{"id":1839,"date":"2015-11-25T08:54:04","date_gmt":"2015-11-25T07:54:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.ofcourseimright.com\/?p=1839"},"modified":"2015-11-25T08:55:36","modified_gmt":"2015-11-25T07:55:36","slug":"why-i-dont-eat-beef","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ofcourseimright.com\/?p=1839","title":{"rendered":"Why I don’t Eat Beef"},"content":{"rendered":"

Those of you who know me well know that I don’t serve beef at home and do my best to avoid it on the road.\u00a0 I don’t normally talk about why; most people assume it’s for religious reasons, because I also avoid pork.\u00a0 But it’s not for religious reasons, nor is it for health reasons.\u00a0 It’s for the environment.<\/p>\n

Back in 1999 the Union of Concerned Scientists came out with a book entitled The Consumer’s Guide to Effective Environmental Choices<\/a>.\u00a0 This was based on a report that was roughly entitled, \u201cPaper or Plastic: Who Cares?\u201d\u00a0 The number 1 thing that UCS said that one could do for the environment was to drive less and buy an efficient car.\u00a0 The number 2 thing one could do was to eat less meat, and most specifically beef. Well now CNN has an article<\/a> about just this.\u00a0 Borrowing a graph:<\/p>\n

\"Carbon<\/p>\n

In that article, the author calculates that eating 1.27 lb of beef has the same carbon footprint as a 70 mile drive in a car that gets 21 mpg.\u00a0 In other words, that number goes up with a more efficient vehicle. He argues that to help arrest the rate of global warming we need to eat less meat.<\/p>\n

Even back in 1996, when the first UCS report came out, the one thing I could do for the environment was eat less beef. (I’ve since curtailed my driving, and Christine and I have reduced to 1 vehicle.)\u00a0 The bad news is that lamb is probably just about as bad (wah!) and I will probably reduce but not eliminate my lamb consumption.<\/p>\n

The above graph only looks at carbon footprint, and probably not all of it.\u00a0 1 lb of beef requires about 1,800 gallons of water<\/a>.\u00a0 When I lived in California, this number seemed unsustainably large, even while we were being hit with El Ni\u00f1o after El Ni\u00f1o.\u00a0 In addition, cattle also cause grazing damage<\/a>, although it may be possible to mitigate those effects.<\/p>\n

Pigs are a different matter.\u00a0 I stopped eating pork products when several Colorado counties became awash in pig effluvia.\u00a0 It wasn’t scientific, but I figured I could do my part by simply reducing demand for the animal.<\/p>\n

I’ve refrained from writing this sort of article.\u00a0 This was a personal choice I made, and I really didn’t push it on anyone.\u00a0 I’m doing so now \u2013 just this once \u2013 for my daughter, so that she and her generation have just a little less damage from our generation to repair.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Those of you who know me well know that I don’t serve beef at home and do my best to avoid it on the road.\u00a0 I don’t normally talk about why; most people assume it’s for religious reasons, because I also avoid pork.\u00a0 But it’s not for religious reasons, nor is it for health reasons.\u00a0 … Continue reading “Why I don’t Eat Beef”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":172,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[17,30],"tags":[508,63,509,507],"class_list":["post-1839","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economics","category-humanity","tag-beef","tag-environment","tag-global-warming","tag-meat"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ofcourseimright.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1839","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ofcourseimright.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ofcourseimright.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ofcourseimright.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/172"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ofcourseimright.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1839"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/ofcourseimright.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1839\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1841,"href":"https:\/\/ofcourseimright.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1839\/revisions\/1841"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ofcourseimright.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1839"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ofcourseimright.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1839"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ofcourseimright.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1839"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}