In late April 2021, Epicurious, an online recipe and food resource announced that they would be removing all beef recipes from their site and social media. Their Instagram caption stated:
“Today, we announced that we’ve cut out beef. It won’t appear in new Epi recipes, articles, newsletters, or on social going forward. We know that some people might assume that this decision signals some sort of vendetta against cows- or the people who eat them. But this decision was not made because we hate hamburgers (we don’t!). It’s about sustainability and being pro-planet. Our mission is and will always be the same: to inspire home cooks to be better, smarter, and happier in the kitchen.”
Epicurious is owned by parent-company Conde Nast. A media conglomerate best-known for its publications including Vogue, The New Yorker, and GQ. Due to its large influence, and the fact that the beef industry is continuously defending the truth about its sustainability, many people were upset by their public announcement.
While the platform had already made this decision a year prior, the announcement added insult to injury and caused many beef advocates to raise their voices and speak the truth about the sweeping generalization Epicurious made about the beef industry.
Individuals filled up social media platforms to talk about the sustainability of the beef industry, one that is highly controversial. Not only were farmers and ranchers defending their stance, but even the Washington Post chimed in regarding how “Ditching meat isn’t the answer for climate change.”
This sensitive topic has caused many issues within the agriculture industry, raising the question, “Is eating beef sustainable?”
While large companies, such as Epicurious, would have you believe that eating beef isn’t environmentally friendly, the answer isn’t so black and white.
The truth is, the beef industry, and all animal agriculture sectors, have improved their sustainability greatly over the decades, and are continuing to conduct research to further improve the planet-friendly requirements consumers’ demand.
The fact is sustainability can mean different things to different people.
The typical animal agriculture arguments include mostly talks about methane and GHG production, concepts of which have been largely debunked by experts such as Dr. Frank Mitloehner, who discussed how the transportation industry contributes much more GHG emissions than animal agriculture in an interview with Alltech last year:
“But comparing livestock to, let’s say, transportation, or power production and use, or the cement industry or so on is a dangerous exercise. And the reason is that the main greenhouse gas from livestock is methane, and methane undergoes cyclical conversion into CO2. So, it is atmospheric CO2 going into plants, going into the animal, and then that goes back into the atmosphere as CO2 again. So, this is a relatively short life cycle. As long as you don’t increase livestock herds, as long as you keep them constant, you’re not adding new additional carbon to the atmosphere. Okay? This is really important. As long as you do not increase livestock herds, you’re not adding new additional carbon to the atmosphere.
But every time you use fossil fuel, you extract carbon from the ground in the form of oil, coal, and gas. You are burning it, and you’re converting that into CO2, and that CO2 has a lifespan of 1,000 years. Meaning every time you use fossil fuel, let’s say, by driving a car, you are adding new greenhouse gases to the existing stock that’s already there. So, livestock is cyclical and its impact is relatively short-lived versus fossil fuels, (which) are not cyclical. That’s a one-way street, from the ground into the air, and its impacts are long-lived.” (Livestock’s Environmental Impact: Misinformation about greenhouse gases)
And, sustainability is achieved in different ways by different operations.
For example, my herd is quite small with only three head. On the small pasture, we have to graze, we work hard to ensure a complete diet, which means the heifers get grain, hay, and grass. We do this to ensure they aren’t overgrazing because we can’t rotate them yet, and to create healthier, more efficient cattle. We mow our yard and bring the clippings to our cattle, which we hope they consume and will then spread seed, to suppress the noxious weeds that overtook the pasture while it was uninhabited. The water we use to irrigate with is recycled back into the water cycle, and all this prevents the pasture from becoming a fire hazard. To my operation, that is how we are sustainable, and we continue to find ways to improve upon that.
A larger operation has the technology, staff, and resources to create a more advanced sustainability model. They have computers and nutritionists that workday in and day out to create completely efficient feedstuffs for the animals to consume, which allows them to grow healthier and faster without compromising the well-being of the animal. They can recycle water within their own operation more than once, and they use by-products from other agricultural commodities to feed their animals- creating a zero-waste industry.
We both have our sustainability models, and while some things are similar, as in we are always improving upon this, we are both very different in our approaches.
“Sustainable” is a term that has a few definitions. These definitions fall into three pillars- Social, Environmental, and Economic. In 2005, the UN sought to define sustainability through these pillars, and how they all intertwine, and thus a graphic was created to help demonstrate the need for all three in order to truly be “sustainable” and exist long-term.
Cainthus.com, a computer vision and artificial intelligence company specializing in the dairy industry and based out of Ireland and California, shares some important thoughts and questions on this sustainability triangle and what sustainability means.
“Is environmental sustainability about land use, biodiversity, emissions, or more? Does economic sustainability mean cheap food or farmers earning enough to farm? Does social sustainability mean socially sustainable from a consumer or producer perspective? Who pays for sustainability – producer, consumer, government, all of these, or something else? Then there are the subjective/ideological positions that must be considered, such as certain groups not believing that animals should be used in any capacity to provide us with food (which creates problems across all three pillars by removing a valuable sustainability tool from our armory).”
According to them, only two pillars can exist at the same time, and it’s best to select the top pillar based on which one has the least amount of subjectivity- economic, followed by environmental. With this, though, raises the question of how realistic that is. They use the EU version of the Green New Deal as a classic example:
“The EU’s Green New Deal won plaudits globally for the foresight it displayed in dealing with the ecological impact of agriculture. However, these policies will result in lower levels of European food production, necessitating greater dependency on imports from places like Brazil and Argentina. Rewilding in the EU at the cost of greater loss of Amazon and Cerrado habitats may not be a price worth paying.”
Cainthus brings up an excellent point. Sustainability has a pillar that focuses on long-term economic health, and relying on other country’s imports means that, as an industry, we are not sustainable. Keeping jobs here, and self-sustaining our own people is highly crucial to the longevity of a nation.
Another important fact to touch on is how the United States is one of the most sustainable countries for beef production. We have lowered our GHG emissions and continue to develop technologies and practices that are more efficient and healthier for our animals and planet. Other countries do not get to share this same pride, so relying on their products may mean we are further harming the environment.
Cainthus adds, “Others believe that removing animals from our food system will deliver greater environmental sustainability, but this is questionable given the important role animals play in nutrition, up-cycling waste, enabling food production on marginal land, and providing soil fertility in the form of urea and manure.”
So, while trendy and “woke” companies continue to criticize an industry that is responsible for providing food for the world, without any obvious attempts to speak to a farmer or rancher about the truth or trying to partner with the agricultural industry to find a solution, ranchers and industry experts are working hard to be better stewards of the land.
And yeah, any logical animal ag expert will accept that there is a lot to improve upon when it comes to the sustainability of our industries, but just like other industries who are given the grace of time to find a better solution to their negative environmental contributions(everyone has negative impacts), we only ask that consumers allow us time to research and find new ways to be environmentally friendly, instead of canceling us.
