Are we past peak-meat?
It’s difficult to pose such a question here in the U.S. just days before the Super Bowl, which will see a poultry apocalypse to provide chicken wings to go with the human brain trauma. But the attempts to create meat in vitro will eventually be perfected, and when the price for such faux fare falls very low, some significant changeover will occur. You can add to that a growing vegetarian and vegan populace which doesn’t seem fringe at all anymore.
In a Vice article, Hannah Ewens conducts an interesting thought experiment, wondering what would be the economic, environmental and health impact if everyone in an entire country (she uses England as her case study) stopped eating all meat overnight. An excerpt:
Vice:
What would happen to the environment if we all stopped eating meat?
Nick Hewitt:
Eating meat makes a large contribution to the greenhouse gasses that people in the UK produce. If everyone stopped eating it, the food-related greenhouse gas emissions would reduce by about 35 percent. It’s one very effective way to make a big dent in emissions.
Vice:
Why?
Nick Hewitt:
It’s particularly cattle—beef is by far the worst. Cows chew grass and digest it in conditions in the stomach with no oxygen, and that releases methane. That’s the principle reason. Also, the way the grassland is fertilized causes greenhouse gas emissions. Transporting the food around does contribute, but it’s relatively small, unless you use air freight. Lorries aren’t too bad. The biggest lifestyle choice you could make to reduce greenhouse gasses is to stop eating meat. It’s hard to think of another single lifestyle change we could make that would have the same effect.
Vice:
So using the same farmland for plants would be the quickest way to reduce emissions?
Nick Hewitt:
Yeah. You’d still have to be careful with your fertilization, but using land for meat is the least efficient way of producing protein. It’s just an inefficient way of producing food. By growing plants on the land and eating those, it’s much more efficient, so we would be greatly reducing those greenhouse gas emissions.
Vice:
Would it make more of a difference if everyone was vegan?
Nick Hewitt:
Yeah, it would make more of a difference.•