I Have Never, Ever For One Second,

considered becoming any type of vegetarian,

give up steak and chips, roast pork with crackling, chicken in a basket, no way, but giving up meat—especially beef—can help lower cholesterol intake, also in a new report from Bard College, the Weizmann Institute of Science and Yale University took on the task of analysing the input of resources used in meat production and published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a new paper, they focused on animals in the U.S. food production system and found a few startling facts about beef production, 


first, the researchers calculated the feed costs for each class of animal—beef, pork, chicken, laying hens and dairy cows, they did not include fish because data about resources used to raise those animals is limited, and fish only contributed about two percent of American’s animal-based energy intake from 2000 to 2013, they used data collected between 2000 to 2010 from the U.S. Departments of Agriculture, Interior and Energy about land area, water and nitrogen fertiliser to determine the burden produced by feeding and raising all of those animals, then, they standardised the data by calories contained in a given amount of milk, eggs, beef, pork or chicken, 


the findings, while expected, are quite sobering, pork, chicken, dairy and eggs are equivalent within a factor of two when it came to their environmental burdens, the authors determined, but beef requires far, far more resources than any of those other protein categories, the team calculated that beef requires 28 times more land, 6 times more fertiliser and 11 times more water compared to those other food sources and that adds up to about five times more greenhouse gas emissions, 


to further put these findings into perspective, the authors also ran the same calculations for several staple crops, all told, on a calorie-to-calorie basis, potatoes, wheat and rice require two to six time less resources to produce than pork, chicken, eggs or dairy products, so will I be giving up beef? pass the Yorkshire puddings please!