Beef; It's what's NOT for dinner (by Amanda via Mary)

My environmentally conscious friend, Amanda "Fatty" Pankau, sent me this email yesterday (citations and all), so I thought I'd help share the word:

It is often hard to put the environmental impacts of meat production into context. Here are a couple interesting ways of looking at it.

2.2 lbs of beef is responsible for more greenhouse gas emissions and other pollution than driving for 3 hours while leaving all the lights on back home (Ogino et al. 2007).

It takes ~440 gallons of water to produce 1 lb of beef (Beckett and Oltjen 1993).

Ogino, A., H. Orito, K. Shimada, and H. Hirooka. 2007. Evaluating environmental impacts of the Japanese beef cow–calf system by the life cycle assessment method. Animal Science Journal 78:424 -432.

Beckett, J.L. and J.W. Oltjen. 1993. Estimation of the water requirement for beef production in the United States. J. Anim. Sci. 71:818-826.