“The only time to eat diet food is when you’re waiting for the steak to cook.”
Julia Child
I like a good burger now and then. Actually, I love a good burger. My preferred toppings are ketchup, mayo, tomatoes, and pickles. With fries on the side, obviously.
But for the past several years, I’ve been eating less red meat and cooking it less often for my family. Until recently, it was mostly for health reasons. A diet high in red meat is linked to increased rates of certain cancers, type 2 diabetes, and heart disease.
However, once I started learning more about climate change, I realized there is also a relationship between eating meat and rising temperatures. The reason: methane.
Methane is problematic, because, although it doesn’t hang around in the atmosphere as long as CO2, it has at least 25x the heat-trapping power. Yikes! And the amount of methane entering the atmosphere has risen dramatically in recent years. It now accounts for 20% of the heat-trapping emissions.
One of the main sources of methane is agriculture. I will write more about the others in a future post. In simplistic terms, when animals burp, they release methane. The bigger the animal, the bigger the burp. For example, cows produce 10x more methane than chickens.
There are some very cool solutions being studied to reduce the amount of methane coming from agriculture. One fascinating example is adding seaweed to a cows’ diets. It reduces the methane they emit…by a lot. In addition, solutions to remove the methane already in the atmosphere are being developed.
Because methane doesn’t linger as long as CO2, reducing the amount we emit, along with removing some of what’s already out there, can have rapid results in slowing the warming trend.
So, I don’t plan to stop having the occasional burger. And nobody is going to force you to stop either. This blog is not about judgment or guilt over our choices. But, if we make even small changes to our diets, it could be a win-win for both our health and the climate.
Just some food for thought.
Let’s do something about climate change. Learn about it. Think about it. Talk about it.