Let’s Have Better Meat, Not No Meat: An Open Response To The Guardian

The Guardian recently published an article claiming to debunk the 18 biggest arguments in support of eating meat and encouraging everyone to become vegan. In addition to a number of falsities throughout the article, The Guardian is taking a black-and-white, reductive approach to considering how meat consumption impacts the environment and the most effective ways to improve its sustainability.

This isn’t surprising considering that The Guardian takes funding from the Open Philanthropy Project, a group with a well-established anti-meat agenda. As part of the funding, The Guardian regularly publishes articles that support its stance against livestock production. This is very clearly a conflict of interest for a news source.

Bottomline: people are not going to stop eating meat. A study from the Humane Research Council even suggested that as many as 85% of vegans return to consuming animal foods within one year. Although some consumers may be eating less meat or integrating plant-based meals into their diets, most consumers are still putting meat on their plates and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future. 

This isn’t surprising, either. Meat provides nutrients that cannot be found in plants, offers a more bioavailable (better absorbed by the body)  source of protein compared to plant-based sources, and provides us with a satiety that is seriously lacking in meatless diets.  

So, instead of trying to convert 9 billion people to a meatless diet, why don’t we instead try to build a new system for raising livestock that improves ecosystems, provides food security, and reduces its reliance on outside inputs. 

Here’s why we shouldn’t throw the bovine out with the bathwater and why we should be converting consumers to regenerative eaters instead of vegans.

1.) Going vegan won’t magically “fix” agriculture’s impact on the environment

We don’t have a livestock problem, we have a farming problem. Since the era of agriculture where then-Secretary Earl Butz told farmers to get big or get out, or food production system has focused on one goal alone: yield. As a result, our yield-obsessed food system has compromised environmental outcomes, food quality, food safety, and farmers’ access to reasonable income as well as their mental health. The get big or get out ethos has been one of the primary drivers of consolidation in agriculture, which has proven to be a fragile and unreliable system during the recent pandemic.

Swapping out meat and other animal foods for plant-based burgers and other meat substitutes won’t fix the underlying problems in our food system. Telling consumers to just switch out meat for substitutes would be like telling consumers to simply install different upholstery in their vehicles instead of exploring ways to reduce their fossil fuel dependence. To improve agriculture’s relationship with the environment and human health, we need to encourage farmers to adopt different practices throughout the entire system -- not just in livestock production. Impossible Foods claims its soy burger can save the planet but it isn’t providing consumers with any information about how those soybeans were grown. Did farmers use cover cropping? No till drilling? An abundance of chemicals like pesticides and herbicides? 

We don’t need people to quit eating meat. We need people to start asking questions about how their food was grown no matter what they may be eating.

2.) It’s not the cow, it’s the how

Meat itself isn’t evil, it’s the method by which we farm it (feedlots and CAFOs-Confined Animal Feeding Operations) and how we prepare it (breaded and deep-fried), and what we eat alongside it (fries and a large soda). Vilifying a food that humans have been eating for our entire existence makes little sense. Regenerative agriculture seeks to address many of the environmental issues that arise from raising livestock in high-density confinement on diets that are not appropriate.

This is where it becomes important to differentiate how cattle, pigs, and chickens are raised. The Guardian claims that over 96% of soy is fed to cows, pigs, and chickens. Lumping these three types of livestock together, however, is a major misstep. Although cattle are fed some grain in feedlots, 86% of what they consume are upcycled plant  materials. It’s also important to note that cattle begin their life on pasture eating forage before finishing the last few months of their lives in a feedlot. Conversely, pigs and chickens spend their entire lives in confinement and consume diets that often consist entirely of grain.

3.) Not everyone thrives on a meatless diet 

Contrary to what The Guardian asserts, people cannot obtain all their nutrition needs from eating plants alone. Meat and seafood contain more protein per calorie and per gram, especially if you consider bioavailability). Getting adequate protein while moderating energy from carbs and fat is critical to satiety, optimizing body composition and avoiding metabolic syndrome. Unless you are eating a LOT of vegan protein powders a “plant-based” diet sourced from industrial agriculture is a sure way to ensure you are always hungry and will consume a lot more energy to get the nutrients you need, including protein. Read more about how not all proteins are created equal here and read about what would happen nutritionally if we all went plant-based here.

