Eating less--but healthier--meat.

• Author: Pennybacker, Mindy
• Position: Green Guidance

As autumn approaches in the northern hemisphere, the committed meat eater looks ahead to cold-weather roasts. The urge to don a protective layer of fat against the cold and dark dates back to our Paleolithic past. Unfortunately, while our appetites remain unchanged, we now rely on fossil fuels rather than bonfires and our own muscle power, for energy. Our sedentary lifestyles, coupled with growing meat consumption, are contributing to burgeoning obesity and damage to the environment worldwide (see cover story in the July/August issue: "Meat: Now It's Not Personal!").

According to Worldwatch researchers, the number of four-footed livestock on earth at any given moment has increased 60 percent since 1961. Widespread in North America and Europe, industrial feedlots--a major cause of air and water pollution--are now being used in Brazil, China, India, the Philippines, and elsewhere. The increase in meat production and consumption has dovetailed with what the World Health Organization calls an obesity epidemic worldwide. Sixty-one percent of Americans are overweight, but the number of overweight people is also increasing rapidly in developing countries such as China, Brazil, and Colombia. "In these and more and more developing countries, it is not uncommon for the overweight population to exceed the underweight population," reports the Worldwatch Paper Underfed and Overfed.

As if throwing fat on the fire, many are turning to the scientifically questionable Atkins Diet, whose surging popularity in the past year has ratcheted up demand for red meat despite warnings of ill health effects from the American Heart Association, Physicians for Responsible Medicine, and others. Eating red meat increases risk of obesity, cancer, cardiovascular disease, and diabetes.

So, all we have to do is stop eating meat, right? Try telling that to your father-in-law over a Thanksgiving dinner of stuffed roast squash, or to a ravenous child who turns up his or her nose at tofu loaf after soccer practice! Rather than let your child slip out to McDonald's to satisfy a cave-man craving, you can offer a hamburger made of organic, grass-fed beef which, when "raised on smaller, local farms, rather than on large commercial farms, not only tastes better but is a healthy, environmentally sound alternative," according to Danielle Nierenberg, a Worldwatch researcher (WW news release, June 2003). As Fred Kirschenmann, an organic rancher and farmer and director of the Leopold...