Minimizing meat

Those who've taken my class may remember talking a bit about the impacts of meat on the environment. Cutting down meat consumption even a little can have a big impact, as described in this article. They advocate the "mixed burger," a hamburger that's not 100% meat but is mostly meat mixed with mushrooms. That sounds pretty tasty as well as more eco-conscious than the pure stuff!

Update June 2019: Science magazine is chiming in, arguing that eating less meat is a great step toward decreasing our footprint: "Most strikingly, impacts of the lowest-impact animal products typically exceed those of vegetable substitutes, providing new evidence for the importance of dietary change."

Cheaper food to help the poor? Think again

One of the few places where the Cato Institute and I agree! Cheaper food creates problems with obesity. Cheaper fuel exacerbates problems with pollution. Some great paragraphs from the Economist:

Whereas greener countries slap hefty taxes on petrol and diesel, Egypt does the opposite. Motorists pay only 59% of what it costs to fill their cars. Since driving is cheap, more people do it, aggravating congestion and making urban air eye-wateringly foul. The World Bank estimates that traffic jams in Cairo alone cost Egypt 3.6% of GDP. Egyptian cities are the fifth dirtiest in the world, says the World Health Organisation. And since the truly poor cannot afford cars, most petrol subsidies are captured by the better-off. The top 20% of urbanites receive eight times as much as the bottom fifth.

Similarly, bread subsidies are a waste of dough. Egyptians buy up to five loaves a day for a tenth of their cost. The state also subsidises sugar, cooking oil and other calorific staples. This is one reason why Egypt has one of the world’s highest rates of adult obesity. And despite the introduction of smart cards to limit how much subsidised food an individual can take, the subsidies are often stolen.

[I]if all food and energy subsidies were stopped and half of the savings used to pay for cash transfers to the poorest 60% of households, each of those households would receive $622 a year, more than doubling incomes for the bottom 25%.

Eat Mor Chikn

I never would have guessed that I'd be quoting Chick-Fil-A- I've never been there and most likely never will go- but their ads kind of sum up some recent research (and the publication it's based on). Popular wisdom had long held that fish are the most efficient type of animal to raise. For one thing, unlike large animals such as cows and pigs, fish don't have a lot of bones: a larger share of their body mass is muscle, so a larger share of food you give a fish to make it grow turns into meat. However, this paper argues that chicken is more efficient than shrimp or fish aquaculture at turning feed into meat. One reason is that the stuff we give fish has to already be more nutritious: cattle turn grass, for example, into meat, and grass doesn't have a lot of protein in it. On the other hand basically what we feed fish and shrimp is other fish. That makes the whole process less efficient.

Note that no one is measuring any of the externalities of the production process or anything else so this is far from a final word, but it's definitely an important contribution. Feeding fish to fish never seemed like a good idea, but now there's evidence backing it up!