It is not news that the red meat industry has been one a cause of earth's environmental cancer for a few decades. Fore some people it will be news and others simply a confirmation of their believe that the meat industry is responsible for literal cancer.
A body of the World Health Organization, the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), released a monograph this week (26 October 2015) showing that processed meat can cause cancer and that red meat is probably carcinogenic to humans.
Some of us do not eat meat because we are conscious about the impact our consuming habits have on the planet. Not everyone thinks that saving the planet is not a good enough reason to set constraint on their daily lives (I personally prefer the argument
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In 2013, if we divide the total US population with the yearly consumption of meat we reach 114.3 kg (252 lbs). Of course this figure includes vegetarians, children and infants so the average consumption for an adult is in reality much higher. Believe it or not, this number is the consequece of a decline in meat consumption over the last 10 years. Out of the total red and poulty meat consumption 56% is red meat or 64 kg (141 lbs) per capita a year. This means that on average Americans eat 175g of red meat a day. With the new recommended diet this number should go down to 50g, so every year on average an American would consume 18.25 kg of red meat. In this scenario, the total red meat consumption is of 5.8 million tons a year as opposed to approximately 22 million tons today. This number would be even lower if we took into consideration that vegetarians and infants do not eat …show more content…
The natural reaction is to answer yes, because even if red meat is only a (large) fraction of total meat consumption, its production has proportionally the biggest impact on the environment. First, red meat requires a lot of resources to produce. One kilo of feedlot beef requires 15 500 L of water, about 7kg of grain and every kcal of beef requires 57 kcal of energy (mostly fossil). Even if range beef does not require grain and requires less energy per kcal, it still requires more water than their industrialized counterparts (even if the water footprints are completely different). These statistics reveal that red meat production and especially beef are eroding considerably our available natural resources: energy, water and