The myth behind Meatless Mondays

Meatless Monday is an international campaign that encourages people to not eat meat on Mondays to improve their health and the health of the planet. "Meatless Mondays has become huge, and the overall message becomes, ‘Yes, you can drive your Hummer if you don’t eat that burger. I do not say that we should do nothing about climate change, but there are 330-million people in the US. If they all go meatless on Monday, it would cut the US’s total emissions by less than a third of a percent. We need to understand how eating a burger compares with the other things we do." The US has the world’s highest per-capita emissions and its second-highest output of greenhouse gas emissions, at 5,461,014 tons or 18.27% of the global total, as estimated by the United Nations. Meat, however, will not disappear from plates, says Capper. "There are 7-billion people on the planet now, and there will be 9.5-billion in 40 years time. Also, consumers in the developing world will have more income, and when that happens people want more meat, eggs and dairy in their diet. We will want 70% more food than we are producing now." Put simply, there is not enough land to produce all that food unless production is made more efficient, and that, says Capper, is where technology comes in. Technology has, in one way or another, made milk and beef production more efficient and environmentally friendly, with the dairy industry’s carbon footprint for every kilogram of milk down 63% in 2007 from 1944, and the beef industry’s dipping 16% since 1977, according to calculations by Capper and her postdoctoral supervisor at Cornell University. "Why is it that technology is seen as good elsewhere, but bad when it comes to food?"  How about this one: a 220g steak from an animal given a hormone implant contains 42% more oestrogen than a steak from a nonimplanted animal — 5.1 nanograms to be exact. Capper explains that one nanogram is one-billionth of a gram. By contrast, one birth-control pill, taken daily by more than 100-million women worldwide, contains 35,000 nanograms of oestrogen...more