Go green and cut red meat

By Terri Coles

TORONTO (Reuters) -- As the United States wrestles with its worst bout of food cost inflation since the early 1990s, reducing meat in your diet may help stretch your grocery dollars -- and also protect the environment.

Government figures show that grocery costs have gone up 5.1 percent in 12 months. Eggs alone are up a dramatic 25 percent over last year, Labor Department figures show. With household budgets strained by higher food costs and increased prices at the pump, switching out some of the more-expensive meat protein for cheaper plant protein can help reduce food budgets.

There's also evidence that meat production may be a factor in climate change.

In 2006, the UN's Food and Agriculture Organization said in a report that the ingredients that go into meat, eggs and dairy production -- including fertilizer, feed, transport and processing -- add up to about 18 percent of total greenhouse gas emissions, more than the greenhouse gases produced by the transportation sector.

"Every step of meat production -- and especially modern meat production and factory farming methods -- requires a lot of energy," said Danielle Nierenberg, a senior fellow at Worldwatch Institute, which analyzes environmental data.

It's also more efficient to grow grain directly for food than to grow grain to feed livestock, said Anna Lappe, co-founder of the Small Planet Institute, which has launched a website about the connection between food and climate change, called Take a Bite. For example, it takes 16 pounds of grain or soy to produce one pound of steak, Lappe said.

"I think one of the greatest things we could do to reduce our personal foodprint would be to reduce the amount of meat we consume," Lappe said, punning on the "carbon footprint" catchphrase that has become an environmental banner.

Somewhat ironically, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) is advocating for that change by targeting Al Gore, the man responsible for making "carbon footprint" a household phrase. The often-controversial animal rights organization is asking supporters to pledge to eat vegetarian for 30 days in order to offset meat consumed by the Nobel Prize-winning environmental activist.

"It seems that the greatest inconvenient truth for Al Gore is that the meat in his diet has got to go in order for him to maintain credibility on the global warming debate," said PETA spokeswoman Lindsay Rajt.

A Gore spokesman in a New York Times article last year wouldn't comment on the former vice president's diet but pointed out that the book version of the climate-change documentary "An Inconvenient Truth" mentions eating less meat.

Last year, the Lancet, a medical journal, said a 10-percent drop in global red meat consumption would lead to a cut in the greenhouse gases emitted by cows, sheep and goats. The greenhouse gas methane released by flatulent cows has been cited as a factor in global warming.

Individual cows don't produce that much methane by themselves, Worldwatch's Nierenberg said, but because we raise so many cows -- about 1 billion ruminants each year -- and because livestock production has been growing steadily since factory farming first became popular in the 1960s, the cumulative effect is notable. Now India and China, where wages are rising and a middle class is emerging, are increasing their meat consumption as well.

"One of the first things that people do when they get a little extra money is that they buy more meat products," Nierenberg said.

The increasing demand for meat is one reason -- along with higher energy prices that raise the cost of shipping and production, increased costs for corn used in feed due to the demand for ethanol and a weaker U.S. dollar that makes exports more expensive -- why food costs are currently rising.

"One of the things that I hear a lot when I talk about food is that people ask me about cost," said Lappe, who eats an organic plant-centered diet instead of a more typically Western diet that focuses on meat, dairy and eggs. Although she does pay a premium for organic products, she said she still finds that a diet that depends on foods from plants like vegetables, fruits and beans is less expensive than one that includes more foods from animals. She hopes that the Take A Bite campaign will help educate people on how sustainable food production is a step towards a solution to climate change.

"We all know that we need to reduce our emissions dramatically as a planet," Lappe said. "We also know that we need to sequester carbon in order to be really achieving those emissions reductions, and we're finding that organic farms can be a powerful tool."

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