LOUISVILLE, Ky. — You know that moment where two of your friends on Facebook who usually agree on nothing all of a sudden agree on something?
Today is the first Friday of Lent 2020, meaning the first day that you or someone you know will be going meat-free for the day. For most, it’s a spiritual thing; but I realized that for the next 38 days, my Catholic friends will be doing the same thing some of my other friends have chosen to do year-round: go without meat one day per week.
That means we have data, and that had me wondering: what are the possible environmental impacts of Lent?
(Shout outs to the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, Meatless Mondays, and the EPA for the math help here).
The exact environmental impact varies based on the type of meat and where you live, but for our example let’s take my staple Friday cheat meal: a burger that weighs a quarter of a pound. In terms of emissions, beef is a double whammy. Cows emit methane (they burp and fart a lot, FYI), and then trucks emit carbon dioxide transporting them.
Given that, going without a quarter-pound of beef for the seven Fridays of Lent can cut emissions equivalent to driving 48 miles, or charging your iPhone 2,499 times.
Meat production requires a lot of water, too. A quarter-pound of beef takes 425 gallons of water to produce. That’s enough to fill 10 bathtubs or 6,800 glasses. So for all seven Fridays of Lent, that comes out to 70 bathtubs of water, and 47,600 glasses of water.
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