If you’re an environmentally conscious meat eater, you’re probably carrying at least a little guilt to the dinner table. The meat on our plates carries significant environmental costs through deforestation, greenhouse gas emissions, and air and water pollution – an inconvenient reality given the world’s urgent need to deal with climate change.
That’s a big reason why there’s such buzz these days around a newcomer to supermarket shelves and burger joint menus: products that look like real meat, but are made entirely without animal ingredients. Unlike the bean- or grain-based veggie burgers of recent decades, these “plant-based meats,” of which Impossible Burger and Beyond Meat are the best known, are heavily marketed to traditional meat eaters. They claim to mimic the taste and texture of real ground meat at a fraction of the environmental cost.
If these newfangled meat alternatives can meet much of our demand for meat — and if they’re as green as they claim, which isn’t easily verified independently — they could provide carnivores with a way to reduce the environmental impact of their eating choices without their favorite recipes.
That could be a game-changer, some think. “People have long been informed about the harms of animal husbandry, but the percentage of vegans and vegetarians generally remains low,” said Elliot Swartz, a scientist with the Good Food Institute, an international nonprofit that promotes the development of alternatives to meat. “Rather than forcing people to make behavioral changes, we think it’s more effective to replace products in their diet where they don’t need to make behavioral changes.”
There is no doubt that today’s meat industry is bad for the planet. Livestock is responsible for about 15 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions, both direct (from methane emitted by livestock and other grazing animals and released by manure from pasturage, pig and chicken houses) and indirect (largely from fossil fuels used to grow fodder crops). If the world’s livestock were a country, their greenhouse gas emissions alone would rank second in the world, only after China.
Worse, the United Nations predicts that global demand for meat will increase by 15 percent by 2031 as the growing and increasingly affluent world population seeks more meat on their plates. That means more methane emissions and expansion of pasture and cropland into previously forested areas like the Amazon — deforestation that threatens biodiversity and further contributes to emissions.
Global demand for meat continues to rise with little sign of slowing down. Much of the increase comes from middle-income countries, where consumers are using their increasing wealth to get more meat on their plates.
However, not all types of meat animals contribute to the problem equally. Grazing animals such as cattle, sheep and goats have a much larger greenhouse gas footprint than non-grazers such as pigs and chickens. In large part, that’s because only the former methane burps, which happens when gut microbes digest the cellulose in grasses and other feeds.
Pigs and chickens are also much more efficient at converting feed into edible meat: chickens need less than two pounds of feed and pigs need about three to five pounds to gain one pound of body weight. (The rest goes to the energy costs of daily living: circulating blood, exercise, keeping warm, fighting germs, and the like.) Compare that to the six to ten pounds of feed per pound of cow.
As a result, the greenhouse gas emissions of beef cattle per pound of meat are more than six times that of pigs and nearly nine times that of chickens. (Paradoxically, grass-fed cattle — which are often considered a greener alternative to beef grass — are actually bigger climate sinners, because grass-fed cattle mature more slowly and thus spend more months burping methane.)
