Beef… it’s what’s for dinner.

Or… depending on who you ask, it's destroying the planet.

This meat is contentious.

Lots of people love eating beef, but it also has the biggest environmental impact of nearly any food we eat.

So, what can we do about it?

[OPEN] Per pound, producing beef releases more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere than just about any other meat.

That’s mostly due to methane - which has about 25 times more global warming impact than the same amount of carbon dioxide.

Cows produce a lot of methane.

Well, actually all cattle do.

Cows are female cattle who have had babies, while most beef comes from castrated males, called steers.

I’m using “cow” to mean “four-legged farm animal that moos”.

Most cow methane comes from their mouths, and not...ya know...the other end.

See, cows have a weird multi-chambered stomach.

In the first part, called the rumen, microbes break down fibery plants like grass and give off methane as a byproduct.

Today, there are 1.4 billion cows walking around belching methane.

They are responsible for nearly a tenth of all human-related emissions.

Some of that's from dairy cows, but most of it's from cows raised for their beef.

I dunno if you’ve ever seen a cow up close, but they’re massive.

It takes a lot of cow food to make that much cow, and a lot of land to make all that cow food.

More than a quarter of all land on earth is devoted to feeding all those cows.

As a result, beef is one of the top drivers of deforestation, which is mainly happening in tropical forests - some of Earth’s most biologically diverse ecosystems.

Left to their own devices, trees are carbon-trapping wizards.

They pull CO2 out of the air and transform it into wood, which locks carbon out of the atmosphere for a long time.

Cutting down trees means they stop taking in CO2 and, as trees break down, their carbon makes its way back into the atmosphere.

Having too many cows on a piece of land can also cause the soil to break down and release trapped carbon into the air.

Methane emissions, deforestation, and degradation of soil - these are just the big players our collective love of beef creates a whole pile of other environmental, climate, and health impacts So altogether, there’s a lot of bad sides to beef.

But can we make beef better?

One place to start is with all those burping cows.

We’ve been breeding beef cattle to be more and more efficient at turning their feed into flesh and milk.

That helps farmers make more money, faster, but it has the added benefit of slightly reducing a cow's carbon footprint, because the faster it becomes beef, the less time it spends burping.

If your main concern is climate, and you want to keep eating beef, then you may want to choose feedlot over grass-fed beef.

That’s because cows can grow faster and reach slaughter weight more quickly on grains, and again, the faster they become beef, the less time they spend burping.

Farming grains to feed cows creates emissions too, but the cow’s shorter life makes up for those extra greenhouse gases.

On the other hand, feedlots come with other environmental and ethical questions too, but that’s a whole other conversation.

One alternative that's catching on is silvopasture, which is basically raising cattle and trees on the same land.

The trees pull carbon from the atmosphere, which can help offset some of the methane from the cows.

Turns out trees are good for the planet… who woulda thought?

But whatever the cows are eating, and wherever they’re living, they’re still cows, and still methane-making machines.

So to meaningfully reduce emissions from cattle production - we need fewer cows, and that means less beef.

There’s no magical technology or farming practice that will have anywhere near as much impact as eating less beef.

But, before we start a food fight, it’s worth noting that in some places we’re already cutting back.

Since the 1970s, beef consumption in the US has gone down.

Some of this might be due to the fact that we’re eating more chicken, which, from a climate perspective, is a helpful switch, since chicken causes way less emissions than beef.

We can also replace beef with things that aren’t meat, like beans, mushrooms, those fancy fake meats everyone is talking about, or like a... vegetable?

Like most climate issues, what you do as one person may feel pretty small.

But collectively, many individual actions together do move the invisible hand of larger change.

And if you want to put on your activist hat, you can do things like email your school or office to ask about ‘meatless Mondays’, ask your favorite restaurant if they can make more non-cow options, or be one of those people on Instagram who tells everyone about that really good mushroom burger recipe they have to try.

Seriously, I have a really good mushroom burger recipe.

So even if beef is what’s for dinner tonight, who knows what will be on our plates tomorrow.