Foodie website Epicurious has declared it will no longer publish new recipes containing beef.
For anyone considering adopting a more sustainable way of cooking, cutting out beef was "a worthwhile first step", it said in an article on its website. And cutting out this one item could have a significant impact on making one's cooking more environmentally friendly, it added.
I see it as an anti-beef move which is ill-advised and misdirected.
In the article, Senior Editor Maggie Hoffman and former Digital Director David Tamarkin go on to say that "all ruminant animals (like sheep and goats) have significant environmental costs, and there are problems with chicken, seafood, soy, and almost every other ingredient".
But they remind their readers that "almost 15% of greenhouse gas emissions globally come from livestock (and everything involved in raising it); 61% of those emissions can be traced back to beef. Cows are 20 times less efficient to raise than beans and roughly three times less efficient than poultry and pork".
The duo added: "Our hope is that the more sustainable we make our coverage, the more sustainable American cooking will become".
I happen to believe that this position taken by Epicurious is misguided and wrong!
Detractors have been quick to implicate animal agriculture as being the culprit responsible for causing greenhouse gas emissions to rise. It’s an argument that’s gained a significant amount of traction, with more and more people adopting vegan diets in response to repeated reports – including from the United Nations – that livestock are a major contributor to the world’s environmental problems.
But while animal agriculture is by no means blameless in the global warming debate, it seems the industry’s impact on the environment is not as significant as critics suggest.
Air quality expert Frank Mitloehner (right), professor of animal science at UC Davis in California, says the real problem the livestock sector faces is convincing consumers and policy makers that animals aren’t the bad guys of the global warming challenge.
Critically, he says there should be an urgent rethinking of methane to acknowledge the true impact of livestock production on the planet – before the sector’s reputation is destroyed for good.
Livestock’s impact has been hugely overstated, while the major culprit – the use of fossil fuels, particularly for transportation – has largely been allowed to slip under the radar.
The issue is partly down to the methods used to calculate livestock’s impact: The UN’s most significant report, “Livestock’s Long Shadow”, claimed livestock are responsible for 18% of greenhouse gas emissions, but the figure calculated emissions along the entire supply chain, from land use to processing and refrigeration in supermarkets.
Meanwhile transportation figures, which are regularly reported as 28% of all greenhouse gas emissions, only factor in direct emissions from exhaust fumes, ignoring processes associated with manufacturing machinery, or moving people and produce.
But perhaps more significant, however, is the lack of understanding about the methane famously emitted in cows’ burps, and how it acts in the environment.
While methane is 28-times more heat-trapping than carbon dioxide, methane’s lifespan is just a decade, while CO2 – known as a long-life pollutant – remains in the atmosphere for 1000 years.
After ten years, methane is broken down in a process called hydroxyl oxidation into CO2, entering a carbon cycle which sees the gas absorbed by plants, converted into cellulose, and eaten by livestock.
The global methane budget shows that almost all of the methane produced each year – including the 188m tons from livestock – is broken down. Source: Global Carbon Project
To put that into context, each year 558m tons of methane is produced globally, with 188m tons coming from agriculture. Almost that entire quantity – 548m tons – is broken down through oxidation and absorbed by plants and soils as part of the sink effect.
That means that provided no new animals are added to the system, then the same amount of carbon dioxide produced by livestock is actually used by plants during photosynthesis.
“That’s not to say livestock has no impact on climate, but we are not adding additional warming”, Prof Mitloehner says.
It is noteworthy to mention that in the US, cattle numbers are decreasing thanks to increased production efficiencies and improved genetics – the beef herd has shrunk by about a third since 1975, while dairy cattle numbers have fallen from 25m to 9m in 70 years – methane production from livestock is actually decreasing.
“This discussion is the cornerstone of debunking all of this hype around why we should eat less animal-based protein”, he says.
“Never have we had smaller flocks and herds than we do today, but we are producing the same amount of meat as we did when we had larger numbers.
The people who are selling plant-based alternatives are using hype, particularly around methane, and they need to stop”. I agree!
