Meat and Climate Change
Posted: (October 20, 2008 10:44 am)

In 2006, the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization published a 390-page report called "Livestock's Long Shadow" The dense document came to a startling conclusion: Livestock production -- including land-use changes for pasture and crop production -- contributes more to global warming than every single car, train, and plane on the planet.

Rajendra Pachauri, chair of the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, recently reiterated this point. He called eating less meat "clearly the most attractive opportunity" to quickly reduce greenhouse-gas emissions. "Give up meat for one day [a week] initially, and decrease it from there," he urged.

So move over, Hummer; say hello to the hamburger as climate villain. And still, meat represents only part of the food industry's vast ecological footprint.

If experts are increasingly focusing on food as a climate culprit, the media remain largely oblivious. When most of us think about the climate-change bad guys, we focus on Shell and ExxonMobil -- and let industrial-meat giants Smithfield and Excel/Cargill off the hook.

Roni Neff and her team at Johns Hopkins School of Public Health have been looking at the way the media cover climate change. The conclusion of their just-released study of media coverage: food is generally iced out of the conversation. I recently had a chance to talk with Neff about her research.

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