Is your lunch destroying the planet?

[andrewducker]

From.

Comments

[lpetrazickis.livejournal.com]

Huh. I would not have expected lamb to be more intensive than beef.

[channelpenguin.livejournal.com]

yeah that strikes me as odd too.... surely it's pork production that's truly industrial - but they grow faster than beef cattle, I suppose. UK Beef cattle are still mainly left ou t in fields and not hevaily grain-fed/fattened, I thought??? Maybe I'm out of date... Lambs are over and done inside a year and sheep are pretty much left to themselves in fields to eat grass (and maybe turnips and stuff in winter) - at least in the UK... I think??? Anyone know better???

[alitheapipkin.livejournal.com]

The report is based on US agriculture not British.

[alitheapipkin.livejournal.com]

The pork and poultry v lamb and beef thing is interesting - on the one hand, sheep and cows are ruminants so they produce more greenhouse gases by way of methane, and pigs convert plant matter to protein more efficiently, but on the other, pigs and poultry need cereal feed whereas cows and sheep can be reared on grass alone. I tried to find a similar graph for UK produced food but haven't managed it yet.

[bemused-leftist.livejournal.com]

In the US, 'grass-fed beef' is something special; ordinary beef is fed in feedlots on grain.

[kerrypolka.livejournal.com]

I don't think it is usually, but I know it is something that varies drastically by how you do it (for example, eating NZ lamb is overall more carbon-friendly than British lamb, even including the air miles, because the way lamb is raised in NZ is so much more efficient than in the UK). If they picked a particularly bad region that would skew the results quite a bit.