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The controversial 7g daily red meat consumption recommended in the recent EAT-Lancet report was the latest in a series of attempts by UK-based academics to define the environmental impact of what people eat, followed by British media headlines claiming a single diet has been found to save our climate.
This is not the case, according to the data used by the scientists and the limitations they highlight in their own studies. Yet more often than not, the main food accused of wrecking the planet is beef, which in the UK is nearly all supplied by British and Irish farmers.
The EAT-Lancet report is very clear that it “is not setting actionable science-based targets for any country” and does “not propose a simple global fix”. Its illustrative global diet supports rebalancing between those who don’t eat enough and those who eat too much. “In some contexts, animal production can also be essential for supporting livelihoods, grassland ecosystem services, poverty alleviation, and benefits of nutritional status,” the authors added. None of those nuances were communicated in the media frenzy.
BBC calculator
A few weeks earlier, the BBC had published an online climate change food calculator (ifj.ie/bbc) based on research led by Oxford academic Joseph Poore. His project measured food’s environmental impact from existing studies covering 38,700 farms around the world.
The BBC calculator compares greenhouse gas emissions from various foods with other activities such as driving an average UK car or taking a flight from London. Poore confirmed to the Irish Farmers Journal that food consumption data in the calculator was also specifically British. Yet it uses global average greenhouse gas emissions from beef, in an industry dominated by the carbon-intensive Americas.
“Towards the bottom of the BBC article, there is a graph that shows regional variation in beef impacts,” Poore said. “And yes, as is communicated in the BBC article, Europe does rank lower than other regions.”
Yet the UK-centred calculator does not use European figures available from Poore’s research.
It also adjusts the carbon footprint for the protein content of foods such as beef, dairy and legumes because farmers choose to produce beef for profit “which is driven by prime cuts, not the offal”, Poore said.
In this approach, the high-protein steak carries most greenhouse gas emissions, while the fifth quarter is exempted.
The BBC calculator does not use such nutrient allocation for other food groups: fruit and veg or bread are assessed on a per kg basis without consideration for their carbohydrate, fibre or vitamin content.
The authors then dropped protein allocation when calculating everyday servings: the BBC calculator compares emissions between 75g of beef containing 22g of protein, and 100g of tofu containing only 8g of protein, on the basis that nobody eats a massive slab of tofu in one sitting.
In summary, the BBC calculator tells British consumers what climate impact their beef consumption would have if it was sourced outside the UK and Ireland, and how that would compare against less nutritious foods.
“It’s always difficult to balance ease of use of these tools with accuracy, and I think that by putting a simple average in the calculator, but by including the range below, the BBC did a really good job,” Poore said.
No perfect data
An earlier study led by Peter Scarborough, also from the University of Oxford, compared the impacts of various diets in 2014. It was quoted in media coverage with headlines such as “Giving up beef will reduce carbon footprint more than cars” in The Guardian.
Scarborough told the Irish Farmers Journal he used data from the environmental group WWF showing direct emissions from European beef to be 12kg of carbon dioxide equivalent per kg of beef. So far, so good.
He also wanted to include the impact of land-use change, such as deforestation linked to feed crops, but there, only global averages were available.
This caused his figure for beef emissions to jump to 68.8kgCO2e/kg – again applying American-dominated data to British and Irish beef. EU research shows that the land-use change emissions from British and Irish beef are in fact negative. “The perfect dataset for an analysis of this kind simply does not exist, so there have to be trade-offs involved in the choice of dataset,” Scarborough said.
According to these UK studies, the carbon footprint of beef would be three to five times higher than measured by research from UCD and the EU’s Joint Research Centre (see graph). Bord Bia’s Origin Green programme, which is verified by British independent auditors Carbon Trust, has measured 10.5kgCO2e/kg liveweight in the past three years, which translates into under 20kgCO2e/kg carcase weight.
While there is no question that beef has a higher carbon footprint than some vegetable proteins, this gap shows the importance of finding internationally recognised measuring methods instead of sensationalist headlines that are not relevant to consumers’ choices.
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