How Eating Less Meat Can Lower Your Carbon Footprint

Meat production in the United States occurs on an enormous scale. The average American eats a half a pound of meat a day, and all of that meat was once a living, breathing animal. And those living, breathing animals need food, and to grow that food, trees must be cut. Following are some of the ways that eating meat affects the environment.

1. Feeding the animals

Most of the animals consumed in the U.S. are raised on feedlots. Feedlots are grassless enclosures where cattle are kept in crowded conditions and fed grains, such as corn and soy. This means several things:

- Land must be dedicated to growing massive amounts of grain to feed these animals. Sometimes, rain forest and other woodland is destroyed to make fields where the grain can be grown.

-With so much land dedicated to corn and soy, there is less room for other healthy grains that could be grown for human consumption.

-Animals kept on feedlots and fed an unnatural diet of grains tend to develop health problems. Thus, antibiotics are administered routinely to the animals. The use of antibiotics as a preventative measure is one of the means by which “super bugs” are produced. These are bacteria that have learned resistance to conventional antibiotics, and, if such bacteria infect a person, antibiotics will be ineffective for that person.

2. Transportation

The feed, meat, and animals themselves must be transported. The cattle are driven to the slaughterhouse via truck. Then the meat is transported by refrigerated truck or airplane to its destination; it is then sold to the public. Also, the animals’ feed has to be transported to the feedlots. All of that transportation uses a lot of fuel, and creates significant emissions. And speaking of emissions…

3. Methane and nitrous oxide

These two gases are considered “greenhouse gases,” and are strongly implicated in global warming. Cattle, pigs and sheep emit these gases as they digest their unnatural grain diets.

4. What can you do?

Eating less meat, of course, is a straight-forward approach. Another thing to do is adjust the kind of meat you eat (less red meat). Finally, switching to free range, organic, grass-fed meat wherever possible is a good idea. Grass fed beef is becoming more popular, and is a healthier meat all around.