Sustainable Beef?

Some people are aggressively promoting the idea that meat production can be made sustainable. Just like there’s a sustainable way of getting to work (the bus, bicycle, your hybrid car, etc.), there’s a sustainable way of getting meat. A recent letter by Mark Muller in the September / October 2004 of WorldWatch magazine ("A Disservice to Environmentally Appropriate Livestock Producers") is the latest volley in this exchange. According to this argument, grass-fed beef is not only a good way to protect the environment, it’s also healthier.

The whole idea that "grass-fed beef" based on "free-ranging animals" is "a better way to protect the environment" is nonsense. The destructiveness of livestock agriculture is not something invented in the twentieth century. Worldwide and historically, grazing systems have been far more destructive than factory farms. Grass-fed free-ranging animals reduced much of North Africa to desert after the fall of the Roman Empire. Grass-fed free-ranging animals created extensive deserts in the American southwest in the late nineteenth century, probably the greatest single human-created environmental disaster in this area. Grass-fed free-ranging beef is now eliminating the rainforests in Central and South America. For the amount of meat produced, grazing animals is far more destructive of habitat than factory farms — simply because so much more land is required to support each animal.

Furthermore, meat is not healthy, and returning some extra omega-three fatty acids to beef isn’t going to make it healthy. Meat, whether "environmentally correct" or not, is almost entirely fat and protein, and contains no fiber. Decades of research have established that diets high in fat, high in protein, and low in fiber are associated with the epidemic of obesity, heart disease, cancer, diabetes, and the other "diseases of civilization" — the treatment of which is sending our health-care costs in the U. S. through the roof. Sure, it’s relatively better to get the antibiotics and corn out of cows, but like the "safe cigarette," this at best only ameliorates the problem.

I think it is dangerous for the environmental movement to hail this sort of thing as a step in the right direction. It shows an inability to grapple with the fundamental problem here: eating high on the food chain is going to be inefficient. It’s physics, it’s a law of nature. By concentrating on one resource rather than another — cropland instead of wildlife habitat — grass-fed beef may seem to be an "efficient" source of food, but this is essentially a shell game, and when you lay all of your agricultural resources on the table, this is fairly easy to see. It’s like advertising a bag of refined sugar as "no cholesterol, fat free!"

Grass-fed free-ranging animals are extremely destructive environmentally, and so-called "sustainable" beef can at best be no more than a niche market for the conscience-stricken elite to which this industry caters.