Is "100 per cent British beef" really 100 per cent British?

Is "100% British beef" really low in food miles? slide show

.... academics, policy makers and businesses increasingly consider a shift towards so-called “plant-based” diets which principally require less land, energy, and other resources.

Why exactly is that so? Whilst meat’s, less so dairy’s, high environmental impact has received some public attention, rarely the biophysical reasons for it are made explicit. Essentially, in the production of all animal-sourced foods that involve the metabolism of an animal, energy is lost and emitted to the environment. Rather than electricity or fuels, energy here means the nutritional energy within the plants eaten by animals that in turn produce or become food. The feed conversion ratio puts the feed input in relation to the food output. Raising and slaughtering cattle for beef, for example, requires about 18kg of feed for 1kg of yielded meat; 4kg/1kg for pork; 2kg/1kg for chicken (de Ruiter et al. 2017). Based in the laws of thermodynamics, this poor energetic efficiency is to an extent improvable but ultimately inevitable whenever animate beings, who by moving and maintaining body heat use energy, grow the tissue that becomes food for another animate being. Thus, via an additional body, animal-sourced foods are an energetic detour in comparison to the energetic shortcut of so-called “plant-based” diets in which humans eat plants directly.

The physical necessity of feed conversion losses not only means that meat and dairy too are based on plants (in form of feed crops), but that base of plants is also much greater than what is required for direct human consumption of plants. Thus, by focussing only on the consumption end, the conventional use of the term “plant-based” falls short of conveying the plant-intensive (and thus energy- and land-intensive) materiality of animal-sourced foods. That term we use to describe our food, as much in academia as in everyday life, only scratches the surface of the materiality of production, and I contend that so does our mindfulness of why meat and dairy play a major role in mass extinction and climate breakdown....

Source: https://discoversociety.org/2019/08/07/all-food-is-plant-based-particularly-meat-and-dairy/

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