Sustainability question

Over the last few years, a closer examination into the true effects of animal-sourced foods on global climate change has many scientists changing their position, including one of the panelists of the original IPCC, who admits that ruminant-methane production can’t be counted next to other anthropogenic sources of CO2 emissions like transport, production, and energy generation.

Ty Beal from the Department of Environmental Science and Policy at UC Davis and co-author of the nutrition study, also co-authored a review published around the same time entitled: “An argument against drastic limitation of livestock in the food system”.

Beal et al. quite succinctly explain why it’s understood to be no longer necessary at all to limit animal agriculture to limit greenhouse gas emissions, and that most environmental harm done from the large-scale application of animal husbandry is because of poor husbandry practices, not because the animals themselves are somehow naturally damaging to the world. Earth has always hosted mass herds of ruminant grazers, and they have a natural place in the ecosystem.

When well-managed, livestock farming contributes to ecosystem management and soil health, while delivering high-quality foodstuffs through the upcycling of resources that are otherwise non-suitable for food production, making use of marginal land and inedible materials (forage, by-products, etc.), integrating livestock and crop farming where possible has the potential to benefit plant food production through enhanced nutrient recycling, while minimizing external input needs such as fertilizers and pesticides.

Moreover, the impacts on land use, water wastage, and greenhouse gas emissions are highly contextual, and their estimation is often erroneous due to a reductionist use of metrics.

The authors note that bizarrely, the discussion over the degree to which animal-sourced foods are included in a world food system has become an ideological, and not an intellectual, battleground, with many large corporate interests becoming involved in the conversation through large financing inputs, particularly into institutions like Lancet which suggest limiting global meat consumption heavily. WaL

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