What’s the beef with meat? Andrio Abero at Dutchuncle.com

IF YOU’RE a typical westerner, you ate nearly 100 kilograms of meat last year. This was almost certainly the costliest part of your diet, especially in environmental terms. The clamour for people to eat less meat to save the planet is growing ever louder. “Less meat = less heat”, proclaimed Paul McCartney in the run-up to last December’s conference on global warming in Copenhagen. And this magazine recently recommended eating less meat as a way to reduce our environmental footprint.

If less is good, wouldn’t none be better? You might think so. “In the developed world, the most effective way to reduce the environmental impact of diet, on a personal basis, is to become vegetarian or vegan,” says Annette Pinner, chief executive of the Vegetarian Society in the UK.

It seems like a no-brainer, but is it really that simple? To find out, let’s imagine what would happen if the whole world decided to eliminate meat, milk and eggs from its diet, then trace the effects as they ripple throughout agriculture, the environment and society. The result may surprise you.

In 2008 the world consumed about 280 million tonnes of meat, 700 million tonnes of milk and 1.2 billion eggs, according to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO). Environmentally speaking, this came at an enormous cost.

All agriculture damages the environment – think of all those felled forests and ploughed-up prairies, all the irrigation water, manure, tractor fuel, pesticides and fertiliser. Agriculture produces more greenhouse gases than all methods of transport put together, and contributes to a host of …