Beef can be raised sustainably
With pollanistas everywhere urging the public to stop eating meat as a way of slowing global warming, it’s refreshing to see people who know a thing or two about raising meat sustainably speak out in defense of one of our most nutritious foods.
Not long ago, Eliot Coleman, the acclaimed produce farmer, was roused to argue the merits of grassfed beef in the pages of Grist. More recently, Bill Niman, he of the famous beef and pork, similarly argues in the online Atlantic that it’s not meat per se that is fouling our climate with greenhouse gases, but meat raised in the industrial mode, with lots of corn and soybeans.
Niman makes the further point that “the greatest portion of meat’s global warming contribution comes from deforestation in Latin America, India, and Asia, domestically-produced meat is unconnected to those emissions.”
In other words, meat can be raised sustainably if done so on grass using methods approved by nature. And I can’t think of anyone who makes that argument better than this beef farmer in Georgia. If you have any interest at all in how beef should be raised, you should give this film a few minutes of your time. He says it all.
If you want to do something about global warming, make sure your meat is raised on naturally grown pasture. Get out of your car and walk. Fight coal-fired power plants. Save the Amazon rain forest. Plant a tree.
We are engaging the concerns of a hungry planet--slowly--right here in our kitchen garden in the District of Columbia, about a mile from the White House.
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