The climate chap: The gourmet burger

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STEVE GREEN

You go to this new flash restaurant and ask the waitaress for her recommendations. ‘We’re famous for our gourmet burgers’ is the immediate reply. 

Without hesitation you ask for yours to be medium rare, and await this pleasure. You can-not help looking at the waiters as they deliver food to other diners and the gourmet burgers look divine.

When your beef burger arrives, it’s sim-ply sensational. Just the right texture, ap-pearance, taste, ample protein and vitamins no doubt, and the right degree of redness once you sliced it open. It looks great, and tastes even better. Without hesita-tion the best you have ever eaten.

When you thank the waitress for her recommendation and ask her to thank the chef, she replies ‘our plant-based burgers are sensational aren’t they? Miles better than beef!’

Could this happen? What would be your reaction? It’s already hap-pening throughout the USA and increasingly countries such as China. 

What does a burg-er have to do with the climate crisis? Simply that the beef industry is a massive generator of harmful greenhouse gasses, and the planet is simply unable to carry on producing beef in ever-increasing quantities.

To produce beef we need arable land for farms. We have freed up land by destroy-ing forests, not just the Amazon, but also in New Zealand. Through increasing tempera-tures we are losing ar-able land to desertifica-tion, and losing land to urban expansion. Vast expanses of arable land are devoted to growing soy and maize, primarily to augment cattle feed. Animal agriculture takes up 45 per cent of all ar-able land, and 25 per cent of the planet’s fresh water. Breeding animals for human consumption generates more GHG’s than all the world’s transport systems. Cows are only 3 per cent ef-ficient in turning grain into meat. 

Cows live 16 to 40 months before being slaughtered. However, with less poverty comes more desire for meat and greater obesity. We consume 700 billion pounds of meat annu-ally. China, famous for their love of pork, now has over 3300 McDonald’s serving beef burgers!

It’s a huge industry, and rapidly changing from cattle being raised ‘on the range’ to being manufactured in facto-ries and hardly seeing a blade of grass. This is the future of poultry and fish. Currently 70 per cent of all birds on the planet are chickens - the majority destined for fast food outlets.

Seeing cattle ‘pro-cessed’ in abattoirs is an unforgettable event, but not recommended for school trips!

So the cow lives for around three years, gets transported to the abat-toir, is ‘processed’ and the edible parts deliv-ered to the supermarket where they are wrapped in non-recyclable plastic awaiting your purchase. At every stage, harmful GHG’s are generated.

There has to be a bet-ter way. Compared to beef, the modern plant-based burger requires 96 per cent less land, gen-erates 89 per cent less greenhouse gasses, has no cholesterol, and uses 87 per cent less water.

Businesses such as Impossible Foods now sell their plant-based burgers and ‘ground beef’ to over 17,000 res-taurants in the USA, are rapidly expanding in Asia, and have a great online system for home delivery in the markets they supply. Check them out at impossiblefoods.com. Countdown now stocks a range of plant-based burger patties including products from an American company called Beyond Meat, be-yondmeat.com. Nestle have introduced meat-less pork and milk-free Milo.

Other businesses will no doubt be introducing products as alternatives to pork, lamb and chick-en in the near future. They all strive to make their plant-based prod-ucts simply better and more affordable than farmyard alternatives.

I am not suggesting that you give up beef. What is inevitable is that plant-based products will sit alongside beef at the dairy or butchers, and you, the customer, will exercise your choice.

When I came to Mangawhai it was al-most impossible to buy a vegetarian meal; now just about every cafe serves a wide range of vegetarian, vegan and gluten free options. Change happens! Eating fewer animals will have a beneficial impact on our climate crisis and in reducing your personal carbon footprint. 

Try having a meat-free day once a week, or be brave and try a plant-based burger.

To achieve a cleaner, greener, healthier and more sustainable future, no emission reduction is too small or too soon. All of us have a part to play and a contribution to make. Feedback to theclimatechap@gmail.com

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