Eating for the Planet Part 1: Food Conversion
by Climate Leader, David Gladson
So you’ve heard people say that you could stop eating meat to help the planet, and you are wondering, how does what I eat impact the atmosphere? Great question. While you might at first think that a calorie is a calorie, it turns out that different kinds of foods have vastly different carbon emissions in their production. Meat has one of the highest carbon footprints for three key reasons. We’ll look at the first one, Food Conversion, below.
Animals are not very efficient at turning plants into edible animal products. According to a recent National Geographic article, “For every 100 calories of grain we feed animals, we get only about 40 new calories of milk, 22 calories of eggs, 12 of chicken, 10 of pork, or 3 of beef.”
In more natural food system, animals would be eating things that humans can’t eat and adding food to the system. Cows would be grazing grass in a field that was lying fallow, or chickens would be running around the barnyard catching bugs. But that is not how our modern agriculture system works. More than 99% of the animals we eat are raised in some kind of Concentrated Animal Feeding Operation, or CAFO. Packed tightly together in large sheds for maximum efficiency, the animals are fed a diet designed to fatten them as quickly as possible - a diet of perfectly edible corn and soy, with some agricultural waste products mixed in.
“For every 100 calories of grain we feed animals, we get only about 40 new calories of milk, 22 calories of eggs, 12 of chicken, 10 of pork, or 3 of beef.” National Geographic
Most beef marketed as free-range still spends time in a CAFO. The cow might graze for the first year, but then spend 6 months fattening up in a CAFO up before slaughter.
By converting human edible grains into animal products, we increase the amount of food we need to grow and increase the emissions from farming . And while many of us grew up believing that eating animals products is essential to human health, they are not. The experience of millions of vegetarians and vegans around the world proves that a balanced and healthy diet without meat is not only possible but easy.
In our next two articles, we’ll look at two other key ways that eating meat contributes to climate change: Land Use and Waste Products.