The thing that I find interesting about the Biden War On Meat nonsense is that the original academic study, in looking at the possibility of reducing greenhouse gas emissions by reducing the amount of animal-based food in the American diet, found that reducing the amount of beef eaten in this country by 90%, plus reducing the total amount of non-beef animal-based foods (including dairy) by 50%, would reduce the diet-related greenhouse gas emissions by only 50% in ten years.
In other words, this is not a problem that can be solved by individuals making individual choices about their individual actions.
Not to mention that if we, as a culture, really did cut our beef consumption by nine-tenths in the next few years, cut our dairy and poultry consumption by half, and increased our plant consumption to compensate, it’s hard to imagine our economy handling that without some sort of massive federal intervention. A quarter of a million people work at the meat-packing plants that see fifteen billion pounds of beef. Another quarter of a million people pack poultry. The conversion of those jobs and workplaces to plant-based food (or vat-grown meat) wouldn’t be instant and wouldn’t be cheap.
That’s not to say we shouldn’t do it! In the long run, our dependence on beef is not a Good Thing, and it would be wise to change it.
No, my point is just that addressing the climate issue is going to take co-ordinated effort at the national level, addressing industrial behavior on a large scale. My example over the last fifteen years has been small appliances—most people have small appliances (refrigerators, clothes dryers, window air-conditioners) that are not energy efficient, and it would improve the national energy-use situation enormously if fifty million households got rid of their old refrigerators and got a new one. Except we don’t have fifty million new refrigerators, and we don’t have anywhere to put the fifty million old refrigerators. There’s a similar problem for the person who eats fifty pounds of beef a year—it would be better if they didn’t, sure, but we’re not ready for everybody to stop at once. Doing what you can as a household or a small business is great, but there is no way for even the accumulated changes of individuals to make the kind of difference we need.
Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.
Undoubtedly, a coordinated effort on a national level is going to be needed. The cases of food and refrigerators are quite different, however, in terms of how they play out as coordinated efforts, and in the case of food, individual commitment to change is actually much more critical than in the case of refrigerators. One cause of the difference is that we have two ways to get at the refrigerator problem. On the one side, people can replace their refrigerators, and, on the other side, electric utilities can replace their fossil-fuel-power plants with installations powered by renewables. Reducing the electricity demand by replacing fridges makes the power-plant replacement side easier to accomplish, but that has to be done in any case. In addition, since people don’t actually have to change their usage habits when swapping out an energy-inefficient fridge for their old energy hog, people probably aren’t going to notice the energy-efficiency piece much as long as the energy-efficient units are stylish, except to appreciate savings on their utility bills. All in all, this is a lift of significant technological complexity (and it will require a lot of investment to convert the power sources fast), but, culturally, it’s at most a minor change.
With food, on the other hand, people’s cultural investments run deep, and there’s no way–even if the meat substitutes are great!–to swap out the meat for the meat substitute without people noticing. Yes, there would have to be coordinated effort at the national level to manage the transition for the ranching, meat-packing, dairy, and restaurant industries, but that coordinated effort will be impossible to implement unless there is strong public backing for it, and that backing can only come from millions of individuals making personal commitments to change. Because this change necessarily involves culture, it is also unavoidably political, which is precisely why the Republican operatives are trying to politicize it in ways that use that fact to enhance their power. We must, then, effectively encourage individuals to make commitments on food, not because those individual commitments will be sufficient, but because we will never get a coordinated effort to deal with greenhouse gas emissions from food otherwise.
