This month’s Food X is brought to you by the Center’s Population and Sustainability Senior Media Specialist Kim Dinan. Kim shares the results of a new Center analysis that looked at the enormous climate impact of beef recipes promoted by some of the top U.S. recipe outlets.
Read on to learn what we discovered — and what recipe outlets can do to take responsibility for the role they play in promoting recipes that help drive the climate crisis. You can also take action to promote climate-friendly food in schools.
Cooking the Climate
After the rush and chaos of the holidays, most of us welcome the quiet, cold days of January. It’s a time when we’re more inclined to stay home and cook, whether that’s because we’re fulfilling a resolution, trying to save money, or just embracing the pull of hibernation.
When people whip up a home meal, they often turn to recipe outlets for inspiration. Beef consumption in the United States is four times the global average and the leading driver of food-related emissions. Yet most food-media outlets still promote beef recipes. It raises the question: What’s the responsibility and opportunity for these outlets as we face down the climate crisis?
The Center’s new report takes a look at just that. We analyzed beef-recipe promotion on Instagram across 10 of the top U.S. food and recipe outlets over a 30-day period and found that the annual carbon footprint of posted beef recipes adds up to 145 million metric tons of CO2 — more than Belgium emits in a year.
The posted recipes called for a total of more than 57 pounds of beef. If social media followers cooked those recipes just once a month, it would contribute as much greenhouse gas pollution as nearly 3 million cars on the road for a year.
Reducing meat consumption is a known climate strategy, but it’s not just recipe outlets that are ignoring the climate burden of the food they promote. Another recent analysis by the Center looked at how often climate journalism covers meat reduction as a solution.
We found that diet shifts appeared in only 1.2% of the more than 10,000 articles from U.S. media outlets we analyzed. Coverage would have to increase sixfold to accurately reflect the proportion of animal agriculture’s responsibility for the climate crisis.
It’s clear that we need to change the way food and recipe outlets and climate media inadvertently prop up the agriculture industry while downplaying its prominent role in the climate crisis.
While the Center’s analyses focused on beef’s steep climate cost, beef is also a leading contributor to the wildlife extinction crisis. Producing beef for all those meat-heavy brisket taco recipes and trendy “beef-cuterie” boards uses an enormous amount of land, water, and pesticides. It also drives water and air pollution and direct attacks on wildlife like wolves, coyotes, bears, prairie dogs, and native insects like grasshoppers. But there’s even less attention paid to wildlife in food and environmental media.
