13 minute read
Meat vs Climate
Agriculture, particularly with livestock, is taking the blame for playing a significant part in driving climate change and biodiversity loss around the planet. Could our global consumption of meat be the catalyst for environmental catastrophe, even our extinction? How could this be happening and what can be done? We have a big, meaty problem.
By Richard Forsyth
Half the world’s habitable land is used for agriculture. The concept of countryside for most of us, is not rich, thick ancient forests, it’s large expanses of connected level fields. Of this farmland, when talking about the planet, 77 percent is used for livestock, yet livestock only produces 18 percent of the world’s calories and 37 percent of all our protein. In short, compared to growing crops and vegetables, it dominates the allocated space to produce a lot less food. This uneven equation is not the only reason to worry about meat being a sustainable food source, with a growing population and the available land shrinking.
Planet killing cow burps
Livestock creates 14.5 percent of greenhouse gas from human-related emissions, according to the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation. Cows are responsible for two-thirds of that statistic. In fact, eating a couple of hamburgers a week for a year creates the equivalent amount of greenhouse gases as heating a home in the UK for 95 days.
It’s become common knowledge that whilst we are filling up fields with cows, the cows are filling up the air with unpleasant gases. Livestock farming produces methane and nitrous oxide. Methane comes from a process which sounds much nicer than it smells, enteric fermentation, and by methane we mean around 95 percent burps and five percent farts expelled from your cow-shaped meat.
Microbes in a cow’s stomach break down cattle feed into energy and protein, whilst expelling methane to the tune of between 70 and 120 kg from its orifices per year, equivalent to around 2,300 kg of CO2 a year – that’s about the weight of a car. Staying with a car analogy, this is the same as burning 1,000 litres of petrol. Times that by 1.5 billion cows and bulls and you’ve got a burpy, farty cloud of doom around the planet. It’s not just the cow’s wind, it’s also their eight gallons of gushing urine a day, which produces the nasty greenhouse gas nitrous oxide.
Changing ‘pee-haviour’
Researchers in New Zealand and Germany have tackled this problem by experimenting with potty training calves, and after just 45 minutes every other day for a few weeks, 11 out of 16 animals were trained to use a latrine they termed the MooLoo. The calves learned they would only receive a treat if they used the latrine whilst receiving a mild spray of water if they had mishaps. Cows have the intelligence of two-tofour-year-old children, perhaps for some, another strong incentive to eat more vegetables. Cows indoors create another problem. If your cows are in a barn, the urine and excrement mix up to create the air pollutant, ammonia. In a very literal way, but also for the environment, this can stink.
Seaweed to calm the tummy
In context, the biggest climate-killing bodily release is by far, the cow burps, so short of stopping cow farming, what can be done to calm those grumbly bovine stomachs. One solution suggested is to add a sprinkle of asparagopsis taxiformis, a red seaweed to the cow’s nosh,
which means cows burp 85 percent less methane, as well as needing less quantity of food. The only catch is a requirement to grow 200 million tonnes of this to feed all the cattle on the planet. There are efforts afoot to use a seed bank to alter the genetic makeup of this seaweed into a simpler form that’s quicker and easier to harvest.
A big issue with cattle, that you don’t have with crops, is that you need to feed them and use crops purely for that purpose. Dairy cattlefeed pellets can be made up from maize, barley, oat, soy, flax, seeds from legumes – broad bean and protein pea and dried beet pulp. The point is, we have to feed the food, using more of the valuable land to do so. Of course, cows are very big animals and require wide expanses or space and a lot of resources to sustain them. Therefore, say some problem solvers, why not just eat small animals? Fish and chicken, for example, don’t need the kind of land and infrastructure you need for cattle, or sheep for that matter.
