Farm Better and Feed the World…. Without Farmers?

Posted on August 25, 2014 by bovidiva

Where’s the beef…without ranchers?

The New York Times is putting on a “Food for Tomorrow: Farm Better. Eat Better. Feed the World” conference in NY next month. This is a great idea – we all need to think more about our food choices and how we’re going to produce enough food to supply the population in 40 years time, when we’re predicted to have another 2-3 billion mouths to feed.

So just as a debate on the future of healthcare would include presentations from doctors and surgeons; or a discussion about how education could be improved would showcase teachers and lecturers; this conference is going to feature farmers, meat processors and animal and crop scientists, right?

No. Firstly, we have Michael Pollan, author and journalism professor, famous for the suggestion that if you can’t pronounce it, you shouldn’t eat it. Looks like quinoa, gnocchi and beignets are off the lunch menu? When participating in a recent radio panel discussion with Mr. Pollan it was frightening to note how uninformed he appeared to be about the realities of livestock production versus the activist rhetoric (or indeed, the common courtesies of polite conversation).

Secondly, Danielle Nierenberg. I had the pleasure of being on a panel in Washington DC with Ms Nierenberg when she was still on-staff at HSUS. She was vehemently against the use of technology in livestock production and claimed that all housed or confined cattle were kept in filthy disease-ridden conditions. She further claimed that, contrary to the World Health Organization’s information on the topic, bird flu did not exist in small backyard poultry flocks in Asia and that biosecurity in large poultry operations was responsible for its spread.

Thirdly, a spokesman from the Union of Concerned Scientists. A pseudo-scientific organization that is opposed to so-called industrial agriculture, GMOs, antibiotic use in agriculture, agribusiness, the USDA nutrition guidelines…. the list goes on.

Amongst the remaining 14 speakers, there is a self-proclaimed activist, a chef, a politician, 3 reporters, 2 academics, and finally, two representatives from the retail sector – Panera Bread (known most recently for their “EZ-chicken” campaign which was rescinded after outrage amongst agricultural advocates) and Walmart. The sole representative of the farming community is an organic dairy producer with a herd of 85 Ayrshire cows from Wales.

I’m not suggesting that none of these people have valid opinions on how food should be produced – as consumers, we all do. However, the fact that conventional food producers and processors aren’t involved in the discussion makes me wonder whether this is simply an opportunity for those who most often criticize the current food system to shake each other’s hands, nod happily in agreement and make proclamations about how things “should be”, without discussing the practicality or feasibility of these solutions with those who farm the land and raise livestock every single day.

Almost inevitably, the conclusions coming out of this conference will be that you should reduce consumption of processed and conventionally-produced foods, and that if you are going to eat a small amount of meat, it should be organically-raised. That’s a beautiful shiny picture – I wonder what it will mean to the single mother trying to feed four children on a $10,000 salary; or the livestock producer who simply cannot make a living producing organic cattle?

Starvation isn’t sustainable for anybody – to feed the world in 2050 we need real solutions that improve crop and animal performance while reducing resource use. Solutions that are provided by farmers and ranchers working together with geneticists, nutritionists, consultants, veterinarians, crop scientists, soil scientists and meat scientists to improve the productivity of their farm.

To bastardize the old saying: “Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day; teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime; give a man a panel of 17 food “experts” and you’ll feed him for…..?” Cynically, I’d suggest the answer may be less than one meal.

Beef is Killing the Planet…and Elvis is Riding a Rainbow-Belching Unicorn

Posted on July 23, 2014 by bovidiva

My Twitter feed just exploded. Yet another study has been released claiming that if we all just gave up beef, the planet would be saved, Elvis would come back from the dead, and rainbow-belching unicorns would graze the Northern Great Plains. I may have exaggerated a little with the latter two claims, but the extent of media coverage related to the paper “Land, irrigation water, greenhouse gas and reactive nitrogen burdens of meat, eggs and dairy production in the United States” seems to suggest that the results within are as exciting as seeing Elvis riding one of those unicorns…but they’re also about as believable.

Much as we’d all like to stick our fingers in our ears and sing “La la la la” whenever anybody mentions greenhouse gases or water footprints, we cannot deny that beef has an environmental impact. Yet, here’s the rub – so does every single thing we eat. From apples to zucchini; Twinkies to organically-grown, hand-harvested, polished-by-mountain-virgins, heirloom tomatoes. Some impacts are positive (providing habitat for wildlife and birds), some are negative (nutrient run-off into water courses), but all foods use natural resources (land, water, fossil fuels) and are associated with greenhouse gas emissions.

So is this simply another attack on the beef industry from vegetarian authors out to promote an agenda? Possibly. The inclusion of multiple phrases suggesting that we should replace beef with other protein sources seems to indicate so. But regardless of whether it’s part of the big bad vegan agenda, or simply a paper from a scientist whose dietary choices happen to complement the topic of his scientific papers, the fact remains that it’s been published in a world-renowned journal and should therefore be seen as an example of good science.

Or should it?

