Day 3: It's all about trade-offs
The phrase "eat less meat" is tossed around a lot by animal welfare and climate advocates. But which meat should you eat less of, exactly?
It's one of the most important yet overlooked questions to think about when reducing your meat intake, because different meat and animal products have very different impacts on climate, local communities, and animal welfare. Let's start with beef. Think of cows as the SUV of food production.
Cows spend much of their lives on pasture, eating grasses and other plants, which ferment as they're digested. When cows burp, they emit methane, a greenhouse gas that is much more potent than carbon dioxide. Methane is so potent that cows alone (raised for both beef and dairy) account for around 9 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions (not just emissions from meat — all emissions).
In terms of the carbon footprint of different meats, pork is the next biggest emitter, then chicken, and then fish. This has led some environmental advocates, academics, and journalists to encourage people to prioritize reducing their beef consumption, even if it means increasing consumption of chicken and fish.
The call to eat less red meat and more "lean protein," like chicken and fish, is also a common refrain from doctors, and people have been listening.
But the choice to eat less beef and more chicken has its own downsides, if one of the reasons you want to cut back on meat is to lessen animal suffering.
My colleague Kelsey Piper, who wrote an excellent article on this issue, said replacing beef with chicken "ends up swapping one disaster — the climate crisis and beef farming's role in it — for another: the moral disaster of industrial chicken production."
She continued:
To put it simply, it takes many, many more chicken lives than cow lives to feed people. Cows are big, so raising one produces about 500 pounds of beef — and at the rate at which the average American eats beef, it takes about 8.5 years for one person to eat one cow. But chickens are much smaller, producing only a few pounds of meat per bird, with the average American eating about one whole chicken every two weeks.
Chickens are also treated much worse than cattle. Cows raised for beef spend about the first year to year and a half of their lives on pasture and the final few months on feedlots, which aren't necessarily high-welfare but aren't nearly as awful as the factory farms where chickens spend 100 percent of their lives.
This is also a concern for fish (who experts say can feel pain) and egg-laying hens. Because fish and eggs have a much lower carbon footprint than beef, they're also often recommended as climate-friendly foods.
But, like chickens raised for meat, these animals are treated much worse than cattle (though wild-caught fish only suffer in capture and slaughter). They are also small animals, so many more of them need to be raised or caught to provide the same amount of food as one cow.
And while eggs, chicken, and fish are more climate-friendly than beef, plant-based foods like beans, tofu, and vegetarian meats are even lower in emissions, and the fish and poultry industries are known water and air polluters. With all this in mind, I can't help but feel that labels like vegetarian, flexitarian, and pescetarian (vegetarian plus fish) fail to capture the true impact of one's diet on animals.
For example, a vegetarian diet rich in eggs would be responsible, so to speak, for more animal suffering than an omnivorous diet that doesn't include any chicken, fish, or eggs. Similarly, a pescetarian diet rich in fish would be responsible for more animal suffering than an omnivorous diet low in chicken and fish, even if pescetarianism might be seen as more beneficial for animals.
I've wondered what a new, more specific dietary label could be for people who care about animals and want to use their food choices to help but don't want to go full-bore vegan. I haven't come up with anything clever enough to stick just yet.
Regardless of which animal products you choose to reduce or cut from your diet, it's important to understand the animal welfare and climate consequences of those choices, so as not to unintentionally make either worse off. Tomorrow we'll switch back to the food realm and cover how to eat less meat and stay healthy. Before we do, I want to hear from you — what have you been cooking up? Share a photo of a home-cooked meal, a restaurant outing, or a grocery haul and use the hashtag #VoxMeatLess on Twitter or Instagram.
—Kenny Torrella
Resources A no-beef diet is great — but only if you don't replace it with chicken (Vox)
Are my hamburgers hurting the planet? (The Washington Post)
The next frontier for animal welfare: fish (Vox)
Watch: The chicken industry's worker safety problem (Vox)
Animal product impact scales (Faunalytics)
Why the US egg industry is still killing 300 million chicks a year (Vox)
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