I am so grateful every day to live in America. We have the freedom of so. Many. Choices. We get to choose where our kids go to school, or if we want to homeschool them. We get to choose where we live, who we marry, and which church we attend. Those are big choices.
Do you know what else I am grateful for though? Maybe it doesn’t seem as big of a deal as the afore-mentioned, but we have so many choices when it comes to choosing which foods we eat, and what we feed our families. From a completely plant-based diet, to any type of omnivorous diet or some combination of both, we are also incredibly blessed that our food supply is abundant and safe! Plus, it’s actually vitally important if we want a healthy and sustainable food system that we have a varied diet consisting of both plants and animals.
Sustainable Food Choices
Today I want to talk about choosing your diet based on the sustainability of your protein choices. I respect everyone’s decision to choose their own diet according to their own values and needs. However, when I hear a statement such as, “It takes a lot more energy and resources to produce a kilogram of beef than it does to produce a kilogram of, say, kidney beans,” I can’t help but wonder how they ever came to this incorrect conclusion.
If you know me at all, you know that someone making other people fear their food is one thing I have zero tolerance for. Especially since as I stated already, we live in America, home of the safest and most abundant food supply in the world. There is no reason to make another person fear or feel guilty about his or her food choices, especially when there is no truth to the statement you are making.
So, let’s break it down. Beef vs. kidney beans. First please let me reiterate though, that I love both beef AND kidney beans, and pretty much any source of protein we might be discussing. I love food. I’m not picky.
What I dislike is when someone makes someone else feel like they are making the wrong choice because their diet is less sustainable or worse for the Earth or our precious resources.
Facts and Figures
To help set the record straight, I did some light reading (insert sarcasm) through the 600-ish page public document known as the 2016 United States Environmental Protection Agency Inventory of U.S. Greenhouse Gas Emissions & Sinks. This is published online and is actually full of interesting information, if you’re into science and global warming……
What I found was that the data from 2016 shows that in the United States, animal agriculture accounts for 3.9% of GHG emissions, while plant agriculture (ahem, kidney beans) accounts for 4.7% of emissions. Furthermore, of the 3.9% of emissions from animal agriculture, beef production comes in at just 2%. To put this in perspective, electricity accounts for 27.6% and transportation 27.4%.
Another interesting fact: Over the last 25 years, the beef industry has decreased it’s carbon footprint by 16%!! Do you know of any other industry that has accomplished that? It’s pretty impressive!
This is done in part by simply improving productivity—it takes fewer days now to raise an animal from birth to finishing time, which means it takes less resources—less land, less water and less fossil fuel energy (30% less, 14% less, and 9% less than in 1970, respectively, according to a 2007 study by Washington State University).
Other methods of increasing sustainability of the beef industry include excellent dedication to caring for the animals across all systems (grass-finished or grain-finished, conventional or organic, etc.), because healthier animals are more productive.
Also, the natural biology of cattle as ruminants (they have a specialized stomach with four compartments), means they can eat things that humans cannot, and this aids in their important role in our food system. Cattle often eat the leftovers from other industries that would normally go to waste (think distillers grains from the ethanol industry, cottonseed from cotton production, and beet pulp from sugar beet production). This makes them “upcyclers”— they upgrade human inedible materials or food waste into high-quality protein and essential micronutrients.
So, in the end, we all have an important responsibility in reducing GHG emissions. But to say that animal agriculture takes more energy and resources than plant agriculture is just simply not true.
As a sidenote–this all doesn’t even take into account the large nutritional differences between beef and beans–one kilogram of beef is packed with so many more nutrients than a kilogram of beans! Plus, I’ve talked extensively here and here about beef’s important role in my own nutrition.
A natural plant-only ecosystem simply does not exist, nor would it be sustainable (just like an animal-only system would not be either). We need both.
And isn’t it wonderful that we have so many choices of what to eat?
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