a different kind of air travel

‘food miles’ is not the great food salvation from climate change – yes, it’s nudged through the door into our everyday lives, and done obvious wonders in re-establishing our connection with producers, but the impact our food makes from plot to plate is about way more than just the journey itself

let’s be clear, the whole transportation of our food amounts to just 13% of food related greenhouse gases….the use of artificial fertilisers, for example, hits the atmosphere twice as hard but for whatever reasons noone seems to want to talk about anything other than food miles – but i’m afraid someone has to, and that dubious responsibility has fallen to your correspondent

step forward an unlikely culprit….cow wind, yes friends, cow wind

pardon the l’oreal moment, but here’s the science bit

– 1.4 billion ruminants graze the world – that’s about 1 bolus botherer to every 4 people
– each cow parps out 70-100kg of methane a year*
– methane is a greenhouse gas 21 times more powerful than CO2

that adds up to a whole lot of wind – and in the context of climate change, a real silent but deadly

putting that into an understandable currency, each of these cud-crunching creatures gives off the equivalent of driving 4000 miles in the average car….quite amazing, and what it actually implies is that in most cases it is greener to keep your grass short by mowing than have cattle graze it

shame that by a cruel twist of nature (given its constituents) we can’t press charcoal biscuits into service to alleviate the frequent fearful flattus

clearly we can’t do away with all our four-stomached friends….cattle in particular are the centre of subsistence farming in many parts of the world, essential for the survival of many…but here in the cosy developed world, our consumption of beef and dairy is extraordinarily high, and entirely out of proportion with what we need

looking at it another way – it takes about 9x the energy of the food itself to get our average supper to the table, and meat is just about the king of the hill when it comes to energy inefficiency….while each of these regurgitating ruminatia converts it’s food into meat it uses up 96% of the energy of that diet in doing so – a startling 4% comes our way as burgers, brisket and brescaola

add that to the vast production of gastronomic greenhouse gases, and it doesn’t become difficult to piece together a pretty reasonable case for reducing our beef and dairy consumption….wherever it comes from

* sheep = 7kg of methane a year