Methane, Mitigation, and Meat
Or: Beef, biodigesters, and biochar.
Here’s Episode 4: Methane, Mitigation, and Meat—all about the sources of carbon emissions from agriculture and land use, plus deep dives on two very different methane mitigation strategies in dairy farming and my own rumination on how cheese professionals can introduce some climate-informed flexibility into our thinking when it comes to how we market our products and how we feed ourselves.
Listen or read the full script below!
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Episode script:
Welcome to Milkfed, a podcast about cheese, culture, and climate. I’m Alexandra Jones, a cheese writer and educator based in Philadelphia. In this six-episode series, I’m using cheese as a lens to consider the relationship between our contemporary food system and the causes and effects of climate change.
Join me as I learn from farmers, cheesemakers, cheesemongers, historians, dairy scientists, and other experts. We’ll hear from the people who produce our food about how climate change is affecting their ability to feed us, and wrap our heads around ways we can both preserve the 9,000-year tradition of cheesemaking and survive in a rapidly changing climate.
Hey y’all, Alex here with episode 4 of Milkfed. In our first three episodes, we traced cheese’s evolution through an abbreviated history of agriculture and climatic conditions on Earth and showed how the forces of capitalism and colonialism combined to set humanity on a trajectory in which the vital act of feeding ourselves could become a driver of an existential climate crisis. Now we’re kicking off the second half of this series, which is focused on the three types of climate actions we can take in response to this situation: mitigation, adaptation, and resilience.
Today’s episode is about mitigation—ways we can reduce carbon emissions to slow the rapidly accelerating effects of climate change. We’ll learn about which human activities cause climate change, consider a couple of specific climate solutions available to dairy farmers, their pros and cons, and how they fit into the bigger picture, and touch on individual ways we can take action on climate right now. But first, we need to understand where those emissions are coming from.
Before we begin, I have a few disclaimers to share: I’m about to break down a bunch of numbers, which will make a lot more sense if you’ve got clear, colorful infographics to look at. You can totally just let the data wash over you, but if you’d like, I’ve linked a PDF of all my various charts and graphs in the show notes.
Secondly, this episode, and indeed this podcast overall, focuses on carbon emissions—the key metric when it comes to climate change. There are plenty of other environmental, sustainability, economic, and social metrics to consider for the health of the planet and its inhabitants, and those can and should absolutely inform our choices. But when it comes to stopping or slowing climate change, carbon emissions are what we need to focus on.
And finally, the audience for this podcast, and the climate actions I suggest, are people in what’s often called the global north—North America, Europe, Australia, parts of East Asia. We consume far more than our fair share of resources, and a 2020 Lancet Planetary Health study found that the Global North—largely the US and Europe—was responsible for 92% of carbon emissions since 1850. Our societies have been and continue to be the primary perpetrators of this mess, and it’s on us to clean it up.
If you know anything about climate change, it’s probably that fossil fuels—coal, oil, and natural gas—are the biggest contributors, both today and historically. Cutting emissions from fossil fuels by reducing energy consumption and transitioning to renewable energy sources is imperative for humanity to address the climate crisis.
So how does agriculture factor into this problem? Greenhouse gas emissions by sector are topped by energy production; then agriculture, forestry, and land use change (which goes by the fun acronym AFOLU); after that, industry; then transportation; and finally buildings, according to data from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. (Here’s where you can click the link in the show notes to see some nice colorful infographics that make all this a little easier to take in.)
The bottom line is that AFOLU contributes anywhere from 25 to 35 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions, depending on whether post-retail emissions associated with food and emissions from non-food agricultural products, like corn for ethanol or animal feed, are included in those calculations. It’s a close second after energy production.
Agricultural emissions mostly come from the act of farming itself—which can include burning fossil fuels to run tractors, for example—from generating methane and other greenhouse gases released by livestock and their waste, and from land use change. Basically any activity that changes how land is used, such as farming, urbanization, mining, and deforestation, ends up releasing carbon stored in the land into the air. Just as forests, perennial pastures, and other healthy landscapes have some ability to sequester carbon in the soil, disturbing that soil releases it again.
After land use change, the next biggest agricultural contributor to emissions is wasted food. I was surprised when I first learned that some of the contributors to climate change that feel most visible and actionable to consumers—like packaging, processing, and transportation, or “food miles”—contribute only a small fraction of emissions from ag. (Not that there aren’t plenty of other good reasons to buy local and bring your own bag, of course.)
All this means that how we currently produce food and manage land is contributing to the climate crisis in a hugely significant way—and that there’s serious potential to reduce emissions by changing how we use land, how we farm, and how we eat.
When it comes to what we eat, particularly in the developed world, certain foods have a much higher climate impact than others. If you know anything about carbon emissions and food production, it’s probably the impact of beef, which far outstrips any other food according to several different metrics: per kilogram of food produced, per thousand calories of food produced, and by 100 grams of protein produced.
