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Chicken Eaters Will Inherit the Earth
For some reason, members of PETA are under the impression that “meat is the #1 cause of global warming.” They’ve got banners that chide Al Gore for ingesting animal products, but according to Salon, they haven’t done their homework:
As Phil Gutis, the Natural Resources Defense Council’s communications director and an erstwhile PETA member, says, ‘I wouldn’t look to PETA for science.’ The No. 1 cause of global warming is burning fossil fuels for electric power.
That said, raising livestock does create global warming emissions—cattle burp up a whole lot of methane, which is bad news for the environment. The good news is that, according to a study in the science journal Earth Interactions, chickens are a lot more energy efficient. They don’t emit staggering amounts of methane, and they only require “2 pounds of grain to produce a pound of meat, compared with about 6 pounds of grain for a feedlot cow and 3 pounds for a pig,” writes Salon.
And believe it or not, American vegetarians who consume dairy and eggs are emitting more greenhouse gases than nonvegetarians who consume poultry, dairy, and eggs but not red meat:
‘Astonishingly enough,’ says study coauthor Gidon Eshel, a Bard College geophysicist, ‘the poultry diet is actually better than lacto-ovo vegetarian.’ In other words, a roast chicken dinner is better for the planet than a cheese pizza. ‘If you need to eat dead animals, poultry is the way to go,’ says Eshel, a vegan.
If your love for cheese outweighs your concerns about global warming, this article won’t place too high on your reading list—but at the very least, it’s worth checking out for the bizarre photo of a (rubber?) chicken looking quizzically at a slab of raw meat that’s being grilled over a flaming planet Earth.
Posted by | Wednesday, October 24, 2007 at 4:37pm | 6 comments
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although i agree with PETA on many things
i take everything they say with a grain of salt (cooking term pun intended). for every bright person in their group there is a fanatic fruitcake
I've been trying to do more chicken and vegetarian. So this is good to know. Although I still drink about 1/2 gallon of milk a day which I'm assuming can't be good.
I'm still wondering what the impact is of all the processed foods that are in the typical (of vegans I've met) diet.
This kind of makes me scratch my head a bit... how could someone who eats eggs and cheese create more greenhouse gasses than someone who eats poultry, eggs, and cheese? I think this article is assuming that people replace poultry with eggs and cheese (perhaps even pound for pound), but this often isn't true, at least in my case (and in the case of any lacto-ovo who thinks about their health at all). I don't find that I eat more cheese as a lacto-ovo than I did as a meat-eater... I fill that spot in my meals with other products such as soy or legumes.
The Salon article raises some interesting things for investigators to examine:
Since it brought into question the earth-friendliness of soy products due to deforestation and land-use issues, it would be nice to see, in terms of caloric benefits for humans vs. deforestation, how land needs for generating soy products compare with those of livestock.
Also, because turkey meat has become such a popular choice for people trying to eat healthy, I wonder where it stands compared to chicken of beef in terms of greenhouse gas production.
Also, when accounting for all of the uses of beef tallow and other parts of cows, I wonder if chickens still compare favorably to beef in terns of their earth-friendliness. If we were to not use cow parts for gel caps and chondroitin sulfate, would we be using materials that are better or worse for the environment? Do chicken bi-products have comparable benefits to those of cows?
Anyone who pays any attention to PETA should go watch Penn & Teller's Bullshit episode that investigates them. Bet you didn't know that PETA kills almost 2/3rds of the animals that they rescue.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l9ijLu...
Thanks, now I have a reason to invest in El Pollo Loco. :-)
BTW some us sympathize with alternate PETA groups such as People who enjoy Eating Tasty Animals: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/People_E...