I’m the first to rely on scientific, peer-reviewed papers as being the holy grail for facts and figures, but there’s a distressing trend for authors to excuse poor scientific analysis by stating that high-quality data was not available. It’s simple. Just like a recipe – if you put junk in, you get junk out. So if one of the major data inputs to your analysis (in this case, feed efficiency data) is less than reliable, the accuracy of your conclusions is….? Yep. As useful as a chocolate teapot.

Feed efficiency is the cut-and-paste, go-to argument for activist groups opposed to animal agriculture. Claims that beef uses 10, 20 or even 30 lbs of corn per lb of beef are commonly used (as in this paper) as justification for abolishing beef production. However, in this case, the argument falls flat, because, rather than using modern feed efficiency data, the authors employed USDA data, which has not been updated for 30 years. That’s rather like assuming a computer from the early 1980’s (I used to play “donkey” on such a black/green screened behemoth) is as efficient as a modern laptop, or that the original brick-sized “car phones” were equal to modern iPhones. If we look back at the environmental impact of the beef industry 30 years ago, we see that modern beef production uses 30% fewer animals, 19% less feed, 12% less water, 33% less land and has a 16% lower carbon footprint. Given the archaic data used, is it really surprising that this latest paper overestimates beef’s environmental impact?

The authors also seem to assume that feed comes in a big sack labeled “Animal Feed” (from the Roadrunner cartoon ACME Feed Co?) and is fed interchangeably to pigs, poultry and cattle. As I’ve blogged about before, we can’t simply examine feed efficiency as a basis for whether we should choose the steak or the chicken breast for dinner, we also have to examine the potential competition between animal feed and human food. When we look at the proportion of ingredients in livestock diets that are human-edible (e.g. corn, soy) vs. inedible (e.g. grass, other forages, by-products), milk and beef are better choices than pork and poultry due to the heavy reliance of monogastric animals on concentrate feeds. By-product feeds are also completely excluded from the analysis, which makes me wonder precisely what the authors think happens to the millions of tons of cottonseed meal, citrus pulp, distillers grains, sunflower seed meal etc, produced in the USA each year.

Finally, the authors claim that cattle use 28x more land than pigs or poultry – although they acknowledge that cattle are raised on pasture, it’s not included in the calculations, which assume that cattle are fed feedlot diets for the majority of their life. This is a gross error and underlines their complete ignorance of the U.S. beef industry. Without cow-calf operations, the U.S. beef industry simply would not exist – efficient use of rangeland upon which we cannot grow human food crops both provides the foundation for the beef industry and creates and maintains habitats for many rare and endangered species of plants, insects, birds and animals.

Want to know how to reduce the environmental impact of food production overnight? It’s very simple – and it doesn’t involve giving up beef. Globally we waste 30% of food – and in developed countries that’s almost always avoidable at the consumer level. Buy the right amount, don’t leave it in the fridge to go moldy, and learn to use odd bits of food in soups or stews. Our parents and grandparents did it out of necessity – we can do it to reduce resource use and greenhouse gas emissions; and take the wind out of the sails of bean-eating anti-beef activists.

We’re Off to Eat at Chipotle, the Chipotle Burrito of Oz

Posted on June 27, 2014 by bovidiva

Another day, another jalapeño in the salsa of Food With Integrity spin from Chipotle. After their recent decision to source grass-fed beef from Australia, citing a lack of supply from US ranchers; Texas Agriculture Commissioner Staples yesterday praised Chipotle for their willingness to discuss the matter. Yet in a world where companies can be made or broken by PR, the likelihood of Chipotle Chairman Steve Ells responding to Staples’ queries regarding their beef choices with “Our mind is made up, we’re not prepared to discuss it further.” was highly unlikely. Instead, their defensive response to Staples simply stated that they were happy to engage in dialogue.

Dialogue is great, but note that it doesn’t actually mean that any decisions will change. After all, I’m happy to dialogue with opponents of GMO crops and vaccines, but have any of those discussions made me change my stance on the safety, efficacy and importance of these technologies? No.

Rather than being applauded for their willingness to debate, Chipotle should instead be questioned about the apparent incompatibility between their Food With Integrity slogan, and their beef choices. As stated in the response to Staples, Chipotle only uses 23% of the beef on a carcass, relying on other buyers to provide a market for the remainder. Yet as we strive to feed an ever-increasing population using fewer resources and with less waste, wouldn’t it be more sustainable for Chipotle aim to use as much of each carcass as possible? After all, authentic Mexican food uses many different cuts, organs and variety meats – shouldn’t Food With Integrity derive more than chips and salsa from its supposed region of origin?

As discussed by California ranchers here, the issue appears not to be related to a scarcity of US beef per se, but rather beef at a price that Chipotle wants to pay. Given their claims of support for US beef producers, paying grass-fed ranchers the premium that they need for their production systems to be economically viable would show more integrity than importing beef from overseas. Ranchers should not be expected to operate at a loss for the privilege of supplying Chipotle with a premium product, of which three-quarters will be discarded.

