It took a year and a half but Environment Canada has finally received some publicity for a 1995 report which turned a relatively benign eye on the environmental impact of hamburger production.
Production of the common hamburger, from pasture to styrofoam fast food package and plastic throw-away utensils, takes an environmental toll, says the analysis.
But production of any product would.
And few of the negative impacts occur at the farm.
“It was never our intention to pit one food against another or to say one food is more environmentally friendly than another,” said Rosaline Frith, acting director general of Environment Canada’s state of the environment reports.
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“It was our intention to say that it doesn’t matter what kind of food you eat, there are things you can do better, ways to produce it that are less harmful to the environment.”
The report, first published in mid-1995 but little noticed at the time, hit the headlines last week when a news service reporter found the text on the internet and wrote a story. A Toronto newspaper carried it.
Then came national radio reports.
“I guess sometimes the story takes awhile to catch on,” Frith joked after fielding several days of telephone queries about a report she had helped write long ago.
For the meat industry, too, the attention on the issue was surprising.
“It’s history,” said Larry Campbell of the Canadian Meat Council. “It is really challenging a fast food lifestyle that I don’t think is going to change.”
But it is history the meat industry had some hand in defining.
Campbell said the first version of the life cycle of a hamburger study was much more negative about the environmental implications.
“The first version recycled that old idea that somehow meat eaten here comes from cattle produced because of destruction of the rain forest,” he said. “That simply isn’t true so we got that out.”
No cattle are imported into Canada from countries cutting rain forest to create ranches and the final version of the report makes that clear.
Beef not from rain forest areas
“It is important to note that beef produced on land once covered by tropical rain forest does not end up in the hamburgers served at Canadian quick-service restaurants.”
Frith, and the report, also noted that raising cattle often helps the environment by taking fragile soil out of intensive crop production and into pasture.
And she said the environment department recognizes that farmers have made strides in recent years to improve their environmental practices.
“In the agricultural sector, we certainly have come a long way,” she said. “So has the manufacturing sector. But we can always do more.”
