To the Editor:
I appreciate the recent piece on Josiah’s pivot to half-mushroom burgers and Brown's efforts to reduce red meat consumption on campus. We all owe a big thanks to Brown Dining Services for taking on the challenge of helping achieve our sustainability goals while providing healthy, tasty food for our students, faculty and staff. The article mentioned the nitrogen footprint as a motivation for red meat reduction — but it's more than that.
Brown’s Strategic Sustainability Plan has five focal areas: climate change, nutrient pollution, water use, biodiversity and human health. Eating less — or no — red meat and dairy helps with each of these. Producing a half-pound burger can release the equivalent of up to 50 pounds of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, while burning a half a pound of coal produces about two pounds! That same half-pound burger can add about 20 pounds to your nitrogen footprint, largely due to the fossil fuel-derived nitrogen fertilizer required to grow the crops — mostly corn and soybeans — that are fed to cows. Nitrogen pollution affects air and water quality, and thus human health, as well as having multiple other negative environmental effects. Speaking of water, that half-pound burger requires about the same amount of water as a seven-hour shower. And clearing land for beef production is responsible for about half of all tropical deforestation —- one of the biggest threats to biodiversity.
Simply put, eating less red meat and dairy is one of the biggest steps an individual in our community can take to live more sustainably — especially for students who can’t yet control what type of car they drive or how they heat their homes, but can choose to eat more sustainably at on-campus dining halls.
Sincerely,
Stephen Porder (Associate Provost for Sustainability, Acacia Professor of Ecology, Evolutionary and Organismal Biology and Environment and Society)