I recently had a Twitter conversation with a follower who asserted that when assessing sustainability (economic viability, environmental responsibility and social acceptability), we should put “people and planet” ahead of “profit”. I disagree, as I firmly believe that all three have to balance – if any one is prioritized, the business will not achieve long-term sustainability. Yet in this instance, Food With Integrity appears to demote all three (while attempting to maintain Chipotle’s profit margin):

Reduced economic viability for US beef producers;
Increased environmental impact of shipping beef from over 8,000 miles away;
Reduced social acceptability for Chipotle’s brand within the agriculture industry.

Planning to eat at Chipotle this weekend? I’m willing to bet you’re not a US beef producer.

Do Moms Have Instant Beef Credibility?

Posted on November 14, 2013 by bovidiva

I spoke at the International Livestock Congress back in January 2012, and at the end of the day, had the pleasure of listening to a couple of distinguished industry colleagues wrapping up the day’s talks in Q&A format. The conversation went thus (with names changed to spare the blushes of the individuals concerned):

Dr. R: “Jude Capper talked about the importance of having credible industry spokespeople to communicate with consumers – how do you suggest that we improve the image of beef sustainability?”

Dr. S: (hitches up his pants, stands up straight): “Well, Jude Capper is credible because she is female…” (pause while the shoulders and eyebrows of 50 or so female graduate students in the audience almost hit the ceiling) “…and she’ll be even more credible when she has children.”

If any one of those graduate students had a gun, a knife or even a sharpened pencil, I think it’s a safe bet that Dr. S would not still be on this earth – the air was so thick with “How dare that chauvinistic old man SAY that?!” it was like spending a weekend in a cigar bar. Yet Dr. S was absolutely right (although he’d probably have fewer voodoo dolls created in his image if he’d explained his statement) – female scientists, especially those who have children, are trusted by female consumers more than the traditional scientific image of an older man in a white lab coat. Why? Well it’s all about how we relate to others. We’re more likely to trust people who seem more like ourselves (age, ethnic group, profession, socioeconomic class) than those with whom we perceive we have little in common. It’s therefore not surprising that recent research (graphs below) shows that we trust our friends and families more than we trust the media, TV shows (take that, Oprah!) or politicians.

I’m excited to announce that I’m gaining credibility by the day…pound by pound…literally. At almost 7 months pregnant, the most popular question I have at conferences is still “How do I communicate this information to the consumer?”, but it’s swiftly followed by “When is your baby due?”. My baby bump has given me more opportunities for conversations about the importance of beef in pregnancy nutrition with people in airports, on planes and in the grocery store in the past few months than in the rest of my life to date – and I haven’t been the person starting the conversation.

So what does this mean for communicating with the consumer? Even in these enlightened times, women still make the bulk of food-buying decisions, so we need to specifically target the female consumer . In almost every talk I do, I urge farmers and ranchers to put photos, videos and status updates on Facebook and Twitter so that they can reach their crazy cousin, unsure uncle or doubting daughter, living in a far-off city, with positive messages about agriculture. This time, I’m widening the net – if you happen to be male*, please also ask your wife, girlfriend, daughter, mother, granddaughter or niece to post and let the female consumer know why we do what we do every day, why beef is a great choice for our families, and why we spend time for caring for baby calves almost as if they are our own children. If you’re female… well, have at it! There are already some excellent blogs out there from women in the livestock industry (e.g. DairyCarrie, The South Dakota Cowgirl, Feedyard Foodie, Mom at the Meat Counter, The Real Farm Wives of America and The Pinke Post) – let’s push back against all the tide of anti-meat or anti-conventional agriculture misinformation with more real-life experiences from the parents of the next generation of farmers, ranchers and consumers.

*Note that I am NOT suggesting that only women should blog or post on social media! This is simply about making that female-female connection that, whether we like it or not, does promote an instant degree of trust

Scare Tactics – Why Do So Many “Public Health Experts” Promote Fear vs. Food?

Posted on September 30, 2013 by bovidiva

How many of us are motivated by fear every single day? We’d like to think that we’re lucky enough to live in a society where we don’t feel afraid. In contrast to inhabitants of many war-torn regions we are unlikely to be shot as we drive to work; when we’re sick we have the luxury of modern medical attention (Obamacare not withstanding); and we can buy almost any food we fancy, at any time of year and feel safe in our food choices… or can we?

Food safety is an underlying assumption of dietary choice within the USA. We buy food based on three major factors: taste, price and nutrition. Safety isn’t a defining factor in choosing between the cheese quesadilla, the chef’s salad or the T-bone steak because most of us have rarely experienced significant negative health effects as a consequence of food choice (aside from the annual Thanksgiving food coma).

Yet so many food commentators, self-proclaimed experts (I read Michael Pollan therefore I am…) or bloggers appear to exist for the sole purpose of instilling consumer fear. Take this recent article in Salon – 9 reasons why we should fear eating steak – apparently it’s riddled with antibiotics, full of heavy metals and likely to give us all mad cow disease. I’m not going to turn this blog post into a thesis, so today will simply address one of the issues raised in the article, and examine the others in future posts.

