"Even if your steak was reared in the UK, there's a good chance it was fed on food grown on land that was once rainforest" is the message of a report by Friends of Earth ("What's Feeding Our Food?"), discussed on this month's issue of The Ecologist.

It is a chilling message, showing that our appetite for meat (and the growing trend in China) is turning huge areas of rainforest in Mato Grosso into monoculture soybeans farming at record speed. 

Apparently, the area of land required to produce soybeans for Europe's livestock farming industry since 1996 is roughly equal to the amount of rainforest that has been cut down in Brazil to make way for plantations since then.

In the last 15 years, production of soybeans has skyrocketed by 170% since it became the preferred animal protein feed since the BSE crisis. The large soybeans plantations are detrimental to local communities because they're industrially run and require very small numbers of staff (on average 1 employee per 500 acres).

I think that now more than ever before a true commitment to fight climate change means to eat less meat. The carbon footprint of meat is simply astronomical. Livestock production is a major source of emissions, using valuable resources such as drinking water (often in countries such as Australia where these resources are a more valuable commodity than they are at the country of consumption, e.g. UK). Then for good measure the feedstock is produced largely from depleting rainforest (greenhouse emissions from change of use of land amount to more than all our transport emissions combined).

A low-carbon footprint diet is to a large extent an "almost vegetarian" diet. Eating red meat is an archaic and barbaric habit that stems from our most primary instincts as hunters. After all, each time you are taking a bite at a steak you're munching a bit of muscle. How disgusting is that? It's positively pre-historic. Besides it clogs your arteries and it is a major factor in causing cancer (because you're eating less veg if you're appetite is satiated with animal protein). Obviously clogging one's arteries was not a problem when men lived to the age of 30 before the Stone Age, but in our day and age it does matter once you hit the age of 80 and beyond.

I can see the roaring abuse and rotten eggs coming my way from opinionated food critics and red meat fundamentalists, but it is true.

A sensible low-carbon footprint diet derives animal protein exclusively from fish and low-fat dairy. A switch to a much more significant consumption of fish should make us rethink sustainable fisheries and creative ways to regenerate fish stocks quickly to keep up with demand. But that's another topic altogether.

It's a fact that a vegetarian person using a 4x4 (SUV) as sole means of transport has a much lower footprint than a meat-eater who cycles. Here's some food for thought for all meat-eaters out there.

Brunella Bell

brunella@carbonica.org

CARBONICA - PROTECTING THE WORLD'S RAINFORESTS 

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