Another factor to consider with respect to the impact of individual change has to do with economic impacts of changes. Even a relatively small downturn in demand will put pressure on producers, causing some to go out of business, others to change their business, and investors to shift their priorities, making it harder for the meat industry to access capital to sustain its operations. The Atkins Diet (may it live in infamy) put a lot of local bakeries out of business, and they didn’t just bounce back right away when diet fashions changed again. I don’t wish ill on workers in the meat-packing industry or on family ranchers, but a substantial level of individual commitments not to eat beef can move the industry much closer to a tipping point where coordinated intervention is needed because the industry’s economic model is no longer viable, even if only a relatively small percentage of the population has given up beef. To the extent that producers can be induced to buy into a transition out of their own economic interests, then the politics become substantially easier. There’s also other kinds of steps that might bring the meat problem closer to the refrigerator problem, like replacing cattle with bison, which has many complexities but which brings multiple environmental benefits without causing people to eliminate red meat from their diets or requiring ranchers to give up their way of life. Paying the price for humanely-raised-and-humanely-slaughtered, free-range-and-exclusively grass-fed bison would tend to reduce significantly the amount of red meat most people would consume. Individual consumers changing their consumption habits can start to create the economic infrastructure to make this sort of change available to more people.
Or maybe feeding seaweed to cows will take care of the methane problem . . .
You make excellent points. I do think that the potential change in our diets would be made more convenient by the availability of good, cheap plant-based meat substitutes–and encouraging or even subsidizing those alternatives may be part of the coordinated effort in the short term. Is there now political backing for that kind of thing? Maybe? But it’s worth exploring.
I also want to emphasize that my reaction was not just that reducing the amount of beef (particularly) that Americans eat is going to take coordinated effort (which it will) but that it would take a really massive change in habits to make a relatively small change in the outcome–as you say, new refrigerators and clothes-dryers are an easier problem in many ways. And the power-plant end of things, while technically difficult, is potentially far more effective and involves far fewer individuals making decisions as individuals. I’m convinced that the bulk of the effective decisions are that way: institutional changes made by interlocking institutions. Ultimately there are individuals making those decisions, of course, and individuals will be affected by them, but in a very different way than giving up hamburgers.
Thanks,
-V.
Digging a little deeper into the numbers, I might raise questions about the idea that this is a case in which “it would take a really massive change in habits to make a relatively small change in the outcome.” According to the report, if the dietary changes proposed were undertaken, the resulting reduction in GHG emissions from food would account for 24% of the U.S.’s required reductions from 2017 emissions levels under the Paris Agreement. That doesn’t seem to me to be a small change in outcome. (It’s worth remembering that, on the one hand, we don’t need to get to zero GHG emissions, just to an amount that is below the capacity of the carbon cycle to pull out of the atmosphere on an ongoing basis, getting the carbon cycle back into balance, but, on the other hand, we will still need to cut emissions further after 2030, which I think is the endpoint of the study’s timeframe.)
Also according to the report, beef represents only 9% of average calories consumed, and other meat and dairy is another 18%. Cutting beef by 90% and the rest by 50% would leave the two groups together comprising 10% of calories consumed, so 17% of caloric consumption would need to shift, pretty close to 1/6. Is changing 1/6 of one’s diet to reduce meat & dairy consumption a massive change of habits? The beef reduction on its own is only 1/12 of caloric consumption. People regularly make (but also fail to make) changes in their diet on this scale or larger for health reasons, so it’s not a magnitude of change that obviously exceeds human capacity. How should the relative sizes of change in habits be measured or assessed?
How should the relative sizes of change in habits be measured or assessed?
That’s an excellent question.
I would guess that the typical American eats meat at more than ten meals a week—probably four or five beef, maybe close to that many pork products, and then chicken or turkey at another four. And most of those, I suspect, have the meat as a significant part of the meal—not just as one thing in the pasta sauce, but as the entrée in itself. Plus eggs, cheese, and so forth… People would absolutely notice if they went from (say) seven meatless meals a week to fifteen. I don’t think 1/6 of the calories corresponds to 1/6 of the experience of eating, where it’s closer to—half? For many people, anyway.