I’m a scientist by training. In my career to date, I’ve learned that the more controversial the topic, the more important it is to base claims on sound data that is peer-reviewed and published in order to gain trust. If I present data that challenges perceptions, the first questions are always “Is this published in a peer-reviewed journal? Who funded it? How do I know it’s correct?” That is not to say that science is the only way to communicate – it’s not. Yet when making claims, it’s important to have science, or at least logical and biologically-feasible arguments, to back them up.

Yet, if we’re asking a question, even if it’s a loaded question that may instill fear or doubt into the reader, apparently scientific foundation is redundant. Could combining coffee and bagels in the same meal cause impotence? Is breast cancer caused by the rise in popularity of household pets sleeping on their owners’ beds? Is your tiredness really the result of too little sleep, or could it be all the chemicals that “big food” uses every single day? Hey, I’m just asking! Not making a claim, not saying that X + Y = Z, just throwing the thoughts out there. But having read them, how many of us now are thinking about our sexual performance, the potential ill-effects of Fluffy the cat, or how we really do seem to be more tired nowadays? (note that these really are examples that I have invented, I know of no scientific foundation for any of them).

Possibly the most damaging line in the Salon article contained no data. No scientific foundation. Just a question:

Could Ractopamine, added to the food supply in 1997 with little public awareness¹, be contributing to skyrocketing rates of obesity and hyperactivity in children?

The FDA approved the use of Ractopamine in swine in 1999. It’s added to the diet of finishing pigs, improving feed efficiency and partitioning more feed nutrients into lean meat rather than fat (as demanded by today’s consumer). Effectively it allows us to produce more pork using fewer resources, but it has been linked to behavioral changes in pigs.

Most of us are aware that childhood obesity is a huge issue (pardon the pun). Many of us know children that have been diagnosed as having attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). So does Ractopamine cause these? It’s as likely as suggesting that eating alfalfa hay is going to make us lactate like dairy cows.

Maximum residue limits (MRLs) exist to make sure that there are no human physiological effects of veterinary drugs in meat, milk or eggs from treated animals. Regulatory bodies including CODEX assess potential human effects of a drug residue in animal products by multiplying the average residue level in food by the average intake. For example, if the residue level is 2 micrograms per 100 grams and the average person eats 300 grams of that food each day, the intake would be 6 micrograms. This intake is then compared to the acceptable daily intake (ADI) – the quantity that could be eaten every day for a lifetime without human health risk. This is usually the intake that would have a physiological effect, divided by a safety factor of one hundred. The MRL for Ractopamine in meat is 0.25 parts per million (0.00000025 grams per gram) with an ADI of 1.25 micrograms per kg of bodyweight per day.

If we examine the average pork intake for a 10 year old child in the USA (detailed calculation below) we see that they’d have to eat 13.3x more pork than the daily average to even equal the ADI – remember that’s the intake at which we would expect no physiological effect. For Ractopamine to have a physiological effect, the ADI would have to be increased one-hundred-fold. So the average 10-year old child would have to eat 1,330x more than the average child’s intake of pork, equivalent to 35 lbs of pork per day, every single day (the average adult only eats 48 lbs of pork in a year), for Ractopamine to have a health effect. My little nieces adore pork sausages, but they are pushed to eat two (approx 2 oz) in a day, let alone 35 lbs worth!

Still think that we can link Ractopamine use to obesity and ADHD? We can’t prove a negative, but it’s as tenuous a link as suggesting that we could drown in a single drop of water. So why are public health “experts” like Martha Rosenberg using fear tactics to scare us rather than extolling the positive contributions that high-quality animal proteins make to the human diet? Surely there’s no agenda there….is there?

¹Note that all the data relating to this is freely-available on the internet – the “little public awareness” line is simply more fear-mongering.

Details of Ractopamine calculation

Let’s examine an average child’s intake. The average 10-year-old boy in the USA weighs 32 kg (71 lbs) and needs 34 grams of protein each day. In the USA, meat contributes about 40% of protein intake and about 21% of that comes from pork. That means, on average, a 10-year-old boy would eat about 12 g of pork per day (2.9 g protein).

If Taylor eats 12 g of pork each day at the maximum residue limit of Ractopamine (note that this would be unusually high), he’s consuming 12 g x 0.25/1,000,000 = 0.000003 g Ractopamine. His ADI = 1.25 micrograms x 32 kg bodyweight = 40 micrograms, or 0.00004 grams. That’s 13.3x higher than his intake. So a child could eat 13.3x more pork than average, every single day, and not be expected to have any physiological effects. For ingested Ractopamine to have a physiological effect he would have to eat 100 times that amount – 16 kg, or 35 lbs of pork per day. To put that into context, the average adult eats 48 lbs of pork in a year.

Are We Increasing Resource Use and Taking Beef from the Mouths of Hungry Children?

Posted on August 26, 2013 by bovidiva

Can we really afford to lose the sustainability advantages that productivity-enhancing tools provide?

Beta agonists have been a hotly debated topic in the media recently, after it was suggested that the use of Zilmax™ might be related to welfare issues in supplemented cattle (see note 1), and Tyson announced that they would not purchase cattle produced using the feed supplement.

