Society for the Advancement of Animal Wellbeing

I don't eat bacon cheeseburgers. About three years ago I gave up red meat and pork. I am American, and brother do I love bacon cheeseburgers. But I decided that as part of the imperfect project of trying to live a decent, moral life, I could no longer chow down on bacon cheeseburgers. I could not put my preference for the taste of a certain type of protein above the hunger of starving babies, or the imperative of tackling climate change.

It is one of the great failings of the environmental movement—and successes of the food lobby—that most people have no idea that bacon cheeseburgers have anything to do with starving babies, or climate change. Meat production is incredibly energy intensive. According to the U.N.'s Food and Agriculture Organization, meat production accounts for 18% of annual greenhouse-gas emissions — more than transportation, which accounts for roughly 14%. What's more, millions of acres of rain forest are cleared each year for cattle ranchers and suppliers of animal feed, wiping out one of the world's great "carbon sinks" and further accelerating climate change. A simultaneous problem is that meat production is also incredibly energy inefficient. We feed far more calories to cattle in the form of grain than we consume from their flesh. In a world where hundreds of millions of people go hungry, we snatch food from the mouths of starving babies and feed it to plump beasts.

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