I don’t happen to like the taste of beef, myself, but I rarely go for a whole day without eating some kind of meat—chicken, ham, pork sausage, lamb, turkey. I would guess I haven’t gone two consecutive meatless days in years. If I went to three meatless days a week, it would be a big change. Would I adjust? Yep. But I would absolutely notice.
Now, continuing to think about me personally, I could absolutely cut back on the amount of meat in my meals, particularly if meat-substitutes were comparable. If a veggie kielbasa had the very similar taste and texture to a pork kielbasa, then I wouldn’t notice at all. If my egg-and-sausage sandwich had sausage that was a different mix of animal-based and plant-based ingredients, I might be satisfied. If my pork chop were smaller and my portions of rice and peas bigger, I wouldn’t go hungry. If my chicken-broccoli-ziti in white sauce had a third less chicken, and somewhat less dairy, it wouldn’t be a huge change in the eating—although it would be a significant change of habit to cut up less chicken to put in the mix. There would be ways to make that change of 1/6 of the calories feel more like 1/6 of the experience of eating, certainly. But some of those ways require things that aren’t necessarily easy individual choices—although, even there, as you say, if people choose to purchase smaller pork chops, it’s possible the market would respond to make more of those chops available. It’s already much easier to eat lower-meat meals at restaurants than it used to be. And certainly the market seems to be pushing toward acceptable meatless burgers, if not yet (I think) chicken and pork products. Perhaps those will be next! But it’s more of a collective-action problem, isn’t it? When lots of people want to cut back on their meat consumption, it is much easier for individuals to do it.
I am comparing this sort of thing, in my mind, with converting industrial and commercial practices, which involve many fewer individual choices, for what seem to me to be equally substantial if not much larger payoffs.
Thanks,
-V.
The variability of diet is one of the things that makes it a difficult area for concerted action, isn’t it?
In my own experience, increasing engagement with cuisines that are less organized around meat, esp. Mexican and Indian, which has led me over time to develop a real taste for beans and lentils, had made meat-reduction seem like a smaller change of habit: eating less meat just means having bean quesadillas or spinach and lentils more often than I used to. If one doesn’t already have flexibility built in, the changes involved will be much harder to implement without an experience of disruption.
From a payoff standpoint, I think there are two reasons that meat and especially beef, continues to be emphasized.
One is methane. Recent recognition of rising methane concentrations and their significant contribution to global warming has led to a focus on the sources of methane pollution, which brings attention to cows (although of course oil and natural gas extraction is a larger and more readily addressed source . . . ). Because methane is so much more potent a GHG than CO2 and because it breaks down much more quickly in the atmosphere (10-20) reducing methane production will yield drops in GHG climate forcing faster than cuts in CO2.
The other is that meat production (and again, especially beef) has a vast environmental footprint in other respects in addition to greenhouse gas emissions. It’s very water-intensive, so beef-heavy diets amplify water crises. It’s also land-intensive, so beef production drives biodiversity loss. The habitat impacts also come back around to GHG concentrations from the other side, as intact (or restored) natural ecosystems tend to be significant carbon sinks, so as they are degraded, the earth’s capacity to sequester CO2 drops, which means that production of GHG has to drop even farther before it will lead to reductions in the concentration of atmospheric carbon.
The fact that global meat production has been steadily increasing for decades is also cause for concern. Even if emissions are dropping elsewhere, increasing emissions from meat production could erase those gains.
“The low-hanging fruit” approach to prioritizing action on climate makes strategic sense from a certain perspective, but as we get closer to “total social mobilization to prevent catastrophe” level of crisis, a “do all the things” approach becomes harder to avoid.
A last thought about the strategy here is that, with respect to food, if we want a significant change to take place 15-30 years from now with respect to GHG emissions from food, we have to push hard for change now, even if we don’t actually expect it, because we have to engage the 10-25-year-old cohort so that they, during their most flexible and adaptable years, can begin to make the cultural adjustments that will actually become the sustainable norms around the time their own children are teens. Hard to plan social change on that scale, though.