Just a few months in the past, I discovered myself in an surprising dialog with a lady whose husband raises cattle in Missouri. She, nonetheless, had lately raised and butchered an ostrich for meat. It’s extra sustainable, she instructed me. Certain, I nodded alongside, beef is singularly horrible for the planet. And ostrich is a purple meat, she added. “I don’t style any distinction between it and beef.” Actually? Now I used to be intrigued, if skeptical—which is, lengthy story quick, how my household ended up consuming ostrich at this yr’s Christmas dinner.
I eat meat, together with beef, and I take pleasure in indulging in a vacation prime rib, however I additionally really feel considerably conflicted about it. Beef is much worse for the atmosphere than just about some other protein; pound for pound, it’s accountable for greater than twice the greenhouse-gas emissions of pork, almost 4 occasions these of hen, and greater than 13 occasions these of beans. This discrepancy is essentially organic: Cows require lots of land, and they’re ruminants, whose digestive programs depend on microbes that produce enormous portions of the potent greenhouse gasoline methane. A single cow can belch out 220 kilos of methane a yr.
The distinctive awfulness of beef’s local weather influence has impressed a cottage business of takes imploring Individuals to contemplate different proteins in its stead: hen, fish, pork, beans. These options all have their very own drawbacks. In the case of animal welfare, for instance, lots of of chickens or fish must be slaughtered to feed as many individuals as one cow. In the meantime, pigs are particularly clever, and traditional technique of farming them are particularly merciless. And beans, I’m sorry, merely aren’t as scrumptious.
So, ostrich? At first look, ostrich didn’t appear essentially the most climate-friendly possibility (beans), essentially the most moral (beans once more), or the tastiest (pork, in my private opinion). However may ostrich be ok in all of those classes, an appropriate if shocking answer to Individuals’ love of an excessive amount of purple meat? On the very least, I puzzled if ostrich could be deserving of extra consideration than we give to it proper now, which is roughly zero.
You in all probability received’t be shocked to listen to that the literature on ostrich meat’s local weather influence is slightly skinny. Nonetheless, in South Africa, “the world chief within the manufacturing of ostriches,” authorities economists in 2020 launched a report suggesting that greenhouse-gas emissions from ostrich meat have been simply barely increased than hen’s—so, a lot, a lot lower than beef’s. And in Switzerland, biologists who put ostriches in respiratory chambers confirmed their methane emissions to be on par with these of nonruminant mammals resembling pigs—so, once more, a lot, a lot lower than cows’.
However Marcus Clauss, an creator of the latter research, who specializes within the digestive physiology of animals on the College of Zurich, cautioned me in opposition to focusing solely on methane. Methane is a very potent greenhouse gasoline, but it surely is only one of a number of. Carbon dioxide is the opposite large contributor to world warming, and a whole evaluation of ostrich meat’s greenhouse-gas footprint wants to incorporate the carbon dioxide launched by each enter, together with the fertilizer, pesticides, and soil components that went into rising ostrich feed.
That is the place the comparisons get extra difficult. Cattle—even corn-fed ones—are likely to spend a lot of their life on pasture consuming grass, which results in lots of methane burps, however rising that grass shouldn’t be carbon intensive. In distinction, hen feed is made up of corn and soybeans, whose fertilizer, pesticides, and soil components all rack up carbon-dioxide emissions. Ostrich feed seems related, containing alfalfa, wheat, and soybeans. The local weather influence of an animal’s feed are vital contributions in its complete greenhouse-gas emissions, says Ermias Kebreab, an animal scientist at UC Davis who has extensively studied livestock emissions. He hasn’t calculated ostrich emissions particularly—few researchers have—however the extra I seemed into the emissions related to ostrich feed, the murkier the story turned.
Two different ostrich research, from northwest Spain and from a province in western Iran, certainly discovered feed to be a significant component within the meat’s local weather influence. However these reviews additionally contradicted others: In Spain, for example, the global-warming potential from ostrich meat was discovered to be increased than that of beef or pork—however beef was additionally basically no worse than pork.
“Actually, not one of the [studies] on ostrich look credible to me. All of them give odd numbers,” says Joseph Poore, the director of the Oxford Martin Programme on Meals Sustainability, which runs the HESTIA platform geared toward standardizing environmental-impact information from meals. “Possibly that is one thing we are going to do with HESTIA quickly,” Poore continued in his electronic mail, “however we’re not there but …” (His ellipses advised to me that ostrich may not be a high precedence.)
The reality is, greenhouse-gas emissions from meals are delicate to the precise mode of manufacturing, which fluctuate nation to nation, area to area, and even farm to farm. And any evaluation is barely nearly as good as the standard of the info that go into it. I couldn’t discover any peer-reviewed research of American farms elevating the ostrich meat I may really purchase. Finally, my journey down the rabbit gap of ostrich emissions satisfied me that parsing the relative virtues of several types of meat could be inappropriate. “Simply eat no matter meat you need however reduce to twenty p.c,” suggests Brian Kateman, a co-founder of the Reducetarian Basis, which advocates consuming, nicely, much less meat. (Different activists, after all, are extra absolutist.) Nonetheless, “eat much less meat” is an adage simpler to say than to implement. The problem, Clauss stated, is, “any measure that you’d instigate to make meat rarer will make it extra of a standing image than it already is.”
I considered his phrases over Christmas dinner, the type of celebration that many Individuals really feel is incomplete and not using a fancy roast. By then, I had, out of curiosity, ordered an ostrich filet (billed as tasting like a lean steak) and an ostrich wing (like a beef rib), which I persuaded my in-laws to placed on the desk. At greater than $25 a pound for the filet, the fowl value as a lot as a first-rate minimize of beef.
Ostrich has not one of the sturdy or gamey flavors that individuals can discover off-putting, however it’s fairly lean. I pan-seared the filet with a beneficiant pat of butter, garlic, and thyme. The rosy inside and caramelized crust did completely resemble steak. However maybe as a result of I didn’t style the ostrich blind—apologies to the scientific technique—I discovered the flavour nonetheless redolent of poultry, if richer and meatier. Not unhealthy, however not precisely beefy. “I wouldn’t assume it’s beef,” concluded my brother-in-law, who had been persuaded to smoke the ostrich wing alongside his ordinary Christmas prime rib. The wing jogged my memory most of a Renaissance Truthful turkey leg; a leftover sandwich I mounted up the subsequent day, although, would have handed as a superbly acceptable brisket sandwich.
I wouldn’t thoughts having ostrich once more, however the value places it out of attain for weeknight meals, after I can simply be consuming beans anyhow. At Christmas, I anticipate my in-laws will keep on with the prime rib, streaked by way of as it’s with heat fats and nostalgia.