Smoky bug burgers
Going even further with this idea, why not go really small and eat insects? If insects seem a disgusting option, you may be surprised to learn they may already be in your diet. The red dye used in ice cream, listed as cochineal dye is from female cochineal beetles which eat red berries and are seen as a source of natural red colouring. Then there is Shellac from the lac insect (a parasite of trees in Asia) used for shiny red coatings on sweets. What is being proposed by climate aware food producers, is that we farm and harvest insects for protein to replace our other meat products. If determined to eat meat in a more climate-friendly way or when other options are not available, it can make sense. Thailand, the largest producer of farmed insects revealed cricket farms produce half the CO2 of a chicken farm and uses 25 percent less water, whilst using far less land and generating less waste.
Ground-up crickets make a cricket powder that is high in protein, around 58 to 65 percent protein per insect and is comparable to skinless chicken in this respect. Cricket burgers are said to be a bit nutty and smoky in flavour. Cricket farming is not greatly established but food for crickets is usually similar to chicken feed with grains and flours. Biowaste is also being tested as cricket food, which could prove useful. Crickets convert feed into meat product more effectively too, with greater kgs meat product for equivalent feed, when compared to chickens. However, the fact still remains, you’re feeding your food, so it might be better to cut out the middleman (or middle cricket), and just have a bean burger to save time and the trouble of filling up another field to feed some bugs.
Veg and two veg
Governments around the world are not, yet at least, convinced that quotas on meat-eating should be set and the emphasis for any change is still on the consumer. Meat is a sizable one trillion dollar industry and significant economic driver, damaging it would be uncomfortable for many economies, especially the ones hacking down trees to accommodate new farmland.
For a large number of people, not eating meat is also either unappealing or unthinkable, meat being perceived as a necessary and tasty component of the human diet. Interestingly, and controversially, meat is not an essential part of the human diet. A grim statistic for meat-eaters is that around 45,000 deaths a year from heart disease,
cancer and strokes are linked to meat consumption. We can, today live without meat completely and remain healthy, even healthier, obviously depending on the way we eat different vegetables in combination, than when including meat in the food we choose. There is an abundance of protein and iron in the vegetable world and many substitute vegetablebased food products that have similar tastes and flavours to meat products. Today in wealthier economies, meat is very much a personal choice, no longer a necessary staple.
Frankenstein fillets
There is one other idea, one that is extraordinary but one that will inevitably be a menu and shopping list option soon and that is, clean meat. This is also known as cultured meat, it is meat that is grown in a lab, no hooves or horns necessary! It sounds bizarre and it is, but it means not raising and feeding an animal, cutting out cruelty and using less oil, water and land in the process. It is estimated that one-hundredth of the land is needed to make clean meat compared to farm animals.
The first clean meat burger was produced in 2013 and offered to foodie journalists in London. Gastronomic critics, Hanni Ruetzler and Josh Schonwald bit into the burger for a taste trial. Ruetzler described it as “close to meat, but not that juicy.” She added, “the consistency is perfect.” A lot has happened since then and a full range of meat products are being promised. Due to the level of control you can have in the creation, you can have less fat, and more omega-3 fatty acids. This could be the healthiest meat you could possibly eat. Author, Paul Shapiro, more recently reviewed the taste of clean foie gras in the Guardian newspaper, which was a meat made in a laboratory. He claimed it tasted “rich and buttery, savoury and decadent”. To be clear, this is still meat, just without animal suffering or draining on natural resources. Despite still being the beginning of the journey there are around 50 companies eager to make clean meat commercial any time now, in a sector that has so much potential, it will inevitably grow. The process involves extracting cells from an animal via a non-invasive biopsy and putting them in a cultivator, so the cells think they are inside
an animal. With a cocktail of ingredients including sugars, enzymes, salts, amino acids, growth factor proteins and more, the mix grows into muscle tissue, good enough to eat.
