The Most Environmentally Friendly Options Among Animal Products
If you have been following this blog for the past few months, you will already be well-informed on the extreme environmental costs of raising livestock and the large proportion of carbon emissions that come directly from the meat industry. You will also be aware that some fish are caught or raised in a sustainable manner, whereas others are being grossly overharvested, leading to marked inbalances in marine food webs. Finally, as a loyal reader, you undoubtedly learned about the benefits of buying produce that is local and in season, as well as consuming only fruits and vegetables that have low fertilizer and pesticide demands. Your conclusion from all these lessons may well be: eat as few terrestrial animal products as possible, and choose wisely among everything else. But are all foods derived from land animals equally harmful to the planet? If certain fruits, veggies, and fish are “better” than others, shouldn’t certain meats and dairy products also be less harmful than others?
The answer, of course, is a resounding yes. I already explained the benefits of consuming pastured and grass-fed livestock, but what I am interested in now is the more general categories of meats, milks, and cheeses.
Meat:
As you would most likely expect, red meat is much more environmentally harmful and energy intensive than poultry. More specifically, cows and sheep scored worst of all meat types in terms of energy usage, global warming, and eutrophication of lakes and other bodies of water. Cows of course, also account for the largest proportion of livestock land usage, and also contribute the most to water acidification. One of the main avenues by which food animals cause global warming and water pollution is through their excrement. For every pound of edible meat, cows produce 35-65 pounds of manure, pigs 13-18 pounds, and chickens 2-4. On small-scale farms, this manure makes excellent fertilizer, but in today’s age of industrial feedlots, most of the manure is wasted and simply leaks into the environment, degrading local ecosystems. Similarly, cows and sheep, being ruminants, emit tremendous amounts of methane, which is a potent greenhouse gas that is contributing to global warming. With all these factors in mind, it should come as no surprise that cow, sheep, and pig meat on average leads to four times the amount of greenhouse gas emissions per mass of meat than chicken or turkey.
Pigs are often lumped together with cows and sheep under the umbrella term “red meat”. However, pigs don’t belch methane (they aren’t ruminants) and they consume much fewer resources because of their accelerated life cycle and large numbers of offspring. However, even the 20-30 piglets that a single sow can give birth to in a year is no competition for hens that may lay hundreds of fertile eggs per year. Chickens also gain weight very efficiently, requiring much less food and thus fossil fuel energy to breed them.
Dairy:
Milking cows as opposed to slaughtering them is without a doubt a much more efficient means of extracting food energy from animals. As a self-professed dairy-lover, I have never been able to understand vegans who claim that they are saving animals by eliminating all milk from their diet. Don’t the cows need to be milked? Yes, dairy cows do benefit from being milked as opposed to being killed for hamburgers, and yes, this process yields much more food per animal. Most dairy foods, however, are still very energy-intense to produce, and thus cheeses may have nearly equivalent environmental impacts as certain types of meat.
There are various ways in which cheese production damages the environment, including methane released by dairy cattle, pollution from animal wastes and feed, and fossil fuel use in maintaining the cows and processing the milk. These processes contaminate water, land, and air in addition to using precious energy resources. In sum, the same negative side effects that come from raising livestock for meat production are seen in the dairy market as well. Yet, as always, all cheeses are not made equal. In terms of carbon emissions, sheep cheese is a much greater villain than either cow or goat cheese. Cattle emit more methane than goats but they compensate for this by producing more milk as well. In contrast, sheep will emit roughly twice the amount of methane per unit of milk as cows and goats do.
Other factors of cheese processing also contribute to their carbon footprint. In general, softer cheeses use less milk and require shorter cooking times than hard cheeses, making them a better environmental option. Aging cheeses demands a high energy input since the cheese must be kept at a stable, cold temperature for a long period of time. According to recent studies done into this topic, the lowest-impact cheeses are: feta, chevre, brie, Camambert, and mozzarella.
~Sara
