“Hamburgers are the Hummers of the Food Industry” - this was the title of a recent media report that caught my attention. As I read the article, it became apparent that “beefburgers” would have been more appropriate, but that would have robbed the title of its alliteration. The piece itself filled me with a mixture of alarm and amusement, so I will paraphrase its essential content here.

I guess we all know by now that eating plenty of fruit and vegetables is good for us, but how many of us are aware that we might need more than 5 A DAY if we are to ensure the wellbeing - or possibly even the survival - of our species? According to a recent Canadian scientific paper, we had better start changing our eating habits right now, or face dire consequences globally.

The Canadian paper is among the first to quantify the impact of our appetite for meat and dairy products, giving us a clearer picture of the environmental damage we are orchestrating. The livestock sector accounts for 18 per cent of global greenhouse gas emissions, of which 78 per cent is due to cattle. Before you laugh at the impact of the bovine backside on our climate, just consider the fact that meat production is expected to double worldwide by 2050. If just one adult stops using beef and dairy products, they will save the CO2 equivalent of burning 324 gallons of petrol per year. If everybody in the UK followed suit, the equivalent saving would be 20,000 million gallons - imagine the impact worldwide.

So why are cattle so damaging? The Canadian paper explains that a by-product of the incredibly inefficient beef production process is methane, a potent greenhouse gas. A single kilo of beef will “cost” the methane equivalent of 16kg of CO2 being released into the atmosphere - a figure four times higher than pork and more than 10 times as much as a kilo of poultry. If people were to switch from beef to chicken, emissions would be cut by 70 per cent.

At this point, I have to diverge from the almost unbelievably naïve viewpoint of the scientific paper, which fails to take into account the fact that beef production is inseparable from dairy production, unless cattle are genetically engineered to produce a hundred heifers to every bullock. Who honestly believes that we are going to wilfully abandon en masse our enjoyment of dairy products?

We now take daily consumption of meat for granted, and we are unlikely to abandon our demand now or in the future. Perhaps the best we can hope for is a return to the days when meat was regarded as a weekly treat; a combination of education of the populace and the introduction of “emission taxation” into a globally integrated pricing policy might be the only way forward.

According to the Canadian paper, if annual meat consumption per capita in the developed world was cut from the current level of about 90kg to the recommended level of 53kg, livestock emissions would fall by 44 per cent.

So cut out the burgers and get your 8 A DAY here!