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Mining the cow for new meat, despite environmental costs
The Web site for the award-winning alternative weekly, the Philadelphia City Paper.
Mining the cow for new meat, despite environmental costs
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| NewScientist.com |
| Reducing beef consumption could help halt climate change. |
The National Cattlemen's Beef Association has spent $1.5 million and the last five years trying to figure out new ways to slice up a cow, all in the hopes of teaching customers to buy unfamiliar cuts of meat.
The New York Times reports today on this project, financed by the Beef Check-off program, which will debut five new cuts from the familiar chuck steak, and four new cuts from the round. Some seasoned butchers are skeptical of these new cuts, stating that the "Denver," "Petite Tender" and "Sierra" are just the same old pieces trimmed in different ways.
The interesting part of the article is what it doesn't say, which is that the average home cook knows only how to cook steaks and roasts, and cannot be bothered to learn how to cook more flavorful and cheaper off-cuts.�� The Cattlemen's Association therefore has a huge financial interest in identifying cheaper cuts that can be grilled like a steak or stuck in the oven surrounded by carrots and onions.
Writer Kim Severson notes that Americans spend $15.5 billion a year at the supermarket buying beef. In 2008, 1.12 cows were slaughtered every second in America � Mark Bittman linked to this pretty amazing graphic on Herbiv.org that illustrates the rate of slaughter of cows, chickens and pigs.
My question to the Cattlemen: how much more beef can we eat? Elke Stehfest of the Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency and colleagues have studied the carbon impact of animals raised for slaughter. From NewScientist.com:
Climate-change experts have warned of the high carbon cost of meat for several years.
Beef is particularly damaging. Methane, a potent greenhouse gas, is released from flatulent cows and by manure as it decays. Furthermore, to produce a kilogram of beef (2.2 pounds), farmers also have to feed a cow 15 kg of grain and 30 kg of forage. Grain requires fertiliser, which is energy intensive to produce.
If eating habits do not change, Stehfest estimates that emissions would have to be cut by two-thirds by 2050, which is likely to cost around $40 trillion.
If, however, the global population shifted to a low-meat diet � defined as 70 grams of beef and 325 grams of chicken and eggs per week � around 15 million square kilometres of farmland would be freed up. Vegetation growing on this land would mop up carbon dioxide. It could alternatively be used to grow bioenergy crops, which would displace fossil fuels.
Shifting the argument for reducing meat consumption from the shrill cry of animal rights to a sober environmental analysis is a brilliant approach. Much like casting alternative energy as the way to stop giving hostile nations billions of dollars for fossil fuels, it allows a different segment of the population to latch on to the cause.
Though a $5.99 "Denver" steak could tempt a thrifty home cook into trying a new cut, it's still the same high-cost beef, no matter how you slice it.
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