As the global population increases and consumer interest in food production sustainability continues to grow, we know that to maintain the continuous improvements in beef sustainability that we’ve seen over the past half-century, we need to ensure that economic viability, environmental responsibility and social acceptability are all in place. All cattle producers obviously have the choice as to what tools and practices are used within their operation, but what are the big picture environmental and economic implications of removing technology use from beef production? Let’s look at two tools – beta agonists and implants (see note 2 below for an explanation of these tools).

In a traditional beef production system using both tools, we’d need 85 million total cattle (see note 3) to maintain the U.S. annual production of 26 billion lbs of beef (see note 4). If we removed beta-agonists from U.S. beef production we’d need an extra 3.5 million total cattle to support beef production; losing access to implants would require an extra 9.9 million cattle; and removing both tools would increase total cattle numbers to 100 million (a 15 million head increase) to maintain the current beef supply (see note 5).

If we need more cattle to maintain beef supply, we use more resources and have a greater carbon footprint.

If we removed beta-agonists, we would need more natural resources to maintain U.S. beef production:

More water, equivalent to supplying 1.9 million U.S. households annually (195 billion gallons)
More land, equivalent to an area just bigger than Maryland (14.0 thousand sq-miles)
More fossil fuels, equivalent to heating 38 thousand U.S. households for a year (3,123 billion BTU)

If we removed implants, we would need more natural resources to maintain U.S. beef production:

More water, equivalent to supplying 4.5 million U.S. households annually (457 billion gallons)
More land, equivalent to the area of South Carolina (31.6 thousand sq-miles)
More fossil fuels, equivalent to heating 45 thousand U.S. households for a year (3,703 billion BTU)

If we removed both beta-agonists and implants, we would need more natural resources to maintain U.S. beef production:

More water, equivalent to supplying 7.3 million U.S. households annually (741 billion gallons)
More land, equivalent to the area of Louisiana (51.9 thousand sq-miles)
More fossil fuels, equivalent to heating 98 thousand U.S. households for a year (8,047 billion BTU)

Beef production costs would also increase if these tools weren’t used. Feed costs would increase by 4.0% without beta-agonists, 8.1% without implants and 11.0% without both tools. These costs ultimately would be passed on through every segment of the beef supply chain (including the retailer or food service segment) and ultimately onto the consumer, making beef a less-affordable protein choice.

In a world where one in seven children currently do not have enough food, keeping food affordable is key to improving their health and well-being. If we use productivity-enhancing tools in one single animal, the extra beef produced is sufficient to supply seven schoolchildren with their beef-containing school meals for an entire year. Is that a social sustainability advantage that we can afford to lose?

Although animal welfare is paramount for all beef production stakeholders from the cow-calf operator to the retailer, it is possible that the consumer perception of productivity-enhancing tools may be harmed by negative comments on media articles relating to Zilmax™. There is no doubt that we will need to use technologies within food production in order to feed the growing global population, yet we need consumer acceptance of both the technologies that we use, and the reasons why we use them, in order to continue to secure market access for U.S. beef.

Consumer acceptance therefore needs to be a key component of our mission to continuously improve beef sustainability. That does not mean giving in to the uninformed whims of those who blithely assert that we could feed the world by returning to the production systems of the 1940’s or ’50s, but does offer an opportunity to reach out, listen to and engage in a dialogue with our friends, family, customers and colleagues about the advantages that technology offers. We have a bright future ahead, but only if we keep the torch alight.

To read more conversation about the use of technologies within beef production (including the real-life experiences of feedyard operators who use these tools) and for facts and figures relating to beef production, please check out the following websites: Feedyard Foodie, Ask a Farmer, Facts About Beef, and the U.S. Farmers and Ranchers Alliance.

Footnotes

1) Merck Animal Health have since pledged to conduct a thorough investigation into the issue and have temporarily suspended Zilmax™ sales in the U.S. and Canada.

2) Beta agonists are animal feed ingredients that help cattle maintain their natural muscle-building ability and add about 20-30 pounds of additional lean muscle instead of fat. Implants (sometimes called growth promotants or growth hormones), are placed into the ear and release hormones slowly, helping cattle maintain natural muscle-building ability while also decreasing the amount of fat gained.

3) Includes beef cows, calves, bulls, replacement animals, stockers and feedlot cattle plus calves and cull cows from the dairy system.

4) Although this is a considerable amount of beef, it’s still not enough to fulfill current demand for beef in the USA and overseas.

5) This work was presented as a poster at the Joint Annual Meeting of the American Dairy Science Association and American Society of Animal Science in Indianapolis, IN in July 2013. The poster is available for download here.

Are We Producing More Food…and Feeding Fewer People?

Posted on July 18, 2013 by bovidiva

I’m ashamed to admit that the picture to the left is of the lunch table that a media colleague and I left last week – after spending an hour lamenting the fact that in the US, 40% of food is wasted (30% globally). Admittedly, that waste isn’t all down to restaurant portions (in our defense, we both had to fly home, so doggie bags weren’t an option) – however, according to FAO data here, consumer waste accounts for anything between 5% (in Subsaharan Africa) and 39% of total waste (North America and Oceania). The difference (anything from 61% – 95%) is made up from losses between production and retailing.

