BY WILL GLOVINSKY

In print | September 18, 2008

You went for the beef burrito at Sharples. You had your doubts, but a friend assured you that if you closed your eyes you would taste Chipotle. When you sit down at the table, however, another friend (or is he?) gives you a nasty look and hisses, “Eating meat causes global warming.”

You pause, burrito in hands and bite. It isn’t Chipotle, but it does force you into one of the running debates on American excess and emissions. What have you done? Your acquaintance, however impolite, has done his homework. In 2006, two University of Chicago professors conducted a study on the greenhouse gasses emitted to support different diets. Vegetarianism not surprisingly came in first, with the smallest carbon footprint required to feed one person. A diet including poultry was next, and then the “mean American diet,” a little of everything (think food pyramid), and virtually tied for last were fish diets and red meat-heavy diets. The geophysicists who conducted the survey compared eating red meat frequently to driving an SUV.

The basic science behind these findings lay in the transfer of energy from one level of the food chain to the next. At the bottom are autotrophic producers, like plants, which combine inorganic resources with an energy source (the sun). Herbivores like cows eat these producers, and carnivores eat, among many other things, beef burritos.

Generally, only about ten percent of one trophic level’s energy is passed on to the next. The rest is used for homeostasis, becomes poop, or goes toward body parts undesirable to carnivorous Americans. Also worth mentioning is the refrigeration required to transport and keep most types of meat. Therefore, to consume the most energy efficient diet humans would have to relinquish their cherished perch at the top of the food chain and eat exclusively primary producers.

Before you guiltily put the burrito down and offer a mea culpa, however, you should place the issue in context. One consideration is that raising livestock can play an integral part in an ecologically conscious farm. After all, we have so many wholesome veggies only because cows so charitably donate the manure required to provide crops with lots of nitrogen. This does not offset the undeniable inefficiency of energy transfer, but it’s something to think about.

More importantly, you might argue with renewed conviction that livestock has become something of a whipping boy in the race to make America more “green.” The adverse impact on global warming is only the most recent addition to the slew of reasons — it’s cruel, it’s unhealthy, it makes you smell bad — for which we are told we should not eat meat. Is your acquaintance simply rehashing his old frustration with your eating habits?

The key here is that livestock remains just one piece in the puzzle (but one that has an already contentious mantle). What if you had sat down at Sharples, introduced yourself as a native of suburban DC, and were promptly berated for your presumed excessive driving? If a vegetarian can tell a beefeater off, should pedestrian urbanites be able to attack car owners with impunity? (You don’t have to live in the suburbs…) Or should the student recently back from study abroad find herself accosted over her emissions-heavy air travel?

Yes, the science supports the vegetarians. But the United States is a rich country, and therefore we have a lot of ecologically unfriendly luxuries. We drive cars, use air conditioners, eat what we want, travel frequently and to distant places, and our homes are big and at times superfluous. We are all guilty of polluting the planet, so let’s not claim righteousness because we abstain from one such inculpating practice (although kudos if you do).

If you choose to be ecologically conscious, as we all should be, then you can do it in your own way. Don’t eat meat? Great! If you do, maybe cut it back a little, remember to turn your fan off when you leave the room, and simply forgo all dubious looking burritos.

Will is a first-year. He can be reached at wglovin1@swarthmore.edu.

« RETURN TO OPINIONS

« PREV ARTICLE | NEXT ARTICLE »