Photographs by Bullit Marquez/AP (left) and Chris Pizzello/AP (right)
Indeed, the environmental concerns surrounding meat have helped make it the new nexus for a host of increasingly popular social concerns—food, culture, politics and the environment. The idea of channelling meat’s deepening carbon footprint into potent political rhetoric came to Tobias Leenaert, a long-time animal rights activist in Ghent, a few years ago. As a member of the Ethical Vegetarian Alternative, he had helped launch a pro-vegetarian campaign in 2000 that met with limited success. Then, in 2007, his group started looking for a campaign message with “a bigger scope, an idea that was more approachable”—in other words, a collective face more agreeable than that of the dogmatic vegan preaching against the suffering of animals or the perils of saturated fat.
The group hit upon the flourishing environmental movement and growing fears about climate change as a nifty marketing gambit. The new message made it “easier to get a lot of partners involved,” says Leenaert. “We wouldn’t have been able to get the city’s support if we just had a go-vegetarian message.” Now he hopes to convince even more of his neighbours by making the eating of animal flesh as embarrassing as owning a Hummer. “Just as driving an SUV to the bakery around the corner is sort of shameful,” he says. “We need the same thing with meat.”
When McCartney launched his Meat Free Monday campaign last June, it was “Livestock’s long shadow,” the UN report, that he referred to, saying: “We thought cars were the villain of the piece, but it appears livestock produces more.” Trust a pop-song virtuoso to boil an issue down to its snappy essence—“Less meat equals less heat” is as easy on the ears as beep beep’m beep beep yeah, yet it has broad backing from climate change scientists, who argue that meat, apart from presenting such risks as heart disease, obesity and E. coli, is a wasteful luxury. “It’s just a matter of feed conversion efficiencies—we’re going to feed 10 times as much grain to cattle to get a kilogram of meat compared to if we just ate that grain ourselves,” says Nathan Pelletier, an ecological economist at Dalhousie University and a leading expert in the environmental impacts of food. “It’s the basic math of animal physiology.”
Then there are the emissions stemming from the methane burps of cattle and other ruminants, and the fertilizer laid out over fields of feed, not to mention the clear-cutting wrought by the demand for pasture. Estimates of the greenhouse gases associated with different meat products vary, but beef is undoubtedly king—between 13 and 30 kg of CO2 equivalent per kg of beef, says Pelletier. That’s followed by pork, with estimates ranging from 2.3 to 6.5 kg of CO2, then chicken, which ranges from 1.5 to three kilograms, roughly the same as the emissions associated with some food crops. The environmental impacts of fish are more complex and vary enormously according to species; one University of Chicago study even suggests that fish and red meat are almost equally energy inefficient.
Though some argue that entirely grass-fed organic cattle—animals not fattened up with grain or corn on massive feedlots—generate less greenhouse gases because no energy is expended in producing synthetic fertilizer and growing feed, there’s no clear consensus. On the one hand, cattle tend to be raised on grasslands ill-suited to food crops and, in their foraging, actually help pasture lands sequester carbon. On the other, they have a tough time extracting all the goodness available to them from hard-to-digest grass—hence their four stomachs—and on that diet generate even more methane, a greenhouse gas 20 times more potent than CO2.
Questions around the sustainability of meat are particularly pressing given the global rise in meat consumption in recent years. Consumption around the world has quintupled in the past 50 years and is set to double by 2050, according to the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization. Sixty years ago, producers generated around 18 kg of meat per person; by 1994, production had jumped to a staggering 35.4 kg per person. In 2008, the most recent Statistics Canada numbers available, Canadians ate just over 100 kg of red meat, fish and chicken per person, more than a quarter of a kilo a day.
Trends in developing nations like India and China, where ballooning middle classes are boosting appetites for animal protein, suggest things will only get worse. Demand in China doubled between 1990 and 2005 and continues to rise with galloping intensity. As that demand grows, so do the ominous forecasts. “If you look at the impact on the planet of today’s levels of meat consumption, it becomes absolutely clear—there’s no way that we can continue to eat meat at the rate we do or that developing nations are going to be able to satisfy their growing demand,” says David Boyd, author, along with David Suzuki, of David Suzuki’s Green Guide.
These realities are creeping into policy discussions around the world. A tax on meat that would reflect its carbon output has been discussed in the Swedish parliament, and by the influential British economist Lord Stern. Princeton bioethicist Peter Singer, writing in New York’s Daily News in October, proposed a 50 per cent tax on meat and compared it to tobacco, going so far as to argue that “the reasons for a tax on beef and other meats are stronger than those for discouraging consumption of cigarettes, trans fats or sugary drinks” because of meat’s triple whammy impacts on health, the environment and animal welfare. Last year in the U.K., farmers feared Environment Secretary Hilary Benn—a vegetarian known derisively in the British press as Veggie Benn—would produce a policy document encouraging British families to drop red meat from their diets. (Instead, Benn said only that British consumers should choose less environmentally impactful foods, and encouraged food brands to participate in a voluntary “green” labelling program.)
