prefer", "fish species that is sustainable". Back and forth .... I'm all lost in the supermarket, I can no longer shop happily .... Well you know I got the more sustainable fish. But I had a burger this week as well (grass fed meat from northern CA).
I am reading a book now called Untamed about a woman who eats primarily road kill. Imagine all the meat that goes to waste there.
I will ONLY eat meat that I get from Charlie. Charlie owns a small cattle farm about 10 miles away. He has introduced me to his cows by name and he sells the meat at farm markets. If I don't buy from Charlie, or from our local poultry farm, I don't eat meat at all. I will not by grassfed beef that gets flown to us from Australia or Argentina.
ANM, I hear you with regard to fish. I love sushi and DH and I go to an inexpensive sushi house every Saturday night. But I recently read that when you get a plate of sushi, you should imagine the entire table filled with the fish that were killed just to get the little pieces of sushi on your plate.
I try to keep on top of what fish is environmentally sound vs. what is not, but it's hard to keep up with.
ETA: The article in the OP suggests cutting down--not giving up. Can't we just eat a little less meat? Just like we spend a little less money, or eat a little less ice cream. Not a revolutionary concept.
Studies show you may be doing harm to the planet by eating kale (http://huntgatherlove.com/content/just-kale-me-how-your-kale-habit-slowly-destroying-your-health-and-world).
Studies show you may be doing harm to the planet by eating kale (http://huntgatherlove.com/content/just-kale-me-how-your-kale-habit-slowly-destroying-your-health-and-world).
Silly article making a spoof of health claims using kale as the subject created some satirical humour.
So, then, that link is not really relevant to this thread.
We humans are very good at making up excuses and other types of rationalizations regarding the harm attributable to choices we make. That doesn't actually relieve us of obligations to act in a responsible manner as a citizen of the world. By the same token, no one is expected to solve the world's problems alone and in the absolute. Rather, being responsible means, first, admitting our impact, and accepting our responsibility for taking steps to mitigate some of that impact. A business owner, for example, who capitalizes on our society's structures that unfairly facilitate lower cost of labor, isn't absolved of the impact those structures cause, but isn't unilaterally responsible for the impact, and therefore isn't expected to take absolute measures to mitigate the impact but rather just reasonable measures, including supporting (i.e., more than just not obstructing) changing of those structures so that they are more just.
I am reading a book now called Untamed about a woman who eats primarily road kill. Imagine all the meat that goes to waste there.
Blechhhhhhh!!!!
My take is that eating cheeseburgers does nothing to the planet, although killing off all the cows may decrease the environmental impact. Of course, if that is our goal, killing off all the people would have the biggest impact. I vote we keep our cheeseburgers and our neighbors.
Let me see if I understand your argument:
Having fewer cows would reduce environmental degradation and pour less carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, thereby slowing global warming.
Exterminating the entire human race would reduce environmental degradation and pour less carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, thereby slowing global warming.
Therefore, suggesting we have fewer cows is comparable to suggesting we exterminate the entire human race.
Hard to argue with that.
Hard to argue with that.Or rather, pointless to argue with that. :)
Its more about how a herd is managed than the impact at the consumer (cheeseburger) end. If your burger comes from a cow that lived in a concentrated feedlot with 100,000 of her closest friends then yes, you are a destroyer of planets. If, OTOH, Bossy ate perennial grass, was rotated from pasture to pasture, turned over a little rich soil with her hooves while she deposited some fertilizer and lived that good life within an hour or so of your grill then you should savor every bite of that burger. I like mine with lettuce and tomato, Hinze 57 and french fried potato...
I imagine the article is based on the assumption that the beef in question is feed lot beef. By one article I ran across, only .005 percent of the total U.S. beef industry is grass-fed, the remainder being feedlot cattle. http://grist.org/food/upping-the-steaks-how-grass-fed-beef-is-reshaping-ag-and-helping-the-planet/
I pay one and a half or two times the prices for grass-fed beef here in the city without any rural connections. On a recent visit to Vermont, I noticed that a lot of the eateries promoted grass-fed beef on their menu, and at reasonable prices. I have never seen that in my area. Vermont is a different sort of place in many respects, but I suppose also has a more rural economy.
I am continually impressed with the fact that all that corn in the vast grain belt of the mid-west really doesn't go directly to feed people, but goes mostly as animal feed and bio fuel, not to mention the empty nutrition of HFCS.
I've raised cows before. I don't see how it is possible to raise them, slaughter them, process them, and transport them to market and make any sort of profit for the prices I see "generic non-happy-cow" beef in the grocery store ads.
I have to think there's a lot of unhappy cows, subsidies, and negative externalities being foisted off on people to sell at that price.
Here's an amusing take on the issue:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2nk8-MqnHlw
Or rather, pointless to argue with that. :)
LOL, it's just following some branches of popular thought to their logical conclusion. http://www.nationalreview.com/article/383432/nyu-professor-wants-make-humans-greener-molly-wharton
Artificially induced meat aversion? Genetic embryo modifications to make people smaller? All for the good of the earth and it's environment of course. No Thanks!
