Red Meat or Chicken? Why It's Wise to Stay Away from Both

You see, people often tell me that they've given up eating red meat out of concern for animals, the environment, or their health (or all three). Of course all efforts to make the world a kinder and less polluted place should be applauded. But here's the thing: cutting out red meat while still eating chicken doesn't address the whole problem.

Here's why: Both choices -- beef and chicken -- badly damage the environment, so choosing one or the other is sort of like the difference between driving a huge SUV and a Hummer. That's also why I'm a little baffled when some environmental organizations say that cutting out beef is advisable, but eating other meats is "relatively" ok. It's really not.

On the issue of global warming, all animal agriculture is a nightmare, relative to producing grains and beans. In a 400 page report from the United Nation's Food and Agricultural Organization, Livestock's Long Shadow, scientists conclude that the business of raising animals for food is responsible for about 18 percent of all warming -- in fact meat causes about 40 percent more warming than all cars, trucks, and planes combined.

That is in part because turning animals into meat requires many stages of (energy intensive and polluting) production (i.e., transporting feed, animals, and meat; running feed mills, factory farms, and slaughterhouses; refrigerating carcasses during transport and in grocery stores -- chickens are at least as energy consumptive as cattle for all these stages), compared to plant foods.

Environmental Defense calculated that if every American skipped one meal of chicken per week and substituted vegetarian foods instead, the carbon dioxide savings would be the same as taking more than half a million cars off of U.S. roads. Imagine if we dropped all meat from our diets altogether.

And it's not just global warming, of course: In a story about chicken waste pollution, the New York Times reported in November that "[a]lthough the dairy and hog industry in states near the bay produce more pounds of manure, poultry waste has more than twice the concentration of pollutants per pound." I assume that's in part because poultry are given a lot more drugs than pigs and cattle -- because they're kept in even worse conditions and thus require more drugs.

When you have the attorney general of a state like Oklahoma battling poultry producers over the industry "wreak[ing] havoc in the 1-million-acre Illinois River watershed, turning it into a murky, sludgy mess," it seems pretty clear (to me) that environmentalists might want to think again about putting that product into even a "relatively" favorable category.

So it makes more sense to cut down on meat altogether, in favor of a more plant based diet, rather than trying to sort out which meats are relatively better or worse. And we can do so in stages.

For example, after looking at the health and environmental problems associated with chicken, beef, and pork, New York Times food writer Mark Bittman (in his superb new book Food Matters) suggests eating exclusively plant-based foods until 6 p.m., and then eating whatever you want for dinner. I know people who have tried this sort of plan, and they find -- quickly -- that they're eating more and more vegetarian food, even during the times when they eat whatever they want. Writes Bittman, "By reducing the amount of meat we eat, we can grow and kill fewer animals. That means less environmental damage, including climate change; fewer antibiotics in the water and food supplies; fewer pesticides and herbicides; reduced cruelty; and so on. It also means better health for you."