Ivy Pepin
When climate scientists suggested eating less beef, many people committed to a “no red meat” diet—but started eating a lot more chicken instead. Here’s why that swap might actually end up hurting the environment more than it helps.
You might have heard it mentioned by a friend, discussed in a book, or echoed in a news article. But chances are, you’ve heard it somewhere: “Eat less red meat to help the climate.”
Cutting out red meat is one of the best things we can do to lower cancer risk, reduce the risk of heart disease, and benefit the environment. And looking at a graph of US beef consumption over the last six decades, it seems like we’ve earned a collective pat on the back. In 1960, the average American was eating 133 pounds of beef in a year. By 2021, that amount had fallen to a little over 111 pounds.
Clearly, the advice from doctors, nutritionists, and environmentalists was working—Americans were finally starting to cut back on red meat, undoubtedly making great strides for the climate, for animals, and for our collective health. Still, even with this major decline in beef consumption, US consumers ate an average of 224.8 pounds of meat in 2021—the highest amount yet. Aren’t we supposed to be reducing our meat consumption? What’s going on?
Here’s the short answer: Rather than replacing red meat with plant-based protein, Americans are eating more chicken than ever. And while it’s great to cut back on red meat, if we truly want to make a difference for the environment, animal welfare, and poultry workers—it’s time we also cut back on chicken.
How chicken became the new beef
While beef consumption has been on a steady decline since the 1960s, the amount of chicken people are eating has skyrocketed. From 1960 to 2021, while red meat consumption plateaued and then dipped, annual chicken consumption per capita surged from 28 pounds to 98 pounds. Americans’ appetite for chicken has increased so much, in fact, that it’s done more than just offset the reduction in beef—it’s increased our total meat consumption.
A few different studies have helped to influence this trend, including one study based on the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey. The study, which set out to examine the greenhouse gas emissions associated with US eating habits, used data on the food participants had eaten in 24 hours. Then, researchers identified the single food with the highest carbon footprint and substituted this food with a calorie-equivalent “lower-impact” food—basically, replacing a plate of beef with a plate of chicken.
The study found that replacing participants’ beef intake with poultry resulted in a 35.7% decrease in their average dietary greenhouse gas emissions. While the finding is certainly compelling if you’re solely focused on reducing carbon emissions, it certainly doesn’t tell the whole story—including the whole host of other environmental drawbacks that come with a large-scale shift from beef to chicken. Nevertheless, the central message stuck: Chicken must be better for the environment than beef.
In recent years, the environmental virtues of chicken have been espoused in National Geographic and Smithsonian Magazine (among other leading media outlets), with attention-grabbing headlines like “Choose Chicken Over Beef to Dramatically Cut Carbon Footprint, Study Shows” and “Choosing chicken over beef cuts our carbon footprints a surprising amount.” Many of these articles rave about “swapping beef for poultry,” emphasizing that we should be eating chicken instead of beef—not cutting back on our overall meat consumption.
Perhaps the most striking quote comes at the end of a New York Times article titled “The Real Problem with Beef:” "I asked Dr. Taber what we might advise people, right now, to help the environment. 'Who needs steak when there’s bacon and fried chicken?' she said."
The displacement paradox
In 2021, researcher Richard York published a study in Nature Sustainability probing this very question: Has the growth in consumption of lower-impact meats over the last few decades suppressed consumption of other meat sources? In other words, has our increased appetite for chicken actually reduced our beef consumption and helped the climate? Unfortunately, he found the answer to be no—the increased consumption of poultry and fish has done nothing to limit consumption of more carbon-intensive meats, like beef and lamb.
York chalks this up to a phenomenon he calls the “displacement paradox.” In a previous study on the renewable energy transition, his research had found that expansions in renewable energy did not result in a reduction of fossil fuel emissions, but, rather, just increased overall energy consumption. Similarly, “when additional meat choices are offered,” he points out, “that additional variety tends to, more simply, increase overall meat consumption.”
York’s research suggests that these large-scale transitions, like moving away from fossil fuels and meat-centric diets, will take more than just providing alternatives. In addition to promoting plant-based meats and renewables, he argues, we need to be actively cutting back on fossil fuels—and, similarly, meat consumption—on the whole.
