Few creatures would seem as beneficent as the cow. Properly grazed and groomed, it gives us burgers and milk, boot leather and fertiliser. Lately, however, radical green groups and celebrity vegans like Paul McCartney have made cows out to be weapons of mass destruction: not only has their meat caused an epidemic of hypertension and heart disease, but they also trample rainforests, trash the soil, and foul the air with greenhouse gases.

Scientists say that every year, the average Holstein produces up to 180 kg of methane, which traps 25 times more heat than does carbon dioxide. All told, bringing meat from the pasture to the griddle produces 18 per cent of global greenhouse-gas emissions, according to the United Nations. Last year, Rajendra Pachauri, the chair of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, called upon everyone to give up eating meat at least one day a week, giving birth to the global meatless Monday. “If anyone wants to save the planet, all they have to do is just stop eating meat,” McCartney famously said.

Perhaps. But since 1960, worldwide production of meat has quadrupled to more than 280 million tonnes a year. Even if everyone in the rich nations swore off meat today, consumption would continue to soar, driven by the protein-hungry rising middle classes of China, Brazil, and other developing nations. For this reason, serious environmental planners have recently focused not on eliminating the meat industry but on turning it green.

It’s a tall order. Making beef, pork, or chicken can be an environmentally devastating process, from felling forests for pastures to the fossil fuel required to produce fertiliser for feed crops. Compared with tofu production, meat-making gobbles up 17 times as much land, 26 times as much water, 20 times the fossil fuels, and 6 times as many chemicals, according to Plenty magazine. And among animal proteins, beef is the real hog; producing a kilo of beef takes up seven times more farmland than it does to produce a kilo of chicken and 15 times the area needed for a kilo of pork. Yet scientists, herders, and green groups are convinced they can curb the damage by making adjustments all along the supply chain, changing the way we farm and feed livestock and building a cleaner cow through modern genetics. Suddenly, the search for what food activist and author Michael Pollan calls “green meat” has become a worldwide effort.

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