What’s the beef with chicken?
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Version 0 of 1. There’s a paradox about meat. Britain’s pastoral landscape is more pleasing to the eye than hedgeless expanses of wheat and oilseed rape; and it doesn’t take a genius to see that cattle and sheep grazing out in the fields have a more fulfilling life than an intensive chicken cooped up indoors. Yet we are repeatedly told that beef and lamb are vastly worse for the environment than intensive chicken. Similarly, our instinct tells us that animals grazing natural pasture are likely to produce meat that is better for our health than chickens bred exclusively for weight gain, and fed a diet of grain, soya and chemical additives they would never have encountered in the wild. Yet again, we’re told that white meat from chicken is healthy whereas red meat from beef and lamb will give us heart attacks, diabetes, cancer and even (it’s hard to believe) a low sperm count. Adding to the relentless onslaught against beef in particular comes a paper this week from US scientists who find it is 10 times more damaging for the environment than any other meat. How can we make sense of this? And what does this mean for farming in the UK where 73% of farmland is under grass, mostly for sound environmental reasons? The main environmental problem for cattle and sheep is that they produce methane, while chickens do not. Methane is a potent greenhouse gas but it breaks back down to carbon dioxide and water and does not add to atmospheric carbon because the amount of carbon dioxide produced is exactly the same at that removed by photosynthesis to grow the crops the cattle eat. The US study was carried out on cattle in dirt-based feedlots eating a diet of maize and soya. These are important human feeds, yet cattle are designed to eat grass, the one crop we humans cannot digest. Cattle have a lower feed conversion rate than chickens, but they can also eat arable byproducts like brewer’s grains, sugar beet pulp and human inedible seed cake; chickens cannot – they are in direct competition with humans for high-quality grains. Globally, grasslands still contain more carbon than all other sources combined. Yet, continuous arable cropping steadily puts carbon into the atmosphere, adding to global warming. And as soils lose carbon they become vulnerable to erosion and desertification. They also produce crops more vulnerable to disease and pest attack, which require pesticides that are killing pollinating insects. But what about meat and health? Well, it’s the exact opposite of what we’ve all been told. Beef and lamb from grazing animals has a healthier balance of saturated fats than grain-fed beef and a very healthy omega-6 to omega-3 ratio of less than 2:1. Grain-fed chicken has a very unhealthy ratio of omega-6 to omega-3 ratio of up to 14:1. The unhealthy balance of omega-6 to omega-3 in modern diets has been linked to heart disease, cancer and dementia. But there is one overriding issue no one seems to have considered. Beef and sheep can also eat clover, a legume that puts huge amounts of nitrogen into the soil naturally. We use a million tonnes of nitrogen fertiliser in the UK every year, which is causing pollution costs for society that are two to three times higher than its commercial benefit to farmers. Nitrogen fertiliser is also produced from natural gas. Global reserves stand at 51 years. If today’s children are to eat at all in the future, their food will have to be grounded in pasture-based farming. |