This isn’t to say we shouldn’t be exploring new alternatives to meat or pushing the renewable energy transition. These creative alternatives and mindset shifts will be essential pieces of the patchwork as we work together to fight climate change and restore our planet. But maybe it’s time to reframe the conversation about chicken vs. beef.
Maybe it’s not actually about what kinds of meat we’re eating. Maybe it’s about eating less meat altogether.
Why is chicken bad for the environment?
Let’s get this straight: Chicken is terrible for the environment. It is better for the environment than beef—but largely just when we’re talking about CO2 emissions. And as we all know, it’s so much more complicated than that.
While poultry clocks in at an average of 2.9 kilograms of carbon emissions for every 50 grams of protein produced (compared to beef’s whopping 17.7 kg CO2 per 50 grams), the real issues are a bit more difficult to summarize in a number. They have to do with agricultural runoff poisoning our water supply, countless acres of forest being clear-cut for cropland to grow chicken feed, and biodiversity loss happening on an enormous scale. As Leah Garcés, president of Mercy For Animals, aptly puts it in a piece for Vox: “Swapping beef with chicken is akin to swapping a Hummer with a Ford F-150, not a Prius.”
When we reduce everything down to a single number, like CO2 emissions per gram of meat, we aren’t really doing justice to the immense complexity of our food system. It’s important to recognize that the environmental costs of chicken, like so many of the climate impacts embedded in our food’s journey from farm to plate, are interrelated and often have compounding effects. The real issue isn’t just beef—it’s an industrialized food system that exploits people, animals, and nature to turn a profit.
Here are just a few of the environmental costs of chicken:
1. Arable land degradation
A study by the Union of Concerned Scientists, published in February of this year, found that US poultry giant Tyson Foods uses between 9 and 10 million acres of farmland to grow corn and soybeans for animal feed. That’s an area almost twice the size of New Jersey. And the majority of it is for—you guessed it—chickens.
“With so much land involved in its feed supply chain, Tyson could help move US agriculture in a positive direction if it used its influence to set high standards for the way farmers manage that land, and if it provided support for farmers in meeting these standards,” the study points out. But unfortunately, Tyson has only enrolled about 5% of this land in sustainable farming programs. The rest of the land is subject to all the environmental degradation that comes along with monoculture—including changes to the soil, disruption of plants and animals, and pollution from fertilizers and pesticides.
2. Deforestation
Another big downside to all this cropland is deforestation—which drives carbon emissions and exacerbates the climate crisis, destroys local livelihoods, and kills millions of animals every year. Much of the soy used to make processed feed for chickens is grown in South America, on land that used to be forests or savannahs.
Take Brazil’s Cerrado savannah, for example, which lost half its forest to soy production. Supply chain investigations have linked this deforestation to industrial farms in the UK, which use soy grown in the region to feed the chickens that go on to supply companies like McDonald’s and Tesco.
Also important to note are the calories inherently wasted by growing crops for animals rather than humans. 8 pounds of grain translates to just 1 pound of edible beef—meaning the land used to grow that grain could have fed many more humans directly. Not only is this land use causing deforestation on an enormous scale; it’s also incredibly inefficient and, sadly, unnecessary.
3. Water and air pollution
Poultry farming produces a lot of waste, from manure to chicken feed to animal carcasses. Chicken manure is generally spread on nearby cropland as fertilizer. But the sheer amount of this waste is too much for the land to absorb, and much of it runs off into streams and rivers, oversaturating them with nitrogen and phosphorous. This runoff causes toxic algal blooms that deplete oxygen and kill or displace aquatic animals. All of this amounts to the factory farming industry being one of the leading causes of water pollution in the US.
And it’s not just water pollution. In the areas around large-scale poultry farms, local communities are forced to breathe air thick with dust particles and the stench of ammonia. Even beyond the unbearable odors, the air pollution caused by chicken farming operations presents a health hazard and turns thriving communities into areas that are almost unlivable.
What about animal welfare?
While the transition from red meat to chicken has undoubtedly been a welcome boon for the poultry industry, it’s been a real-life horror movie for chickens.
