I attended a food show last month at which the keynote speaker’s presentation featured the positive attributes of plant-based products. Specifically, the speaker focused on the hefty environmental impact that meat production causes the environment and the much more enviro-friendly impact of plant-based proteins.

I took pictures of the PowerPoint slides and here’s some of the info the speaker shared:

Plant-based products cause less environmental damage than animal-based versions
From the IPPC, “The world is sleepwalking into climate catastrophe”
Governments need to enact policies toward changing people’s lifestyles and behaviors including promoting plant-based products over meat consumption
Food insecurity: The global population is going to be 9.7 billion by 2050
It takes 7-9 calories of feed for 1 calorie of chicken
It takes 25-35 calories of feed to get 1 calorie of beef
Plant-based alternatives have more positive effects on human health

The speaker was quite passionate and dogmatic that we are going to destroy the environment if we continue on our meat eating, self-indulgent path. She shared a lot of data about meat production’s misuse of water, land and inputs.

Listening to this presentation from a meat industry perspective, the information presented was surely not objective. Yes, meat has an environmental impact, but so does everything else.

I made it a point to talk with the speaker after her presentation and I politely challenged her on some of the claims she made, specifically her outlandish charge that beef production is causing more global warming than transportation.

So, how does one find out the actual, objective, "non-spun" environmental impact of meat? Or of plant-based products? As it turns out, getting the whole picture is complicated.

I checked the websites of many of the largest meat companies in our nation. I also reviewed the various meat industry associations and check-off groups websites. Many have information on sustainability, their plan to reduce GHG and inputs, and get to net zero in the future. I didn’t find any one-page, downloadable fact sheets that can be easily turned into talking points for a presentation, a conversation or a Twitter tweet.

In the current culture, consumers are overloaded with information. Few are going to read a long study or paper on your meat company or your protein category’s environmental impact. I am not saying you need a TikTok or Instagram video (that would be cool though) but you do need to simplify your data and present some simple-to-use talking points that our current social media culture can readily digest. You also need to make this information easy to find with its own page on your website and not bury it deep under layers. A page entitled “Environmental Impacts” or “Meat and Climate Change Facts” would be nice.

I know that providing actual, vetted out, objective data about the true environmental impact of meat production is complicated. The inputs required are hard to measure. But this is true for plant-based products also. Still, I feel we need it to compete with the massive amount of misinformation the plant-based marketers are pumping out every week. What do you think? Should we just keep taking these punches and hope we survive until the end of the 12^th round?

I can’t definitively assess the true environmental impact of producing a pound of beef, pork or chicken. Nor do I know what it is for a pound of walnuts, almonds, pinto beans, melons or plant-based products.

What I do know is that many in the plant-based industry are not just out there to provide a protein alternative that may or may not be more environmentally friendly and nutritious. They are determined to see an end to all meat production. We see this in their Ted Talks, websites, podcasts and the transparently skewed data they present.

I am not opposed to plant-based alternatives. I’ve blogged about this before. All of the companies that process meat should be in this space with their own product line. Better to offer your customers a plant-based product that you make as a protein alternative than to give up market share to the companies that want to end all animal ag. Are you currently in this space and directing resources to see it grow?

How is your company or organization proactively working to defend the constant attack that "meat consumption is unsustainable" for the environment?

Meat’s actual environmental impact: It’s complicated

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