Extinction fates
As cattle proliferate around the globe, in contrast, natural wildlife is in sharp decline. The loss of species is currently estimated to between 1,000 and10,000 times higher than the natural extinction rate – a figure that has defined this era as the 6th mass extinction phase for Earth and unlike the other five, it’s clear our unstoppable expansion of agriculture, overexploitation of wildlife and destruction of natural habitats are what’s making it happen.
The Natural History Museum in the UK developed a tool they called The Biodiversity Trends Explorer which measured species abundance, species diversity and ecosystem health for starters. It enabled users to track modelled biodiversity changes since 2000 toward 2050 on global, national and regional levels. It provided a way to compare ecosystem biodiversity in different countries around the world. In short, they concluded in a press release in October 2021 that biodiversity loss had, as they put it so bluntly, ‘crashed through the safe limit for humanity.’
The demise of pollinators
As agricultural land is widely responsible for natural habitat destruction, this is a factor in killing off pollinating insects, along with pesticides and urban expansion. About a third of plants that flower rely on pollinators to seed and losing pollinating species would be devastating. That equates to tens of thousands of species. A 2021 study discovered that pollinating creatures like bees, butterflies and hummingbirds have been fast in decline during the previous six years around the world. Pollinator species which propagate over 75% of crops and plants are dying out, creating another threat to the world’s food security. To get a taste (or lose it) of what it would be like in a world without pollinators, here are some things we like on our weekly menu that need them to exist: apples, strawberries, blueberries, watermelon, almonds, avocados, coffee, sunflower oil, tomatoes, grapes, beets cauliflower, cabbage, broccoli, turnips, cherries, cucumbers, onions, grapefruit, pumpkins and Brussel’s sprout and there’s more. The natural world is under huge pressure from the way we exploit land available to us and in a paradoxical way, the more we need land for food, the quicker we exterminate environments and eco-systems that can give us food.
When it’s gone, we’re gone
Of course, with no sustainable environments and ecosystems to sustain them, the majority of natural animal life is under threat. In The Living Planet Report 2018, 16,704 populations of 4,005 vertebrate species were tracked, finding that global populations of mammals, birds, fish, reptiles, and amphibians have declined by 60 percent between 1970 and 2014, the most recent year with available data. For context, palaeontologists are clear that extinction events take around 10 million years to reboot and replenish life through evolution – and that is without humans in every corner. A burgeoning population will face a desolate world, without the chance of recovery for disappeared wildlife and without sustainable food supplies. It’s hard to imagine humans outliving an extinction era like the Devonian extinction, which occurred 251 million years ago and where 96% of species died out. One 2020 study in Scientific Reports, stated that if deforestation and consumption of resources continue at current rates, there could be a catastrophic collapse in human civilization and population in the next 20 to 40 years and the chances, according to this research, of our collective survival is less than 10 percent.
End of graze
The one paradox of the meat economy that stands out, for the future of food and its sustainable management, is the question of allocating diminishing resources. Around 77 billion land animals are slaughtered every year for food. What is hidden behind this figure is that it means 77 billion mouths to feed over each of their lifetimes, that aren’t ours. Just focusing on that number alone shows it is a huge number of processed creatures turned to products. For a disturbing context of scale, that is equivalent to roughly the same as every person on Earth, slaughtered every year, in an annual animal Armageddon.
The issues of pollution and land use from farmed land animals is overwhelmingly contributing to climate change. World leaders decided at the climate conference in 2021, COP26, that methane was a target gas to minimise. As ridiculous as it sounds, a world of burping cows might just be the tipping point for the worst-case environmental disaster we all dread to contemplate. The meat issue is in part helping veganism become the fastest growing food trend. For dedicated meat-eaters, vegan meals or vegetarian meals two or three times per week can be a positive ritual. Livestock based agriculture will need to adapt to dwindling land availability, making clean meat and insect-based products a solution for our future dinner options. We are certainly running out of time to address changes to consumer habits and supply chains. For a sustainable future, meat consumption and farming in its current form need to be addressed with urgency, however unpalatable that is for many of us.
