Fight global-warming by eating chicken

by Abha Malpani (RSS feed) on Oct 24th 2007 at 4:10PM

For someone who is a sacrilegious beef-eating Hindu carnivore, I have many 'official' reasons to quit eating meat, but I love my steak and chicken-wings, so that's not going to happen. (In my caste, we cannot even eat egg).

Which is why I was thrilled to read that eating chicken can help combat global warming drastically!

A recent story on Salon explains in a nutshell: the amount of energy and resources we invest in breeding animals for food, alongside naturally toxic excretions of those animals, is more responsible for global-warming than burning fossil fuels. However, poultry are the least polluting. (Gore, did you know this?).

The story throws in some shocking statistics:

• "livestock accounts for 18 percent of global warming emissions worldwide, more than the entire transportation sector" -- why is this not in Al Gore's film?!
• "cattle, bison, sheep and goats burp out a lot of methane that traps 23 times more heat per ton than carbon dioxide" -- and we've been fretting about spraying deodorant?!
• "the difference between a vegan diet and one that includes cheeseburgers is less than 2 tons of greenhouse gases a year -- that's about the equivalent of switching from a Camry to a Prius'' -- I wonder what Toyota would have to say about that.

With that in mind, eating beef is the worst; then comes cattle, sheep and goat; and then pork and dairy products are relatively less harmful. Pork and dairy hold the same place in the environment?!

Conclusion: if you want to change your diet to combat global-warming -- eating chicken is the best thing you can do. Chickens don't "burp" methane and they produce only one-tenth the methane of cattle waste.

Now who would have thought!