Burger with a side of climate change

by: Ellie Hogg

A burger and fries, a family restaurant, maybe a glass of Coca-Cola: an american culinary
mainstay that rivals the comfort of Apple pie, and packed with a punch of protein and flavor. Its
delicious, and youre not the only one to think so: in 2012, the United States consumed 52.2
billion pounds of meat. But that meat on your plate isnt just an enjoyable dinner.
The burger youre about to eat took a long time to get there, and that doesnt necessarily mean
that your server was slow, or that the meat was overcooked. That big juicy burger is the result of
years of growth and many miles travelled, of hard labor and heavy feeding, and all of this work
doesnt go without making a massive impact on the natural world.
The process of that burger reaching its final destination, your plate, begins, as you might expect,
on a farm, but it isnt quite that simple.
According to a explorebeef.org, a website run by farmers and dedicated to educating nonfarming folks on the process of beef farming, Beef production begins with ranchers who
maintain a breeding herd of cows that nurture calves every year. When a calf is born, it weighs
60 to 100 pounds. Over the next few months, each calf will live off its mothers milk and graze
grass in pasture.
After the cows are fully weaned, and briefly grass or grain-fed, they are taken to auction and
sold, then taken to feed-yards where they are kept for the majority of the remainder of their
lives, before being taken to processing and packing plants, where they are slaughtered, and
quickly become something more closely resembling the burger on your plate.
From birth to slaughter, and even beyond, as they are distributed for retail sale (what you find in
the grocery story or at a restaurant), beef cattle will move around quite a lot during their lives,
and the transportation necessitated for that movement from farm to farm and, eventually,
slaughterhouse, emits high levels of carbon dioxide, which contribute to the growing issue of
global climate change.
According to a National Public Radio story about meat consumption in the United States, in
order to make a single quarter-pound hamburger, accounting for the cattle transportation, it
takes 1,036 Btus for feed production and transportation.
However close you are to a cattle farm, the burger on your plate is not likely to be one of the
same cows you drive by on the way to work every day. Even in Washington County, in a state
that boasts 113 beef-producing farms, the beef that you eat from the grocery store or a
restaurant most likely came from another part of the country.
The cows that you see around here are not going to end up in your grocery store. They go the
way that the system is set up; they finish out west explains Dr. Sara Bier, an Earth Science
professor.

She continues, We have tons of cows in Washington County, but they are all shipped out west
for their final feeding so just that tractor trailer traffic alone of shipping hundreds or thousands
of cows across the country and then back [has a huge impact].
Beir teaches at Emory & Henry College in Washington County. She prefers to go by Dr. Sara,
though, because, as she puts it Dr. Beir is [her] father. Beir makes frequent reference to her
father, who was also a science professor, and, like Dr. Sara was for many years, a vegetarian.
I was a vegetarian from the time I was seven to when I was 28 mostly because I love animals
and I didnt like the idea of killing them and eating them, but my dad was a vegetarian because
you can feed ten times as many people with the grains that would be put into feeding a cow,
says Dr. Sara.
Whether you like it or not, a plethora of issues comes on the plate along with your burger, and
they go beyond just the carbon emissions from transporting the beef cattle both when they are
still alive and when they are being shipped in meat form for retail purposes.
Carbon Dioxide isnt the only potentially harmful greenhouse gas that comes as a result of beef
production; methane gases are an inevitable product of having so many animals producing so
much waste from eating so much grain. As anyone who has been around cows knows, you can
often smell them before you see them. Those odors arent just a gross smell, theyre also
contributing to global climate change.
It isnt simply an issue of contributing to climate change either. Dr. Beir (the father, not Dr. Sara)
was right in that meat production causes massive use of other resources. Resources as simple
but important as grain.
The same National Public Radio story that discussed the resources required for the end product
of a quarter-pound burger also explained that 6.7 pounds of grain are needed for that same
single burger, along with 52.8 gallons of water. All of that makes for a pretty heavy plate to go
along with that same quarter-pounder.
So what is the answer, then? Your plate has been piled high with a number of issues that
operate as side-dishes to that deliciously complicated beef patty. While it is not necessarily the
case that Americans should cease eating red meat altogether, a significant decrease in
consumption would help greatly in rectifying the issues that come along with it, and perhaps
have an even bigger impact on aiding the environment than cutting back on driving.
Professor Tim Benton, at the University of Leeds, explains that The biggest intervention people
could make towards reducing their carbon footprints would not be to abandon cars, but to eat
significantly less red meat.
But whether you choose to bite the burger or not is your decision. The spread of issues is laid
out before you, piping hot and ready for consumption. What will you choose?