The vegan lobby is using dodgy data - and it's fuelling hysteria
In the Spectator last week, Jenny McCartney declared that the war on meat has begun and “vegans are winning comfortably”. She points to vegan numbers swelling exponentially (though this is from a low base); and the rapidity with which food suppliers such as Waitrose have jumped on the bandwagon (though their virtue-signalling outweighs the percentage of shelf space devoted to the cause).
But I believe McCartney is right when she says: “For decades now, there has been an undercurrent of guilt about the frequently appalling treatment of animals in industrial farming, something which the majority of carnivores simply choose not to think about…” Agreed – too many of us turn a blind eye, tucking into bacon and eggs, turning the page quickly when the newspaper tells us something about factory farming.Nevertheless it is not clear that veganism is the answer to the problems it has played a useful part in highlighting. Animal welfare could be greatly improved by bringing in better livestock protection laws. At the same time, those of us who can afford to do so should put our money where our hearts are, and switch to inevitably more expensive “certified” products. The time is indeed right for us to look more honestly at what we eat.
The problem is though, that the vegan lobby itself is preventing us from doing this. The debate is now so deluged with emotive images, distorted facts, and barely credible statistics, that it’s impossible for anyone to weigh information fairly and accurately.
I’m going to focus here on one false “fact” that just won’t go away. It’s an important one that is used over and over again to illustrate the wastefulness of meat production. Specifically, it’s about the amount of water it takes to produce a kilogram of beef. At first it seems funny that this particular fact holds such sway. But there is a perverse logic to it. This frequently cited statistic makes the production of beef seem so outrageously wasteful that is tempting for vegan writers to use it again and again – and they do.
Type this into Google: “how much water does it take to produce a kilo of beef?”.
Where I am, the top link is a Guardian report that states “To produce 1kg of meat requires between 5,000 and 20,000 litres of water”. The source is a report by the Institute of Mechanical Engineers. For those of you struggling to imagine 20,000 litres of water, its about 200 full bathtubs to produce one little kg of meat.
Only this Saturday (26 January) OxfordStudent.com published an article that states “The production of one kilogram of steak requires 15,000 litres of water”. No caveats were provided nor does the article bother to give a source.
The Sunday Times has been at it too, earlier this month. An article entitled “The Case Against Meat” states: ‘Up to 20,000 litres of water is needed to produce 1kg of meat’ (Sunday Times Magazine, January 6 2019, The Case Against Meat by Megan Agnew, page 21). This also sources the data from the same Institute of Mechanical Engineers report. So I looked up the IME Report only to find that they too were simply quoting someone else’s work. Worse, I found that the relevant footnote providing the source was missing. It’s pretty hopeless that neither The Guardian nor the Sunday Times did this checking – which took me ten minutes.
A little bit of digging and I found that a year ago The Sydney Herald also quoted the same figure and the same IME source. At that point, a fed-up Australian journalist contacted the IME to try to trace the missing footnote. It turns out that the IME source is a 2008 report published by Waterfootprint.org and written by Professor Arjen Hoekstra.
In this report, Hoekstra introduces the concept of the “water footprint” of foods as a potentially useful environment management concept. The water footprint of a product “is the volume of freshwater used to produce the product, measured at the place where the product was actually produced. It refers to the sum of the water used in the various steps of the production chain.” So far, so straight-forward. As an example, Hoekstra asks us to consider the “water footprint” of beef. He calculates the amount of food a beef producing animal consumes and then states: “Producing the volume of feed [ per beef kg] requires about 15,300 litres of water on average.” Guess what? Unsourced… A simple assertion. That is the end of the chain.
Anyway, the author adds “The numbers provided are estimated global averages; the water footprint of beef will strongly vary depending on the production region, feed composition and origin of the feed ingredients.”
And we don’t need scientific studies when simple logic will suffice to show that for many types of beef the numbers are ridiculous. Take British beef. It is mostly grass fed. British cows generally graze on pasture that is unsuitable for crop production. Rain falls on the grass. The grass grows. Cattle eat the grass. Cattle also drink from rain-fed troughs or streams. None of the water is “used up”. It goes round and round. No strain is placed on the “water system”. The cycle would happen whether the cattle were there or not. For those still concerned with “mostly grass fed” it is also entirely possible to buy British beef that is 100% grass fed where all the water consumed and “recycled” by the cow has recently fallen from the sky. The water usage argument makes no sense. Yet expect to see it again and again.
This brings me to three further points. The water usage figures for beef production are so preposterous that I have to wonder how people could believe them. If we are that far removed from having a good understanding about how our food is produced – then the vegans do have a point. We should try to get a better understanding of where our food comes from – and I can recommend organic grass-fed British beef.
Secondly I found it worrying to find students at our top universities, journalists for our national newspapers, scientific institutions, cheerfully requoting dodgy data, leaving out sources, and losing footnotes. It leaves me less likely to “trust the experts” in some of our other science and data led debates.
Thirdly, it was good to find that I could “go round” the data by looking at a cow grazing in a field. It made me think that the same technique could be used for other expert-led data-deep debates. Where else can we “go round” the data and arrive at something that might be staring at us in the face from the beginning?
