The amount and type of meat that you consume is a huge part of your energy (and water) usage. This is likely one of the biggest impacts you can have on your personal energy and water usage. Putting aside the potential health issues with regards to high red meat diets, it is important from a sustainability perspective to eat less meat and eat meat that is lower in impact. Eating lots of high energy meat is a waste of energy in the same way leaving the refrigerator door open all day would be. We simply don't have enough resources for everyone to be eating lots of high energy meat.
Read our Eat Less Meat section and use the tool there (coming soon!) to figure out the impact of your meat consumption. Did you know that producing 1 pound of corn-fed beef requires 10 times the amount of energy it takes to produce 1 pounds of chicken? Or that 1 beef meal a week with 20 vegetarian meals can almost double your energy consumption compared to 21 vegetarian meals?
Keep track for a couple weeks of the amount of meat you eat. How many times do you eat chicken vs. pork vs. beef vs. turkey? Do you eat corn-fed or grass-fed beef (if you're not sure, you likely eat corn-fed). Keep a little log and see how much of each meat you eat a week.
Completed on Sept. 22, 2009 at 7:08 p.m.
Step 3: Cut out your highest impact meats
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If you eat beef, try to replace most, if not all, beef with chicken. Once you have eliminated most or all beef, then try to cut out pork, then turkey ... read more
If you eat beef, try to replace most, if not all, beef with chicken. Once you have eliminated most or all beef, then try to cut out pork, then turkey. The goal is to be eating as much chicken and sustainably harvested fish as possible (fish is not an issue due to energy usage, but because of fishing methods).
Sept. 22, 2009
how can you find out if your local store's fish is sustainably harvested?
The updates and comments below show how Susan is doing in completing her action. You can leave her comments, suggestions and encouragement using the box below.
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Commit to replacing some high impact meat with lower impact meats or vegetarian meals. Go back to the Eat Less Meat section and use the tool there (coming soon!) to see the impact of your new diet. Try it out for a couple weeks
This is a bit of an ongoing process. Some people will be more religious with it than others, but the key thing is to remove as much beef or pork from your diet as possible. If you can't live without the very occasional steak, that's fine, but get a chicken sandwich instead of a hamburger on a day to day basis. And when you do eat beef, make it grass-fed (it has half the impact of corn-fed beef). We'd love for everyone to be vegetarian, but if that's not something you will do, at least replace as much beef with chicken as possible.
Explain the numbers to others. 1 pound of beef containing the same amount of energy as 10 pounds of chicken is pretty compelling. Maybe you will get them to rethink that cheeseburger and go with chicken instead from time to time.
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Susan's action: Eat less (and better) meat
by
Susan Gunther
Guide:
Eat less (and better) meat
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