'Died of Consumption'

Many years ago, while walking in a graveyard, I saw a centuries-old tombstone that said “Died of Consumption.” I made a joke, saying, “This fellow ate too much.” I knew that “consumption” was what they called “tuberculosis” back then owing to the way the disease wasted away your energy from within. But I remembered that again while I was reading the article in the Scientific American February 2009 issue The Greenhouse Hamburger by Nathan Fiala and what flashed in my mind was our planet, marked with a tombstone that said the same thing: “Died of Consumption.” How could we eat so much, so fast? How did we manage to eat to an extent that we also cooked the planet in the process?

Fiala’s article sliced it for us in intellectual bite sizes for easy digesting. The story of eating meat, especially beef, has contributed greatly to the changing nature of our atmosphere. Since many of those who are not convinced about climate change do not want to blame people, let us just blame nature. We blame nature because she decided to include in her laws that some kinds of gases, like carbon dioxide and methane, when they reach our atmosphere, will just stay there and prevent the heat from escaping the planet. These gases are naturally produced in practically every activity that makes up modern living, including the production of food.

The whole shebang involved in delivering those delicious beef, chicken or pork to their final destination in your mouths involves maintaining livestock farms (feeds and other energy needs of a farm), transporting them, refrigerating them). We can also blame cows because a nasty greenhouse gas — methane — is naturally emitted by cows as part of their digestive process. All these activities make for a greenhouse gas load that is second (18 percent) only to energy production (21 percent). And you can blame the cows for being claustrophobic. If you ever noticed, cows cannot live in little cages. They need a lot of land to graze on. This means more forests have to be cut to make way for more cows to end up as steaks or burgers. That is what large chunks of the Amazon are being cut for. They also need lots of feeds, which livestock farmers have to grow on land that would otherwise have been planted to trees that absorb carbon dioxide instead of emitting them.

Fiala traced the carbon footprint of a half a pound of a burger and it is equivalent to the greenhouse gases produced by a 3,000-lb car for 10 miles. He wrote that if we consider a pound of beef produced even in the most efficient system, it could still generate the equivalent of 14.8 pounds of CO2 — pound for pound, more than 36 times the CO2-equivalent greenhouse gas emitted if you just chose to eat asparagus. A pound of pork generates the equivalent of 3.8 pounds of CO2 and a pound of chicken generates 1.1 pounds of CO2-equivalent greenhouse gases.

Of course, you would say that half a pound of vegetables would not really give you as much energy. But do we really eat this much beef for the energy it gives us or for pleasure or is it because it is ingrained in our cultural heritage?

The numbers from the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) in the article give something about the reason behind eating more beef. There is some sort of beef-lover’s guide map included in the article. I call it a Moo map. The numbers go from Argentina consuming as much as 120 pounds of beef per person per year, 92 pounds in the US to only about three to nine pounds for the average Filipino. It seems like the appetite for beef is not necessarily driven by a need for energy requirements but as a result of higher incomes. The article also said that “beef consumption per capita is growing, particularly in Asia, because of economic development.” So you can blame your income, too, for climate change.

I can now hear meat lovers saying that oft-repeated phrase: “I did not work my way up to the food chain just to become a vegetarian.” The planet is not really asking us to give up meat altogether. As Rajendra Pachauri, the chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), said in an interview after the IPCC received the Nobel Peace Prize (shared with Al Gore), we should just eat less meat — it is healthier for you and you could help make the planet breathe a little easier. You could eat less meat or you can just blame nature for everything. 

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