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.

  • 🍉 Albert 🍉
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    117 hours ago

    question, how come beef is so cheap it’s it takes so much resources?

    if it’s just subsidies, then we should get rid of them

    • @zeca@lemmy.eco.br
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      45 hours ago

      Polluting is a bit different from taking resources. The industry should be more regulated, which would maybe convert the damage made to the environment into an increased price of beef.

    • @zeca@lemmy.eco.br
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      35 hours ago

      Its cheap if you forget that part of the price is the habitability of the planet.

      And beef isnt so cheap around here, i guess it depends on where you live.

    • @rumba@lemmy.zip
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      6 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.

      • 🍉 Albert 🍉
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        23 hours ago

        which is crazy, because EU meat is basically the same price but much better quality.