Op-Ed: Why Switching From Beef to Chicken Is a Recipe for Disaster

Source: Op-Ed: Why Switching From Beef to Chicken Is a Recipe for Disaster

A well-intentioned but disastrous solution is often offered to climate-conscious consumers: to swap beef on our plates with chicken. While on paper this brings down an individual’s dietary carbon footprint, in practice, this would mean billions more animals will be slaughtered each year while even more factory farms continue to harm the climate and all of us in the process. To spare animals from suffering, stave off climate change, and safeguard our food system we need to take factory farming off the table.https://6a3a00c9e74d62e433e6359facf1165d.safeframe.googlesyndication.com/safeframe/1-0-38/html/container.html

Much can be debated about the best way to address climate change but one of its sources is undeniable: the way we produce food—specifically meat—spells disaster for our planet.https://6a3a00c9e74d62e433e6359facf1165d.safeframe.googlesyndication.com/safeframe/1-0-38/html/container.html

The latest ominous Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report underscores that ruminants—meaning animals like cattle, goats, and sheep—have the highest greenhouse gas contribution among our food sources.¹ And the World Resources Institute said in its report that without restricting the global rise in meat consumption, particularly beef, limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit)—which is critical to avoiding disastrous weather patterns—will be impossible.²

As a result, a rash of articles have called for a switch from beef to less carbon-intensive or “efficient” meats, namely chicken. It’s true that per gram of protein, conventional beef has almost 10 times the carbon footprint of chicken.³ Beef uses 23 times as much farmland and three times as much water.⁴⁵ The public has heard these numbers and heeded the calls to change. Per capita, U.S. beef consumption declined by nearly a third from the 1970s to 2017 and has since stayed steady according to USDA data.⁶ Meanwhile, consumption of chicken more than doubled during that time period and has grown by 5 pounds per person just in the last five years.⁷https://6a3a00c9e74d62e433e6359facf1165d.safeframe.googlesyndication.com/safeframe/1-0-38/html/container.html

This consumption shift from beef to chicken is contributing to a crisis of another kind. Approximately 134 chickens must be killed to produce one cows’ worth of meat.⁸ More than 9 billion chickens are now killed for meat in this country each year and all but a tiny fraction of them spend their lives on Confined Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs), or factory farms, which are extremely inhumane and environmentally disastrous. The poultry industry’s standard practice, set by the handful of companies that control the majority of the market, is to intensively confine tens of thousands of birds in giant sheds with less than a square foot of space per animal.⁹

The most impactful dietary change we can make to reduce our individual impact on animals and the environment is actually to shift from conventionally produced, factory-farmed animal products to smaller amounts of pasture-based meat, eggs, or dairy and more plant-based protein sources. It’s not all-or-nothing. The average American could cut their diet-related environmental impacts by nearly half just by eating less meat, eggs, and dairy while sparing animals from the cruelties of factory farming.¹⁵

For meals that do include animal products, swapping in pasture-raised products for even a couple of meals each week can go a long way. Animals raised on pasture naturally spread their manure across the land, resulting in greatly reduced greenhouse gases and air emissions compared to the giant manure lagoons used on factory farms. Factory farms’ manure produces 100 times higher methane emissions than manure distributed on pasture.¹⁶…

 …If everyone in the U.S. ate only plant-based food one day each week and only pasture-raised animal products another day each week, that small change alone would spare 2.8 billion animals from factory farming annually—a 25% reduction in the number of animals factory farmed—with far-reaching environmental benefits.¹⁷