Losses from production to retail comprise by far the biggest contribution to waste in the developing world, which makes absolute sense – if food is your biggest household cost and hunger is a constant and real danger, the concept of wasting purchased food would seem ridiculous. In the developing world, a myriad of factors play into food insecurity including low agricultural yields, lack of producer education (particularly for women, who are often the main agricultural workers), political instability and military conflict (Pinstrup-Andersen 2000). However, possibly the biggest threat to food security is a lack of sanitary and transport infrastructure (Godfray et al. 2010) – building a milk pasteurization plant is a great opportunity to improve shelf-life, but can only be effective if producers have the facilities to refrigerate and transport milk. Improving tomato yields can reap economic dividends, but if they are transported to markets packed into plastic bags on the back of a bicycle, the wastage is huge. I’m not going to pretend I have the solutions to global food wastage, but what can we do in our own households?

Just as our grandparents learned during WWI and WWII – when food is scarce, you make the most of every single drop of milk or ounce of grain. Yet in the modern developed world, we can afford to waste almost 2/5 of our household food through not understanding expiration dates (cheese does not spontaneously combust into a listeria-ridden ooze at midnight on the day of the expiration date); throwing away the “useless” parts of food waste (radish leaves and wilted celery are actually really good in soup); or simply buying more than we need. In a recent study of greenhouse gases associated with US dairy production, the carbon footprint of a gallon of milk was increased by almost 20% simply because of the amount of “old” milk that consumers poured down the sink each day.

To go back to the picture above, it’s tempting to blame the restaurants – portion sizes tend to be huge, so in this carb-conscious world, it’s not “our fault” if we forgo the last 500 calories by leaving half a plateful of potato chips – they should have just served a smaller portion in the first place, right? Well, maybe. If we’re feeding dairy cows or beef cattle and seeing more than 5-10% feed unconsumed, we’ll reduce the amount fed. I’m sure that exactly the same practice would pay dividends in the restaurant world, and I’d be willing to bet that they could charge exactly the same price.

I spend most of my time myth-busting, showing that the modern beef and dairy industries are far more efficient than the farming systems of 40 or 70 years ago and that we now produce more food using far fewer resources. However, are we really feeding more people if we’re wasting 40% of our food? To suggest that we return to a practice from the WWII era feels almost heretical, but here’s an idea – rather than defining “sustainable” systems as those producing artisan cheeses from heirloom breeds cared for by hemp-wearing liberal arts graduates, why doesn’t every restaurant (or suburb) have a small herd of backyard pigs? Collect the waste food, boil it for 30 min to avoid disease issues, feed to pigs, produce bacon. What could be better? Admittedly, my mother country has banned this practice (I’m beginning to wonder if anything will be permissible in Europe soon), but let’s start the pigswill revolution! Doesn’t “You don’t have to eat that last potato, it’ll make some really good bacon and help us feed those 1 in 7 kids in our local area who don’t have enough food” sound more realistic than “Think of all the starving orphans who would enjoy your PB&J sandwich” (to which the continual smart-a** answer was “I’ll just mail to to them). Let’s do what the livestock industry does best – recycle waste resources to make safe, affordable, nutritous meat!

Putting Beef Hormones into Context (AKA “How do you Make a Hormone…?”)

Posted on February 13, 2013 by bovidiva

Disclaimer – the alternative title is the start of one of my favorite jokes – in the interests of keeping this post PG-13, I’ll post the punch line at the end.

It never ceases to amaze me how selectively paranoid we are as a society. I know I’m not alone in avoiding certain behaviors because they seem too risky – I always wear my seatbelt (even in a pick-up driving at 10 mph through a pasture), I don’t put my phone in my lap (who knows what invisible radio waves are frying my internal organs?) and I’m convinced that if I eat a Twinkie (RIP?) it’ll instantly turn me into 400 lb couch potato. Yet I also drive too fast on the interstate, drink enough coffee to keep a polar bear wired for days and have the misguided impression that I can survive on 4 hours sleep per night (thank you NCBA Cattle Industry Convention 2013 for proving me right last week). There’s no doubt that I’m more likely to come to harm from the latter set of behaviors than the former, so why the dichotomy?

It appears to comes down to two main factors:

The perception of relative risk – am I more likely to be injured from driving fast or from not wearing a seatbelt?
The extent of our knowledge about the subject – I know what risks come with caffeine consumption and I accept them in exchange for improved work productivity, but who knows how addictive Twinkies really are? There’s a reason they’re sold in multi-packs…

Thanks to the preponderance of media articles and books about food production, we’re more educated as a society than we were 10 years ago, yet we still fail to understand the concept of relative risk:

Environmentally, the Meatless Mondays campaigns appear to make people feel good about saving the planet even as they drive their Hummer to Whole Foods to buy quinoa and kale salad for dinner
Socially, reusing grocery bags reduces waste, yet appears to come with a far higher risk of contracting E. coli (thank you David Hayden)
Healthwise, I have lost count of the conversations I’ve had with highly educated, health-conscious women who have stopped feeding beef or milk to their kids because of the hormones used in beef or dairy production. Yet this is one area where we have a huge amount of data, we just need to put it in context.

