> Steak and other "whole" cuts are harder, obviously. But 40-45% of beef consumed in the US is ground beef[1], so cutting that by even half would get us half way there.
Frustratingly it wouldn't, because the ground beef being consumed is largely an afterproduct of cows raised for those larger cuts. Burgers are cheap not because beef is cheap (it's not) but because they're being subsidized by brisket roasts and tenderloins cut from the same animal (there's surely some dairy cows in the mix too, but I'm led to believe that most older dairy animals get slaughtered for non-grocery products like animal feed).
We need to reduce steak/bbq consumption primarily, doing so will make burgers more expensive and reduce their consumption as a side effect.
You can continue to enjoy your meat, but still ensure your diet contains a responsible amount of it. A diet with proportionally less meat is both healthier and more environmentally sustainable.
I will never understand why Americans are personally affronted by the idea that they should eat less meat. What makes it such an insulting proposition?
> "a finding that may help consumer groups and government agencies craft educational messaging around the negative health and environmental impacts of beef consumption."
One problem right here. This pernicious narrative that eating beef/meat is bad in absolute terms.
There is no negative impact of eating beef. The negative impact always comes from excess. When it comes to human impact on the environment this is compounded by the excessive population on this planet.
Why Eat Less Meat is a site dedicated to changing the conversation on eating meat from a divisive, emotionally-charged debate to a constructive discussion based on scientific evidence. The following pages list the major reasons to eat less meat, with each reason explained and supported by extensive citations.
“For every 100 calories of grain we feed animals, we get only about 40 new calories of milk, 22 calories of eggs, 12 of chicken, 10 of pork, or 3 of beef.”[3] In other words, our food preferences have led us to effectively throw away food on a mass scale.
The first sentence may be a correct observation which may be backed up by the citation (I admittedly haven't checked), but the second sentence is incorrect. The food has not gone to waste, it was converted from one form to a (at least for some people) more desirable form.
The average American eats 55lbs/25kg beef a year. For 12% of Americans to eat 50% of the beef they have to consume over 4 times as much as the average American.
That'd mean they'd eat a ~270g beef steak every single day.
I'm by no means a vegetarian, let alone a vegan, but even you have to admit that this is excessive. This could easily be replaced with nothing and you wouldn't be protein deficient.
> There are ~30M cattle in the US at any given time
That number is the count of full grown cattle, 31M. When you include calves, it's 98M total in the US. It isn't easy to realize just how nauseating that truly is.
There's roughly 330M people in the US. One cow will feed 2300 people 3oz of beef, which is the most meat one may eat in a sitting and still be considered healthy (though I personally disagree, no amount of red meat is healthy IMO). 360M / 31M comes out to around 10 people per cow, which will feed them once a day 3oz for 230 days. So the US has enough beef to serve every man, woman and child a a 3oz steak serving once every 38 hours, all year long.
Of course, nothing close to this amount is actually consumed, and at least 23% of it is entirely wasted in production, 7.1M cattle annually are effectively turned into garbage before product can hit store shelves.
Why beef specifically?
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