Food historian Tristram Stuart has a piece in the Guardian this morning asking the question: what’s one person’s fair share of meat consumption?
After all, meat (especially red meat) and dairy products have a disproportionate impact on climate change – the livestock industry is responsible for 18% of all greenhouse gas emissions – as well as on land use, grain consumption, water consumption and other issues besides. So if by now we’re all used to the idea that we can quantify our carbon footprint and compare it to what our personal share would be if we had a safe global emissions budget that was shared out equitably between the world’s people, then what would the meat equivalent – the sustainable ‘Big Mac footprint’, if you like – work out at?
As Tristram acknowledges, it’s not as straightforward as ‘meat bad, vegetables good’, given that
no two pieces of meat are the same. A hunk of beef raised on Scottish moorland has a very different ecological footprint from one created in an intensive feedlot using concentrated cereal feed, and a wild venison or rabbit casserole is arguably greener than a vegetable curry. Likewise, countries have very different animal husbandry methods. For example, in the US, for each calorie of meat or dairy food produced, farm animals consume on average more than 5 calories of feed. In India the rate is a less than 1.5 calories. In Kenya, where there isn’t the luxury of feeding grains to animals, livestock yield more calories than they consume because they are fattened on grass and agricultural by-products inedible to humans.
Nonetheless, encouraged by the declaration of a meat-free day a week in Ghent, Tristram’s got his calculator out and made a guesstimate of the kind of consumption changes we might be talking about. Here’s the deal:
Global average consumption of meat and dairy products including milk was 152kg a person in 2003. Average EU and US consumption, by contrast, was over 400kg, while Uganda’s was 45kg. In order to reach the equitable fair share of global production, rich western countries would have to cut their consumption by 2.7 times – and this doesn’t include the fact that the butter will have to be spread even more thinly if the global population really does increase by another 2.3 billion by 2050.
However, still further reductions would be necessary because global meat production is already at unsustainable levels. The IPCC among other bodies, has called for an 80% reduction of greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. Since high levels of meat and dairy consumption are luxuries, it seems reasonable to expect livestock production to take its share of the hit. For rich western countries this would mean decreasing meat and dairy consumption to significantly less than one tenth of current levels, the sooner the better.