Yes, an 8-oz steak from a steer given a hormone implant contains more estrogen than a steak from a non-implanted animal. 42% more estrogen in fact. That’s undeniable. Yet the amount of estrogen in the steak from the implanted animal is minuscule: 5.1 nanograms. One nanogram (one-billionth of a gram or one-25-billionth of an ounce) is roughly equivalent to one blade of grass on a football field.

By contrast, one birth-control pill, taken daily by over 100 million women worldwide, contains 35,000 nanograms of estrogen. That’s equivalent of eating 3,431 lbs of beef from a hormone-implanted animal, every single day. To put it another way, it’s the annual beef consumption of 59 adults. Doesn’t that put it into perspective?

If birth-control is a sensitive subject, let’s compare it to vegetables: one 8-oz serving of cabbage = 5,411 nanograms of estrogen, over 1,000 times more estrogen than the same serving size of steak from a steer given a hormone implant. Yet Huffington Post, TIME magazine et al. aren’t up in arms about the dangers posed by cabbage consumption (NB. ~4,000 cabbage producers in the USA, please don’t send me hate mail, this is just an example).

Hormones are directly or indirectly responsible for everything that we do each day, from waking up to going to sleep, from the mundane to the life-changing. Yes, they are an intrinsic part of childhood development, yet the earlier ages at maturity we’re currently seeing in children have been attributed to increased levels of body fat (i.e. childhood obesity), not to exogenous hormone consumption. I’m not downplaying the consequences that hormones have on our long-term health and survival, just asking for a little balance – after all, where’s the risk in that?

*Oh, and the punchline to the joke above… “Don’t pay her!” (Sorry….)

Meatless Mondays.. or More Veg Mondays?

Posted on October 9, 2012 by bovidiva

I consider myself to be an omnivore. I love meat – the smell of grilling beef or lamb turns me into a human version of Scooby Doo drooling and begging for a Scooby snack, and I’ve been known to arm-wrestle people for the last bratwurst. I love vegetables even more than meat – anyone examining my grocery-shopping list might conclude that I have an entire colony of rabbits to support with radishes, asparagus and zucchini, and I simply don’t understand those people who don’t find immense pleasure in eating “green stuff”. Given that the Meatless Mondays campaign apparently aims to “introduce consumers to the wide variety of healthy, delicious plant-based foods available”, you might think I’d be all over it like butter on a baked potato (be still my beating heart). Yet the very phrase causes my blood pressure to rise. Snacking on carrots, celery and olives in Delta Airlines’ Sky Lounges rather than buying deep-fried Taco Bell at the airport fills me with joy, but when I order a pizza, it’s always the vegetarian supreme…with added Italian sausage.

There it is – the added sausage. Meaty, spicy goodness that adds another layer of flavor to my pizza and that, as meat, I consider to be an essential component of my diet. In the US we are more food-centered than ever before – Facebook albums are titled “food porn” and chefs are celebrities. Yet we also seem to be moving towards a culture where individual foods or nutrients are demonized. “Fat-free” and “sugar-free” are marketing terms that imply that specific nutrients are undesirable in our diet; whole aisles are devoted to gluten-free foods despite the fact that celiac disease found in less than 1% of the population; and who doesn’t have a friend who is diligently avoiding carbs, dairy or red meat on “health grounds”? Why has our society evolved to the point where those who can afford the greatest variety of foods are the most likely to demand a gluten-free, dairy-free, low-carbohydrate, macrobiotic diet as a mark of their elite status?*

Abstinence, whether on dietary or moral grounds, has always been synonymous with purity, sacrifice, and a certain level of sanctimoniousness. I am purer than you because I don’t give in to my dark desires for <<insert your sin of choice here>>. The Meatless Mondays campaign plays the abstinence hand beautifully – give up your selfish meat-eating habits for one day per week and you too can save the world by eating a bean burrito. The Humane Society of the United States inevitably supports the Meatless Mondays campaign, their comment (expressed verbatim in almost every press-release) being that it “helps spare animals from factory farms, helps our environment, and improves our health”. If “meatless” is the way forwards, meat must be an undesirable food and vegetarian diets must be healthier, just as fat-free Oreo cookies would be presumed to be a wiser nutritional choice than regular Oreos (interestingly, their calorie contents are almost identical). Yet the national carbon footprint would be reduced by less than half of one percent if everybody adopted Meatless Mondays for an entire year, and the propounded effects of meat consumption on health have not been borne out by science.

When a school district or college campus adopts the Meatless Mondays campaign, I don’t hear the buzz of black helicopters and see the hand of Wayne Pacelle on the throttle. However, I am deeply disappointed that a campaign demonizing meat consumption, suggesting that eating a hamburger is comparable to the environmental equivalent of driving at 120 mph in a Hummer or the health effects of smoking 20 cigarettes per day, is considered by so many to be a positive move forwards in feeding a hungry world. I am not suggesting that we should all eat a 16 oz T-bone steak for every meal, or that vegetarianism or veganism are not valid dietary choices. Indeed, I propose that meat-eaters be afforded the same courtesy as vegetarians or vegans – to choose foods according to their individual or religious beliefs.