Cows suffer tremendously. But if we’re going to try and put a number on suffering, cows’ lives are quantifiably less painful than those of chickens. When it comes to the number of animals raised and killed for food, as well as the pain these animals experience in their lifetimes, social scientist Brian Tomasik suggests that, due to the cramped and painful conditions they live in, chickens actually suffer three times as much as cows do. In the eyes of Big Ag, it always comes down to what’s cheapest and most efficient—and for cows, that means being raised outdoors and fattened for slaughter on feedlots. For chickens, it means something much worse.
It turns out that the very cheapest way to raise broilers, or chickens raised for meat, is to pack them into filthy warehouses where they never see the light of day, to leave them lying burned by their own waste when their legs break underneath their unnatural weight, and finally to end their brief lives in live-shackle slaughter—a gruesome process in which they’re hung by their ankles, dragged through an electrified bath, slit by the throat by a spinning blade, and often boiled alive. Estimates show that, due to slaughterhouse failures and human error, 1,400 sentient chickens are boiled alive every single day.
Factory-farmed chickens are the most abused animals on the planet. Their lives literally consist of unending torture until the day of their terrifying, excruciating slaughter. And when we factor in the relative size of chickens to cows, we must acknowledge another horrifying truth: It takes approximately 134 chickens to feed the same number of people as a single cow. That means that one sad life for a cow is equivalent to 134 chicken lives full of extreme suffering. This logic has led vegan activist Matt Ball to advocate cutting out chicken instead of beef, which saves far more animal lives.
But even when we’re thinking about sustainability rather than welfare, chicken continues to raise questions. As Serious Eats points out, __how do we really define the word “sustainable?” __
"If your definition is limited to environmental sustainability, then beef is certainly less sustainable than other meats. But according to an emerging definition of sustainability, one that values the health and livelihood of the people who produce our food in addition to economic and environmental concerns, most of the chicken available in US supermarkets and fast-food restaurants is just as unsustainable as beef. And, in fact, it may be worse."
The human cost of chicken
While the beef and pork industries are incredibly exploitative, the poultry industry is one of the worst offenders. Big Poultry has a long history of intentionally exploiting women, minorities, immigrants, and prisoners—those who lack the security or resources to advocate for themselves for fear of jeopardizing their jobs.
A powerful report by Oxfam exposes some of the day-to-day abuses workers face in the poultry industry—among them permanent hand and wrist damage from repeating the same motions thousands of times a day, wages barely above the poverty line, and a heightened risk of experiencing depressive symptoms. The US Department of Labor acknowledges “serious safety and health hazards”.) in the industry, where workers are injured at a rate five times higher than other professions. In 2013, poultry workers were three times more likely to suffer amputations, even compared to high-risk professions like mining and manufacturing.
Over the last 35 years, the maximum speed of a poultry processing line has doubled, and the industry is pushing to make it even higher. In this high-production/high-profits environment, workers are treated no better than machines—and discouraged from taking breaks, even to go to the bathroom. As a result, many workers resort to wearing diapers while on the line.
All of this doesn’t seem very sustainable at all.
Conclusion
Rather than discourage us, the societal shift from eating beef to eating chicken should give us some hope. These changing patterns in meat consumption prove that people are thinking about the environmental impact of what they eat—and they’re changing their everyday habits drastically.
Thanks to the elasticity of supply for meat, less consumer demand for meat does result in fewer animals being raised on factory farms. We’ve increased our chicken consumption and seen a huge shift in the market. Imagine what would happen if we decreased that consumption.
So let’s take away some willingness to experiment. Swapping beef with… chicken? Let’s exercise a little creativity here! Instead of swapping your steak with another uninspired chicken dish, try swapping it with a flavorful plant-based alternative—like a beautiful portobello mushroom, a protein-rich black bean burger, or even a mycelium steak. Diversifying our eating habits is the first step to diversifying our food system.
Then all those other times, when you would have had chicken anyway, you can feel better knowing that you’re eating it in moderation. (And hey, you might want to try some plant-based alternatives for that, too. Like these mind-blowing chicken nuggets from Tindle that taste like, well, chicken.)
