Small Change BILL MCKIBBEN
The Only Way TO have a COW
A call for America to divest its heart and stomach from feedlot beef
MAY I SAY —somewhat defen- sively — that I haven’t cooked red meat in many years? That
I haven’t visited a McDonald’s since col-lege? That if you asked me how I like my
steak, I’d say I don’t really remember?
I’m not a moral abstainer—I’ll eat meat
when poor people in distant places o=er
it to me, especially when they’re proud to
do so and I’d be an ass to say no. But in
everyday life, for a series of reasons that
began with the dietary scruples of the
woman I chose to marry, hamburgers just
don’t come into play.
I begin this way because I plan to wade
into one of the most impassioned fracases
now underway on the planet — to meat or
not to meat — and I want to establish that
I Do Not Have A Cow In This Fight. In
recent years vegetarians and vegans have
upped their attack on the consumption of
animal flesh, pointing out not only that
it’s disgusting (read Jonathan Safran
Foer’s new book) but also a major cause of
climate change. The numbers range from
18 percent of the world’s greenhouse gas
emissions to—in one recent study that
was quickly discredited— 51 percent.
Whatever the exact figure, su;ce it to say
it’s high: there’s the carbon that comes
from cutting down the forest to start the
farm, and from the fertilizer and diesel
fuel it takes to grow the corn, there’s the
truck exhaust from shipping cows hither
and yon, and most of all the methane that
emanates from the cows themselves (95
percent of it from the front end, not the
hind, and these millions of feedlot cows
would prefer if you used the word eructate
in place of belch). This news has led to an
almost endless series of statistical calcula-
tions: going vegan is 50 percent more ef-
fective in reducing greenhouse gas
emissions than switching to a hybrid car,
to grow corn that we feed to cows who
stand in feedlots and eructate until they
are slaughtered in a variety of gross ways
and lodge in our ever-larger abdomens.
And the fact that the product of this exer-
cise “tastes good” sounds pretty lame as
an excuse. There are technofixes—engi-
neering the corn feed so it produces less
methane, or giving the cows shots so they
It won’t do away with the need for radically cutting emissions,
but it could help get the car exhaust you emitted back in high
school out of the atmosphere.
according to a University of Chicago study;
the UN Food and Agriculture Organiza-tion finds that a half pound of ground beef
has the same e=ect on climate change as
driving an SUV ten miles. It has led to a lot
of political statements: the British health
secretary last fall called on Englishmen to
cut their beefeating by dropping at least a
sausage a week from their diets, and Paul
McCartney has declared that “the biggest
change anyone could make in their own
lifestyle to help the environment would be
to become vegetarian.” It has even led to
the marketing of a men’s flip-flop called
the Stop Global Warming Toepeeka that’s
made along entirely vegan lines.
Industrial livestock production is es-
sentially indefensible—ethically, ecolog-
ically, and otherwise. We now use an
enormous percentage of our arable land
eructate less violently. But this type of tail-
pipe fix only works around the edges, and
with the planet warming fast that’s not
enough. We should simply stop eating
factory-farmed meat, and the e=ects on
climate change would be but one of the
many benefits.
