Red meat has a huge carbon footprint because cattle requires a large amount of land and water.

https://sph.tulane.edu/climate-and-food-environmental-impact-beef-consumption

Demand for steaks and burgers is the primary driver of Deforestation:

https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2022-beef-industry-fueling-amazon-rainforest-destruction-deforestation/

https://e360.yale.edu/features/marcel-gomes-interview

https://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/stories/2023-06-02/almost-a-billion-trees-felled-to-feed-appetite-for-brazilian-beef

If you don’t have a car and rarely eat red meat, you are doing GREAT 🙌 🙌

Sure, you can drink tap water instead of plastic water. You can switch to Tea. You can travel by train. You can use Linux instead of Windows AI’s crap. Those are great ideas. Also, don’t drive yourself crazy. If you are only an ordinary citizen, remember that perfect is the enemy of good.

  • rumba@lemmy.zip
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    6
    arrow-down
    1
    ·
    edit-2
    14 hours ago

    The resources required are themselves cheap.

    Well water is nearly free, food can be cheap for a farmer it’s corn and grass which they can grow, or a corn / molassas mix which is pretty cheap to buy. If they birth the cow, there’s special costs and then there’s vet/medicine bills. A farmer’s time is the ultimate cheap thing because they more or less ignore it in pricing. The butcher’s price/time isn’t inconsequential.

    The environmental issues don’t cost them anything unless we tax it.

    Some forms of beef are pretty cheap but not all.

    Hamburger is cheap. filet is $15-$25/lb. 4 decent 1.5 inch-thick steaks come to about $100 wholesale.

    The meat from the cow is about $3000 after processing.