The beef between meat-lovers and tree-huggers

Full Disclosure: I love to eat. I especially love a rare (read: bloody) hamburger. Made of grassfed beef, that is.

Think of the last time you ate a burger and fries. Was it fresh off the grill in Wilcox or Wu? Straight from that arch-adorned yellow and red paper bag at McDonald's? Chili's? In-N-Out Burger? Triumph? No doubt, the burger's a timeless American specialty, made from the same pleasantly pink ground beef in kitchens across the country. With a squirt of Heinz 57 and a leaf of Iceberg suctioned to the yellow square of cheese melting across the meat, this meal is a little piece of heaven. Sadly, it's not as perfect as it seems.

First developed by Genghis Khan's Mongol warriors, who stored meat under their saddles to tenderize it as they rode into battle, one could argue that the hamburger has changed little, since it is just as dirty and unhealthy now as it was 2,000 years ago. Is the situation really this bad? Could it actually be worse? A quick dissection of the beef and how it landed on your plate reveals the inherent problems with America's food system and the links between hamburgers and the environment.

Your quarter pound of ground beef is just one 3,200,000th of the 800,000 pounds of hamburger produced by a single meat processing plant in one day. Four meatpacking firms in this country are responsible for slaughtering 84 percent of the nation's cattle. The neatly packed patties they produce can contain meat from up to 100 cows, roughly 1.1 grams from each cow, or the mass of half a penny. These cows lived with 9,900 identical neighbors in a feedlot somewhere in Iowa, Nebraska, or elsewhere in the Midwest. By the time they were slaughtered and processed to produce the country's annual hamburger intake of roughly 300 hamburgers per person, 78.6 percent of their meat contained microbes spread primarily by fecal matter, as analyzed by our very own trusty USDA.

Luckily, Princeton students are not plagued with E. Coli or sick with salmonella from their weekly intake of 3 to 5 hamburgers. Our meat may not be perfect, but we're not dying from it. So what's the fuss?

The unfortunate relationship between beef production and greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions may not make headline news, but it is an important part of the climate change equation that the average consumer has the ability to change.

Compare a hamburger to a granola bar. Or a panini. Or a molten dark chocolate cake. From the crunchy to the savory to the decadent, it has little in common with these other types of foods. And that's precisely the point.

While plants absorb carbon dioxide and release oxygen as they grow, steers lack magical carbon-neutral mechanisms. The quarter-pound of hamburger comes from the flank of a 1,000 pound steer, which inhales the same oxygen as we do, exhaling carbon dioxide and producing methane gas through enteric fermentation, or cow burps (not from the other end). This steer is a doubled-edged sword of GHG emissions in our food system.

Conventional beef production, in which steers are confined to paddocks and fed government-subsidized corn via tractors for their 18-month existence, produces the meat in most hamburgers. It requires enormous amounts of fossil fuel, a ratio of 35 kilocalories of fossil fuel consumed to produce one kilocalorie of beef as reported by Dr. David Pimentel of Cornell University. And that does not include emissions from the steer itself.

The average steer burps 280 liters of methane daily, amounting to 140 full two-liter soda bottles. Methane is the second most common GHG after CO2, and it is 21 times better than CO2 at trapping heat in the atmosphere. This fact compounds the effects of raising steers: We emit greenhouse gases raising them, and they emit greenhouse gases as they are raised.

Fortunately for our carnivorous population, there is a sustainable alternative to conventional beef, and healthier too. Grassfed beef is the buzzword hitting every establishment from Whole Foods to Chipotle. It defines a steer raised on grass, which, by harvesting his own food, eliminates the costly fossil-fuel dominated process. It doesn't rid us of the greenhouse gas emissions, but it reduces them, at the same time producing meat with two to four more times the amount of omega-3 fatty acids and up to three to five times more conjugated linoleic acid (CLA) than conventional beef. It helps fight cancer and global warming all in one!

Where can you find grassfed beef, besides Mediterra and Cherry Grove Farm, both local and costly options? That may be the best news yet. Princeton's very own Department of Dining Services introduced locally raised grassfed hamburgers this week to the residential college dining calls, a biweekly specialty. At three times the cost of conventional meat, this change marks an exciting improvement for Princeton's food system.