Is it Time to Switch to Kangaroo Meat?
Kangaroo Instead of Beef
Recent food consumption wisdom would suggest that Locavore Eating – eating local foods – is the way of the future. It seems perfectly logical that eating local food will reduce our emissions footprint. With a world population now over 7 billion, the question of how we’re going to feed everyone without damaging the environment is paramount. Not to mention the other 2.5 billion that will be added between now and 2050.
Makes perfect sense, right? Not So!
Stephen Dubner - Freakonomics
So, although it seems counter-intuitive, eating local may not the best idea after all. This is confirmed in a study by two researchers from Carnegie Melon (Chris Weber & Scott Mathews) who:
“suggest that a dietary shift can be a more effective means of lowering an average household’s food-related climate footprint than “buying local.” Shifting less than one day per week’s worth of calories from red meat and dairy products to chicken, fish, eggs, or a vegetable-based diet achieves more GHG reduction than buying all locally sourced food………the GHG emissions associated with food are dominated by the production phase, contributing 83% of the average U.S. household’s……….footprint for food consumption…..transportation as a whole represents only 11% of life-cycle GHG emissions, and final delivery from producer to retail contributes only 4%” claim Mathews and Weber.
What you might want to consider instead is eating less meat, particularly beef and dairy products. Cows are wickedly polluting organisms – producing methane, which is 25 times more potent than CO2 as a greenhouse gas. 30 percent of the world’s ice-free land is devoted to live-stock production, according to The New York Times.
- Kangaroo Meat
A much better solution would be to switch to kangaroo meat since it does not produce as much deadly methane as cows do.
Americans and Canadians consume 36 and 30 kgs of meat per capita respectively, whereas China and India have a per capita consumption of only 4 and 2 kgs.
North Americans need a new food consumption paradigm.
IBI Watch: 
dave: 
opit: 
Lee Norton: 
Intuitively, I just knew that eating local is the way to go. It’s just common sense. Now not so sure – need to look more closely at the research referenced above.
Good post
I checked out the Study by Weber and Mathew. It’s a technical paper that clearly downplays the local food phenomenon. However, some foods are still better grown locally.
Local foods will give you better nutritive value, support the local economy and will lead to growth of local agriculture. With the growth of local food industry, economies of scale will further encourage eating local.
The solution is not to factory farm Kangaroos. It is to switch to a plant based vegan diet.
Good point Vince.It takes a whole lot less energy to produce and consume cereals and other plant based nutrition than it does to produce meat products. That said, we’re a long way from seeing veganism become the dominant diet of North Americans.
Maybe a first step would be to reduce our meat consumption by say 50% – that may be a more attainable goal.
Taking it from the aggregate to the individual … Most of us in the developed world who are in charge of our food choices – probably each of us here, for example – can reduce our animal product consumption 100 percent if we want to, at any time, regardless of what everybody else is doing.
Another way to look at this is … since your next-door neighbor and China may not be reducing their meat consumption 50%, you can compensate for that as best you can.