So what is the future for Meatless Mondays? It’s very simple. If this campaign really aims to expose people to a wider range of vegetables and plant-based food choices, let’s simply christen it “More Veg Mondays”. Have an extra helping of broccoli with your steak, try eggplant parmegana alongside your hotdog, or replace crackers with raw celery and radishes. Rather than demonizing individual foods, let’s celebrate the fabulous variety of choices that are available to us and that allow us the opportunity to eat a balanced diet every single day. Ironically, yesterday my Monday was almost meatless – I spent the day traveling and subsisting on dried mango, chocolate-covered coffee beans and vitamin water in Chilean airports. However, I made up for it once I reached Córdoba – the Iberian ham on my pizza was the best I ever tasted, and made better by the rocket, tomatoes and olives that accompanied it (see picture above). Eat more vegetables? In an instant. Give up meat on Mondays? As Charlton Heston would say: only when you pry it from my cold dead hands.

*Please note that I do not include those who have demonstrable food allergies in this group

Can We Please Have Calls for Moderating Meat Consumption… in Moderation?

Posted on September 10, 2012 by bovidiva

Do we need to moderate meat consumption in order to feed the world in 2050? Given beef producers’ track record of ingenuity, it’s possible but not probable.

A Twitter follower (Tweep? Twriend? Twquaintance?) asked yesterday whether we could really supply 9+ billion people with 250 lb of meat per capita in 2050. The question stemmed from a recent paper in which Stockholm scientists claimed that we would all have to reduce meat consumption by 75% by 2050 in order to have enough water to supply the population, and a subsequent rejoinder from the American Society of Animal Science in which several scientists noted the flaws in the Swedish paper, the importance of animal-source foods in the diet and the use of marginal land for grazing livestock.

On Twitter, the comment was made that there appear to be two distinct sides to this argument – one side (the environmentalists and anti-animal agriculture groups) warning that we need to drastically cut meat consumption in order to feed everybody, and the other (the meat industry) turning a blind eye and effectively promoting the idea that we can eat all the meat that we like without having any environmental impact.

Globally, we’re nowhere near 250 lb meat consumption per capita, even US consumers who are often portrayed as meat-guzzling bacon-o-philes by the Huffington Post et al. have an average annual consumption of 171 lb according to the USDA. As current beef consumption is 58 lb per capita in the USA, that’s a lot of pork and chicken that will presumably make up the difference. There’s no doubt that increases in both population size and per capita income in regions such as China and India will have a significant impact on global meat consumption by 2050. However, I have to admit I find the “blind eye” comment a little hard to swallow, given, for example, the beef industry’s commitment to measuring and mitigating both resource use and carbon emissions through current life cycle analysis research, and involvement with groups such as the Global Roundtable for Sustainable Beef.

There is no doubt that beef production uses considerable amounts of land and water, yet should we expect producers to effectively shoot themselves in the foot and suggest that consumers forgo a cheeseburger in favor of an alfalfa sprout salad? Isn’t improved efficiency a characteristic of every successful industry? The motor industry is a major contributor to environmental concerns, yet automobile manufacturers aren’t saying “we’re going to produce cars in the same way that we did in the ‘50s, you’ll just have to drive less”. Instead, the message is something akin to “we’re making cars more energy-efficient so that you can continue to drive without worrying about your car’s environmental impact.”

That’s exactly what the beef industry has done, is doing and will continue to do into the future. Since 1977, the US beef industry has cut water use by 12%, land use by 33% and the carbon footprint of one lb of beef by 16%. Providing that producers are still able to use management practices and technologies that improve efficiency, further reductions should be seen in future. Yet we have to look beyond the idea that the USA can feed the world by itself. I’m writing this post from Brazil, which has a huge beef industry, yet on average, Brazilian beef cattle first calve at 4 years of age, only 67% of cows have a calf each year and beef animals take 3 years to reach slaughter weight. Comparisons to the equivalent US figures (2 years, 91% and 15 months respectively), show the potential for amazing reductions in resource use from Brazilian beef production, and this, along with other less-efficient systems, is where we have to focus in future. It’s not about forcing US-style production on every producer; it’s about enabling producers to make the best and most efficient use of resources according to their management system and region. Brazil has just approved the use of beta-agonists in beef production, which will allow the production of more beef using fewer resources. This is just one step on the road to improved efficiency.

So do we need to moderate meat consumption in order to feed the world in 2050? I’d love to be able to answer this by citing a published paper that has taken improvements in meat industry productivity over the next 40 years into account rather than assuming a “business as normal” outcome. In the absence of such a paper, I’ll give a Magic 8-Ball type answer: Given beef producers’ track record of ingenuity, it’s possible but not probable. Globally, there are huge opportunities for improved efficiency and concurrent reductions in resource use from all meat production systems – the key is not to reduce meat production but simply to produce it more efficiently.