When it comes to pregnant women and children, a vegan diet is often a poor or even dangerous choice. Recently, a group of doctors from The Royal Academy of Medicine in Belgium have put forward a proposal to make feeding babies a vegan diet illegal. The biggest concern about a plant-based, limited meat diet for babies is that it is likely inadequate in protein, and fat, the critical nutrients needed for brain development. There simply isn’t evidence to support that vegetarian protein sources like milk, eggs, soy, and legumes are adequate substitutes for meat. But, there is evidence to support that they are not equivalent in terms of nutrition, particularly for a developing brain.

Finally, in many developing regions, livestock are a critical resource for women and children. Women are often legally prohibited from owning land but allowed to own livestock, making  them a key resource for economic independence.

4.) There are serious environmental issues with conventional crop cultivation that The Guardian fails to address

Plant-based protein is being marketed as a panacea for all our environmental problems, but none of the companies pushing these products are addressing how their sourcing or cultivation practices will be any different from what Big Food does today. Impossible Foods and Beyond Meat are selling veggie burgers made from soy and peas grown in systems that rely on the same practices that have created many environmental harms like soil runoff, dead zones in the gulf, and the loss of pollinators.

And as the recent pandemic has shown, our current supply chain is incredibly fragile. Swapping out burgers for highly-processed plant-based substitutes at fast food restaurants does nothing to address much broader problems plaguing our food system. Some of these include securing better living wages for farmers and agricultural workers, achieving greater food security at the local level, and reconnecting consumers with the true cost of food production.

5.) Regenerative agriculture is about so much more than sequestering carbon.

According to The Guardian, grass-finished beef is overhyped. It suggests that in the very best cases carbon sequestration offsets only 20% to 60% of total emissions from grazing cattle. It’s unclear which factors The Guardian is including in its “total emissions” analysis. But discounting the entire livestock industry because of this fact makes no sense and assumes that our choices are to either keep producing beef in the status quo system or to not produce it at all. 

If good grazing management can offset 20% to 60% of emissions from grazing cattle then isn’t that something to be celebrated? By this approach, The Guardian is suggesting that we should dismantle anything that isn’t capable of off-setting 100% of its emissions. It also fails to address the lack of carbon sequestered in conventional cropping systems that rely on tillage and exorbitant amounts of chemical inputs that destroy soil biology. If we are unable to grow crops in a system that results in a carbon neutral product would The Guardian suggest that we stop growing them, too?

It isn’t just about carbon either. Although capturing carbon in the soil through good grazing management and different cropping practices is a main tenet of regenerative agriculture, it’s also about decentralized food production, encouraging diversified farm enterprises, and making farms more resilient. The fewer outside inputs that farmers rely upon to grow food, like fertilizer, feed, and chemical inputs, the lower the overall carbon footprint will be for the operation. Good grazing management helps ranchers improve the amount of grass available for their animals, which cuts down reliance on feeding hay and other supplements in the winter. More grass and greater diversity helps improve ecosystem function overall through encouraging greater biodiversity, increasing water holding capacity int he soil, improving land that we can’t crop by building topsoil, and providing better incomes for farmers compared to commodity-based beef production. More grass also often means being able to raise more animals on the same piece of land.

Support the case for better meat

Sadly, this isn’t the first instance that a major media outlet has attacked meat. There was a recent article in The Washington Post entitled “Meat is Horrible”, once again vilifying meat, that was full of inaccurate statements about the harm cattle impose on the land, how bad it is for our health, and how it should be taxed. 

The upcoming book Sacred Cow: The case for (better) meat explores the nutritional, environmental, and ethical aspects of meat consumption and why getting rid of meat would be a major mistake. To preorder your copy of the book, which launches July 14, click here. Pre-orders come with a ton of bonus materials and fun surprises.