Beef is good for Canadians

Vincent J. Curtis

22 Dec 22

RE: Transition away from meat would help the planet.  Op-ed by Renaud Gignac and David Steele.  Gignac is an economist and spokesperson for the Coalition for a Sustainable food transition.  Steele is president and executive director of Earthsave Canada.

It seems that the latest tactic of Veganism is to claim that eating beef is bad, not for you, but for the planet.  Whatever the authors claim about rising beef consumption requiring the destruction of forests does not apply to Canada.  It might be useful for the city-slickers of Central Canada to learn how beef is raised in Alberta’s cowboy country.

The prairies end and the foothills begin in western Alberta.  The change is gradual; where the land is flat, crops are raised; where the land is too rough to run a combine over it, cattle are grazed.  There are few trees on the prairies.

In the foothills, where the hills are forested, cattle are grazed for six months of the year, from June 15 to December 15, on the meadows, which preserves the forest ecology.  Trees don’t have to be cut down to expand pasture land.  If there’s not enough feed for cattle, they are either sent to market early, or bales of hay are purchased from existing crop operations.

The concern about cutting down forests is nonsense.  The world’s population has more than doubled in fifty years, and if forests have to be cleared to feed a growing world, the grass and grain grown on the cleared land needs CO2 as much as trees do, and cattle serve as a tasty intermediate between grass and human.

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