There are few topics as contentious as our diet. No one wants to be told what to eat. Yet a food transition seems to be building momentum. More and more of us are interested in reducing the impact of our diet. Specifically, we want to eat less meat.
While all-out vegetarianism and veganism is becoming more popular, it’s still a minority position. Recent polls suggest that just five per cent of adults in the UK, and three per cent in the US are vegetarian. Most don’t want to eliminate animal products completely, but do want to cut back.
This raises the question of not just how much meat we should eat, but what types. We often talk about steak, lamb chops, bacon and chicken nuggets as if they’re on a level playing field. Just ‘meat’. But their impacts are vastly different. Per gram of protein, beef has almost ten times the carbon footprint of chicken. It uses 23 times as much farmland. If we were to rank them in order: beef and lamb have the highest cost; pork has significantly less; chicken is even lower; and many types of fish are better still.
This means that if you want to reduce the environmental footprint of your diet, substituting beef and lamb with chicken and fish gets you really far. In fact, this has a much larger impact than switching from eating moderate amounts of chicken to a vegetarian or vegan diet. That’s the recommendation I give to most people. Eat less meat overall, but also replace the beef steak with chicken or tuna. In fact, it’s the diet I choose for myself: I’m a pescatarian because of the low environmental footprint of fish.
Problem solved, right? Well, not quite. This recommendation has a darker side. It’s completely at odds with animal welfare. We often ignore this fact, but it’s nonetheless true. The most environmentally-friendly meat choices mean condemning a greater number of animals to live miserable lives. There are several reasons for this.
First, low-impact meats tend to be the smallest animals. In fact, it’s the very fact that they are small that makes them so efficient. Look again at our ranking of meats by environmental impact: beef is worst; then pork; then chicken; then fish. Largest to smallest. Unfortunately, this means killing 134 chickens to get the same amount of meat you’d get from one cow.
Globally we slaughter 320 million cows for meat each year. If we sourced all of that meat from chicken instead, we’d be killing an extra 41 billion animals. But, we’d also shave off around four billion tonnes of CO2-equivalents from global emissions. That’s equivalent to the emissions of the EU and UK combined.
Or, to put it in perspective for an individual: the average Brit eats around 100 kilograms of meat each year. Eighteen kilograms of this is beef: less than one-tenth of a cow. If you replaced all of this with chicken, you could reduce the carbon footprint of your diet by around 30 per cent, but it’d mean killing an extra 10 to 15 chickens each year.
By simply changing what types of meat we eat we can save billions of tonnes of carbon. But it means killing tens of billions more animals.
Second, we might consider animals’ quality of life. I’ve never experienced the life of a farm animal but my guess is that cows probably have a nicer one than chickens. If you gave me the choice of living another life as a cow or chicken, I’d pick the former. Probability would suggest that as a chicken you’d end up in an intensively-raised farm. Packed into a cage. Possibly pumped with growth hormones – so big that your legs would buckle beneath you. Some cows are not treated much better, but I think you’d have much better odds of a kinder life with more space. So, eating more chicken means more animals living worse lives.
Finally – regardless of the animal – the more intensively it’s raised, the lower its footprint tends to be. From the perspective of efficiency, we want livestock to move as little as possible. When they’re moving, they’re burning energy that could otherwise be turned into meat. Caged hens are the winner here. And the same is true for cows: meta-analyses have shown that grain-fed beef tends to have a lower carbon (and certainly land) footprint than grazed beef. This is because cows fed on grain tend to spend more of their time in smaller feedlots, and also have shorter lives – that’s less time to produce methane burps.
This puts us in a difficult position. The truth is that ‘eating sustainable meat’ means slaughtering many more animals and subjecting them to crueler lives. How can we overcome this dilemma? I think we have a few options.
The first, and most obvious one, is to go vegan. Vegans can rightly claim the moral high ground here. Low environmental cost. No mistreated animals. For those that want to go vegan, this is the optimal choice. But the reality is that most people don’t want to cut meat out completely – at least not in the near-term. And they definitely don’t want someone else telling them to do so.
So, those that want to eat some meat – myself included – probably can’t get around this completely. But there are things we can do to weaken the trade-off. Yes, opting for chicken or fish means killing more animals. But we have options for giving them a better, happier life. Eating free-range chicken or eggs is an obvious place to start. In the UK, nearly half of our eggs still come from caged hens. In the US, around 70 per cent do. Globally, this share will be even higher.
There is some variability in the environmental footprint of chickens and eggs depending on the production system. And yes, there might be some efficiency gains from caged hens. But in the scope of the total footprint of your diet, they are relatively small. You might be able to shave off a few per cent of your food’s carbon emissions. To me, this is not worth the welfare cost of putting chickens through a torturous life. Perhaps my free-range eggs emit five per cent or 10 per cent more than caged ones. I’m willing to accept that. Personally, the moral cost of torturing animals is not worth it to shave mere percentage points off my carbon footprint.
But we can of course take this argument even further. Do we really want to live with the moral cost of killing animals at all, when we are on the brink of making comparable products without them? That’s where our final option comes in: investing much more in alternative proteins.
This welfare-environment trade-off is the perfect marketing strategy for alternative protein companies. But it’s one that they’re not leveraging enough. Most put the environmental benefits at the core of their messaging. Impossible Foods’s mission page has the tagline “Eat Meat. Save the Planet.” It lists reductions in emissions, water and land. It doesn’t mention animal welfare at all. Beyond Meat does the same: animal welfare is barely mentioned. The same is true for Quorn, the leading meat-free brand in the UK.
More people care about the environmental message than the animal ethics one, so I guess this strategy makes sense. But here’s the thing: the really jaw-dropping numbers they cite – whether it’s 95 per cent less emissions, or 99 per cent less land – are all compared to beef. They might say “compared to meat” but they mean “compared to beef”. When we start comparing them to low-impact meats like chicken or fish, the environmental benefits are much smaller. In most cases, alternative proteins still win, but they’re not nearly as impressive.
If we look to the future, these companies might need to look beyond beef to find a better sales pitch. Across the US and Europe, people are already turning away from beef towards chicken. Sales data suggests that over the last few decades beef consumption has been falling while chicken is rising. The substitution is happening. Yet total meat consumption isn’t falling – at least not much. Despite rapid growth in the sales of alternative proteins, they’re not yet making a dent in meat sales. They’re a supplement rather than a substitute.
If alternative proteins want to dominate the market, they’re going to need an advantage over chicken. The environmental argument isn’t that strong. But the animal welfare one is.
These emerging technologies offer us a ‘get out of jail free’ card for this ethical dilemma. We could enjoy the same experience of eating meat without the environmental or the welfare cost that comes with it. We’ve yet to fully appreciate how pivotal this might be. Our millennia-old dependence on killing animals for food might be on the verge of unraveling. This is the real story these companies should be telling. The lives of trillions of animals may come to depend on it.
- ☀️ Sign-up to WIRED’s climate briefing: Get Chasing Zero
- The race to grab all the UK’s lithium before it’s too late
- Looking for gifts? Our pick of 2021’s Gear of the Year
- They quit. Now they want their jobs back
- The best games that you’ll never, ever beat
- What to do if your Facebook account is hacked
- The race to stop fish becoming the next factory farming nightmare
- 🔊 Subscribe to the WIRED Podcast. New episodes every Friday
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
