Fact 1: All cows in the world are heavier than all humans*<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Fact 2: Beef and cheese have a very high carbon footprint.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
If you combine these facts you start to understand how beef causes by far the emissions in the food system. And why cow milk is the third biggest contributor to the climate impact of food.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
A field with cows might not look like a big impact but each of those cows requires 60 kg of food per day.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
And that requires a lot of space, about 1-3 football fields per year per cow.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This is why worldwide, beef is also the number one cause of deforestation \ud83e\ude93<\/p>\n\n\n\n
We don\u2019t have to get rid of all cows in the world but there is literally not enough space for everyone to eat the same amount of beef and dairy as Americans and Europeans currently do.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
If someone with the average Western diet replaces beef, it already reduces the carbon footprint of their food by 21% \u2b07\ufe0f<\/p>\n\n\n\n
*Note: I should have phrased it differently in the video, the numbers are kg CARBON: “Biomass is reported in gigatons of carbon. Alternative options to represent biomass include, among others, biovolume, wet mass, or dry weight. We chose to use carbon mass as the measure of biomass because it is independent of water content and is used extensively in the literature.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Source: Bar-On, Y. M., Phillips, R., & Milo, R. (2018). The biomass distribution on Earth. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 115(25), 6506-6511.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
What if you would put all animals on a scale? <\/p>","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":19040,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[367],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-19022","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-infographic-video"],"yoast_head":"\n