What we’re reading: chicken vs. beef and improving fish farming

What we eat doesn’t just affect our health—it affects the health of the planet. Two recent articles highlight serious food production problems and possible solutions.

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Want to help improve the planet’s health? Eat less beef and more chicken. That’s the assessment of James Hamblin’s most recent piece for The Atlantic, “Meats: A Health Hierarchy.” He backs it up with some powerful numbers, like the fact that farming cattle produces about four times as much greenhouse gas as does poultry or fish. To explain the impact of this much greenhouse gas, Hamblin quotes Scott Faber, senior vice president for government affairs at the Environmental Working Group: “If every American stopped eating beef tomorrow and started eating chicken instead—which I don’t expect—that would be the equivalent of taking 26 million cars off the road.” Continue reading “What we’re reading: chicken vs. beef and improving fish farming”