Beef – See Animals Wild

January 27, 2024January 24, 2024

Is the USA beef market destined to crash?

Looking at who is eating the majority of beef in the USA is alarming for the future of the industry. This is because older generations are eating the vast majority. Beef was at its strongest in the 1970s, with the average amount of beef eaten per person in 1975 being around 90 pounds or 40kg, but having dropped to just 57 pounds or 25kg.

Chicken is now the USA most consumed meat.

While this might be bad for the beef industry, it is good for the climate. Beef produces around 10 times the greenhouse gases that poultry does, and 20-60 times the amount that is released getting the same nutrition from plants.

According to this study, just 12% of people were responsible for eating half of the beef consumed in the country.

June 23, 2023June 22, 2023

If the US beef industry is deploying tricks similar to fossil fuels and smoking to delay action, what should we do?

It is, unfortunately, a fact, that meat eaters create a significant extra quantity of carbon released into the air. How much? Well this varies from place to place, and product to product.

While many think that grass fed beef is good for the environment, the methane emissions swing this badly

There are an increasingly large number of people who are recognizing this issue. Now while some will argue that without the meat industry, much of the UK farmland would be built on, and that this would be disastrous for the environment are missing the point. We live on an island, and as such it is in our own best interests to make sure that the worlds ice sheets do not melt.

January 31, 2022July 1, 2022

Insect protein is often touted as a way to fight climate change – can we use it? perhaps indirectly. Would you eat beef fed on insects?

There are countries on earth where eating insects has been a common practice for millennia. Unfortunately, elsewhere it is seen as disgusting.

This is unfortunate as it is a far environmentally cheaper way of making protein for human consumption. Indeed where as a beef burger such as a big mac cheese burger can have a carbon footprint of between 3.4 and 4.8kg, vastly more than the weight of itself; in fact insect burgers have lower carbon footprints than many of the current possibilities such as airy, gluten and mycoprotein.

However, given the fact that the consumers at least at the moment will not be willing to eat it, how about feeding the cattle with insects. This would be dramatically more efficient than feeding the cattle soy, not least because much of the soy is grown on land that has rainforest removed for this purpose.