Pass me the chicken please
pass me the chicken please
American’s eat, on average, three hamburgers a week. Knowing cows produce some sort of gas (methane), I was wondering what the environmental impacts of this are. I found an interesting article, “Go Green by Eating More of Your Greens ” – basically the author has some pretty pointed numbers, for example, “Water: H2O = Life”: 600 gallons of water are needed to produce a single hamburger. 600 gallons — that’s enough water to hydrate a person for over 3 years (at the recommended rate of 8 glasses per day). And that’s just the beef patty–no bun or fixings included.
That’s just one aspect of the burger, for example cows release methane gas (up to 100 gallons per cow per day), caused by cows burping because of what they are fed. Methane is 21 times more dangerous to our environment than carbon dioxide by weight. As the developing countries like China get richer, this means more cows are needed. More cows mean more land is needed for grazing (look at Argentina, they are cutting down rain forest for cow pastures!), more methane is released by cows, and more oil is needed to transport the meat to these countries.
According to wired mag, organic cows don’t make much of a difference, and can be in fact worse to the environment:
“Take milk. Dairy cows raised on organic feed aren’t pumped full of hormones. That means they produce less milk per Holstein — about 8 percent less than conventionally raised cattle. So it takes 25 organic cows to make as much milk as 23 industrial ones. More cows, more cow emissions. But that’s just the beginning. A single organically raised cow puts out 16 percent more greenhouse gases than its counterpart. That double whammy — more cows and more emissions per cow — makes organic dairies a cog in the global warming machine.
How about that burger? Organic beef steers take longer to achieve slaughter weight, which gives them more time to emit polluting methane. And if you’re eating hamburgers made from grass-fed cattle, don’t award yourself any prizes just yet. While pastured beef offers some environmental benefit — these cows don’t require carbon-intensive corn for feed, and the land they graze stores carbon more efficiently than land used for crops or left alone — they’re burping up nearly twice as much methane as cattle fed grain diets, according to the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization. If you really want to adopt a climate-friendly diet, cut out meat entirely. Researchers at the University of Chicago showed that the meat-intensive diet of the average American generates 1.5 more tons of greenhouse gases per year than the diet of a vegetarian.”
– source..
So I think for the time being, I will move more towards chicken.
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