I was cruising my favorite news app yesterday when an add came up claiming that beef was actually super sustainable and good for the environment. I couldn’t help but click. It was funded by the Beef Farmers and Ranchers association—the group responsible for the “Beef, it’s what’s for dinner” campaign. The website was a tossed salad of half-truths and incomplete reasoning. Beef has a big carbon footprint, but smaller than a flight to London. Cattle are “up-cyclers” taking useless plants and turning them into calories and leather. Meat is a nutrient dense food that supplies 9% of U.S. calories but (wait for it) a whopping 10% of our protein and some vitamins.
My favorite part was that they showcase their “Environmental
Stewardship Award,” which, it turns out is an annual award given exclusively to
cattle producers and funded by McDonalds among other conflicted sponsors. The meat
industry is so committed to greenwashing that they bought the URL www.environmentalstewardship.org
and use it to shower an award on themselves every year.
While this vein of greasy propaganda was particularly rich,
it isn’t unique. I am frequently forwarded Alan Savory’s TED talk on how grazing
could halt desertification and solve climate change too. As an aside, TED talks,
like Wikipedia articles, are a great place to start your research, and a very
bad place to draw your conclusions1. Just this week, I was called
a “shame and a sham” (kind of a nice ring to that actually) for suggesting that
eating a plant based diet would be good for the environment.