Beef’s Footprint

How do our seemingly trivial, everyday actions impact the environment? This video focuses on how what we eat has environmental implications. When we eat beef specifically, we contribute to global warming. Cows emit carbon dioxide and methane, two greenhouse gases, into the atmosphere via digestion of cellulose. These undulates can not digest the cellulose which they consume as their primary source of nutrition. Therefore, gut-microbes reside in their stomachs and use the enzyme cellulase to break down the cellulose which cows consume, usually in the form of grass or corn. Two by-products of undulate digestion are carbon dioxide and methane, contributing to global warming. Incidentally, methane is much more powerful than CO2 as a greenhouse gas. Raising cattle adds a significant amount of these compounds to the atmosphere. Beef has a much greater negative environmental impact than other meats such as chicken or pork, is one hundred times more detrimental to the environment than pasta, and roughly 214 times more harmful than eggs. Thus, cutting back on beef consumption can be a start to restoring sustainability of the environment.