Beef Is The Highest Carbon Food?

There is an idea floating around online that because fossil fuel corporations generate the most greenhouse gas emissions and therefore are the most responsible for climate change and its impacts that individual humans don’t really need to do much to reduce our own personal carbon footprints.

This reasoning doesn’t make sense, considering the fact there are about 8 billion humans on this planet, and the human population is growing. In just 20 years, there may be another 1.4 billion of us.

The collective impact of all 8 billion of us today does matter, and, in fact, most of us do also use fossil fuels in one form or another. So, fossil fuel corporations don’t operate in isolation. Many individual humans do use their products, products which cause a lot of harm.

Additionally, our individual food choices can contribute to climate change. Recently, I was wondering which animals grown by large-scale commercial agriculture operations, aka Big Ag,  have the highest carbon footprint, or, which food has the highest carbon footprint. Before doing some online research, my guess was cattle/beef.

It turns out, the answer is beef. Beef has the highest carbon footprint of our human foods. In the US, beef is a very commonly eaten food. Many of us grew up eating steaks, ribs, and hamburgers without carefully examining what the costs were to our human health and to the planet.

It didn’t even occur to us that there might be something harmful about eating beef on a regular basis. Similarly, maybe we had no idea that farm operations centered on raising cows and selling them to kill them and make them into food for human consumption was damaging to the environment.

So, how many cows are there in the world? Various sources state the total is one billion to one and a half billion.

Large cattle herds release excessive methane, a greenhouse gas that contributes to climate change. They release methane through their digestive processes. When their manure is collected in lagoons, it can decompose and release methane. Their manure can also release nitrous oxide, another greenhouse gas.

Land they are kept on was created by cutting down forests and converting wild lands to make pasture which released carbon. Prairie grasses were also eliminated in some areas for the same reason. Land was also converted to grow soybeans and corn to feed them. Growing and transporting such food for them generates emissions as well.

It doesn’t end there, though. When cattle manure and urine is on land surfaces, some of it gets washed into watersheds, creeks, streams, rivers, etc. A portion of all this animal waste makes it into larger rivers such as the Mississippi River which drains into the Gulf of Mexico, or if you are a Trumpist, the Gulf of America. The dead zones in the Gulf are caused in part by this animal waste runoff flowing there. The dead zones produce nitrous oxide, a potent greenhouse gas.

While a dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico might sound sort of abstract or maybe not that consequential, it actually is quite large. “NOAA-supported scientists announced today that this year’s Gulf of Mexico “dead zone” — an area of low to no oxygen that can kill fish and marine life — is approximately 6,705 square miles, the 12th largest zone on record in 38 years of measurement. This figure equates to more than 4 million acres of habitat potentially unavailable to fish and bottom species, an area roughly the size of New Jersey. “

To be clear, cattle contribute to both climate change and Gulf dead zones. The dead zones also contribute to climate change by generating nitrous oxides.

It would be remiss to not mention that in South America, including Brazil, hundreds of thousands of square miles of wild habitat have been destroyed for cattle farming — not hundreds of thousand of acres, hundreds of thousands of square miles. “Extensive cattle ranching is the number one culprit of deforestation in virtually every Amazon country, and it accounts for 80% of current deforestation (Nepstad et al. 2008). Alone, the deforestation caused by cattle ranching is responsible for the release of 340 million tons of carbon to the atmosphere every year, equivalent to 3.4% of current global emissions.” 

Forests absorb a lot of carbon every year, thus helping to alleviate climate change. Destroying forests contributes to climate change. Destroying forests for cattle farming releases even more carbon.

Does that mean all humans should adopt plant-based diets? If we were all completely rational and only used facts and scientific evidence to inform our judgement and make decisions, then yes. We would all adopt plant-based diets. Many of us are actually not very rational when we make decisions, instead preferring to use how we feel  to make decisions or remain in denial about how our conduct contributes to larger problems and destruction.

One myth that drives the consumption of beef is that only animal protein is complete. That’s not true though. There are plenty of plant foods that contain the nine essential amino acids: lysine, leucine, iso-leucine, histidine, methionine, phenylalanine, threonine, tryptophan and valine.

Stanford scientist Chris Gardner analyzed plant foods and found many, many plant foods that people wrongly assumed for a long time were missing some essential amino acids were not. They had all the 9 essential amino acids.

This fact means eating beef, and other dead animal parts, is actually not necessary for human nutrition from the perspective of protein consumption.

Dairy products, unsurprisingly, also have high carbon footprints.

In the US, there may be some hope for the younger Americans who seem to be more open-minded about the foods they eat. “Even as science tries making cows more climate-friendly, the tide of consumption has seen a steady shift. In the last two years, the majority of Americans have upped their intake of plant-based foods, with almost half of millennials and Gen Z-ers regularly eating vegan. But there’s also been another notable tip in the scale: Just 12 percent of the country eats half the nation’s beef. And for many in the meat-heavy minority, the perils of climate change seem to do little in nudging them toward planet-friendlier meals.”

Keeping large herds of farm animals together can result in the spread of disease as well. This article does not cover every problem or issue with the cattle and beef industry, lest anyone get confused. There are other issues and problems too.