RUMINANT RUINATION
Somewhere in Detroit, an engineer is working late, sweating combustion efficiency and catalysts to diminish the emissions from his company's next bestselling car. He steps out to grab a chicken sandwich for dinner. Maybe he realizes it, maybe he doesn't, but that sandwich is his environmental ally.
Recently, a team of researchers led by Gidon Eshel from Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, and Alon Shepon at Israel's Weizmann Institute of Science weighed the full environmental impact of farming, from animal flatulence to emissions associated with feeding, transporting, and processing. They concluded that beef is "about one order of magnitude" (roughly 10 times) worse for the environment than other meats. Per calorie, it requires 28 times the land and 11 times the water, and, of particular interest to…