Artificially induced meat aversion? Genetic embryo modifications to make people smaller? All for the good of the earth and it's environment of course. No Thanks!
So instead we have artificially induced meat itself and genetically modified feed that grows faster and better for all the livestock. Maybe at sometime people will warm to the idea of test tube meat that will take livestock out of the equation. It seems like if we all just started by eating real food raised humanely, and without government subsidies in the loop, we'd be better off health wise and maybe have a better planet, too.
I suspect if you took government subsidies out of feed corn and prohibited or discouraged GMOs and artificial hormones we would see the real market price of beef and then consumption would self regulate.
I think that is exactly right, Rogar. The corn subsidies are now beyond ridiculous. Where I was raised used to be a few million acres of grass and a few thousand of corn all of it along the small rivers in the area. Now the grass is being plowed up as fast as the machinery can be mobilized. I've heard there is about 15% of the historic average cattle herd on the grass that is left, but the rest is all corn. Huge farming operations, many owned by hedge funds, are buying anything they can get their hands on, turning the grass under, drilling wells right into the Ogallala aquifer and planting corn. Obviously they never read the stories of how the dust bowl got started (spoiler alert: history repeats itself). There are a lot of folks getting fantastically wealthy solely due to the subsidies. Its a total racket with no benefit whatsoever beyond the creation of so much paper wealth.
LOL, it's just following some branches of popular thought to their logical conclusion. http://www.nationalreview.com/article/383432/nyu-professor-wants-make-humans-greener-molly-wharton
Artificially induced meat aversion? Genetic embryo modifications to make people smaller? All for the good of the earth and it's environment of course. No Thanks!
Since you provided a link, I'll return the favor:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straw_man
The intern who wrote that article is to be congratulated: She's well on her way to becoming what passes for a deep thinker in conservative circles.
Yes, Yes!! I, am building a NEW Cadillac Escalade the same way! I am preparing to strip mine my land for iron ore, coal, copper, bauxite, chromium, lead, etc, and drill for oil to make fuel and plastics. I'm even planting rubber trees, too! I dammed up a stream to install a homemade hydroelectric plant, and built the shop buildings out of stone I quarried and trees I harvested and sawed into lumber. When I am through, I will have a vehicle I built, free of the costs connected with dependence on Foreign Oil and transporting materials long distance to my factory. See? I am saving the world, just like you and your home-made burgers! Thank Me.
You need to see this one: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_analogy
There's a difference between a flawed (really: "imperfect") analogy and a false analogy. All analogies are imperfect. (If they were perfect, they wouldn't be analogies.) A false analogy is one which varies from the parallels necessary for the expression to constitute an analogy, in the manner outlined in the linked entry.
My rule of thumb is if I'm not willing for someone to eat me, I won't eat someone. And I am on the side of saving the planet--I do see it that way.
Has anyone watched Cowspiracy? http://www.cowspiracy.com/ Some really good and revealing information in this movie. Things you might not have thought about yet regarding the raising of meat animals.
Other viewpoints:
http://www.amazon.com/Cows-Save-Planet-Improbable-Restoring/dp/1603584323
http://www.amazon.com/Meat-Benign-Extravagance-Simon-Fairlie/dp/1603583246/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1426126517&sr=1-1&keywords=meat+a+benign+extravagance
I may have pointed this out before: at the time that Europeans came to the USA, there were some 60 billion bison roaming the Great Plains. The soil, under permanent grass cover, was deep and dark and rich, and got deeper year by year. The national cattle herd of the USA today is around 32 million. So what went wrong? Capitalism and the strip-mining industrial mindset that took over farming! The Great Dust Bowl was caused by ploughing for human crops - CAFOs hadn't been dreamt of yet (or nightmared, depending on one's viewpoint). By that time, the rich prairie soils were already worn down. Jokesters placed their ploughs upside down on tne roofs of their barns, to ensure that their soil would be thoroughly worked before it hit the ocean. They were growing wheat and corn, the bulk of which was going to the growing markets of the East and Europe. So, if the corn and soy were ploughed under and the prairies returned to grasslands (above and beyond what's required for human food), the USA could support the national herd on grass alone. At the same time, the ecosystems would have a chance to recover, and the aquifers to replenish. Deer, wolves, coyotes, rabbits, dozens of species of birds, small mammals, reptiles, and insects would co-exist with the cattle.
Great Dust Bowl: http://www.history.com/topics/dust-bowl
Clearly, regardless of the evidence that either side brings, the other will hew to its own line. But it's good to keep in mind that this is not a bipolar situation. Those who don't want to eat meat don't have to, and they have just as stringent a personal responsibility to make food choices that will not further strain our planet as do those who choose to make meat and other animal source foods part of their diet.
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