Shrimp, lamb, and dairy beef—that’s beef harvested from dairy cattle, which tends to end up as fast-food burgers at the commodity level but on expensive plates at high-end, chef-driven restaurants when raised on pasture—follow by a significant margin, sometimes two to three times less impact.
Cheese falls somewhere around fifth to seventh place on these rankings—always higher than fluid milk, since the cheesemaking process concentrates the solids in milk by a factor of 10. Something I was surprised to learn is that cheese has a slightly greater climate impact than pork, chicken, or eggs by these metrics, but still anywhere from a third to a fifth of the impact of cows raised for beef.
Seeing where cheese falls in these rankings based on climate impact feels a little ironic to me. In my experience, it’s like the cheese industry can’t engage with the nuances of the climate impact of livestock farming, even when we could be positioning it as a way to enjoy the nutritional benefits, flavors, textures, and other aspects of animal products that people don’t want to give up while reducing consumption of of those higher-impact proteins. And I know there are good reasons for that.
We already do a ton of work to communicate the value of good cheese to consumers and often struggle to get our point across in a world with those emotional, black-and-white reactions to food marketing. I just believe that if we let go of the defensiveness and fear we feel when the idea of a climate-conscious diet comes up, we make space space to sell, eat, and produce food in a way that actually engages with climate realities, and maybe even to communicate with consumers about it in a way that’s actually more authentic and impactful.
The whole point of figuring out the causes of climate change is so we can make changes to stop it, or at least reduce and prepare for the conditions it creates. You’ve heard the term “climate solutions.” These are ostensibly strategies, practices, or technologies that can help us reduce carbon emissions or otherwise reduce the impact of greenhouse gases.
Some of them are legit—like transitioning away from fossil fuels to 100% renewable energy sources like solar and wind—while others have been shown to be ineffective, market-driven strategies (carbon credits), theoretical and unproven tech (carbon capture), potentially disastrous (solar geoengineering, AKA the thing that froze the world in Snowpiercer) or so energy- and resource-intensive (AI) that they’d fail to solve or could even exacerbate the problems they’re intended to address.
The media—of which I realize I am a member—loves climate solutions, especially “win-wins” that at least seem to address multiple challenges at once. We, and our readers, are understandably desperate for a crumb of good news about the future of our planet. A groundbreaking research study, a hot new climate tech startup, or a promising seed breeding trial are all noteworthy developments.
But so often, I find that the stories about these solutions are presented with big headlines about how such-and-such could solve the climate crisis, and when you dig into the details, the reality is much less straightforward. And the climate solutions that do make headlines, or that get implemented with lots of institutional and financial support, can come with some tradeoffs.
Ideally, there would be a national and global coordinated effort to decarbonize everywhere, in every sector, including agriculture, using a variety of climate solutions and policy changes to help people, businesses, and local governments through the transition. As things currently stand, in the absence of a top-down coordinated effort—and in fact, in a political atmosphere that’s hostile to any kind of climate action—mitigation is left up to individual businesses in the US (notably, that’s not the case in many European countries, though implementing that top-down approach isn’t always that simple).
Governments and institutions might offer grant funds or loans to pay for these projects, or companies might pay a premium to their suppliers for meeting certain sustainability metrics that they can then use to market their products. Other times, changes are driven by cultural or market shifts—for example, even with the canceling of the Inflation Reduction Act, which provided substantial rebates for consumers’ clean energy efforts, at the end of 2025, electric vehicles and solar panels have become much more affordable and accessible than they were just a few years ago.
When it comes to American dairy farming—an industry in which it’s notoriously difficult to stay in business, let alone make large-scale infrastructure investments that could lower your climate impact, sustainability upgrades have typically been incentivized by government programs: for example, NRCS funding to build fencing that keeps cows from pooping near local waterways and plant trees that act as a riparian buffer to absorb nutrient runoff from fields.
These programs are mostly beneficial, but the strategy is scattershot. In fact, most farms have no way of knowing how much a given mitigation might help a dairy farm reduce its climate impact, though there are platforms like COMET and Cool Farm Tool that can help producers estimate. One thing I learned in my research is that when it comes to climate mitigation, changing the way all but the smallest dairy farms manage waste is one of the biggest ways to reduce methane, ammonia, and other emissions.
We’re going to look at a couple of different climate solutions for reducing emissions from waste in livestock farming to understand not only how effective they might be, but also why they might, or might not, be widely subsidized by governments, promoted in the media, or widely adopted by farmers.
Ruminants release methane in a couple of different ways: through burping and farting as they digest their feed and through the waste they leave behind. Certain feed additives have shown promise to reduce the former in research trials, though to my knowledge, I don’t know of cheesemakers in the US taking advantage of any of these yet. There are more strategies available to manage emissions from waste.
On a year-round, pasture-based dairy with lots of land per animal that practices rotational grazing, that waste may be able to be naturally absorbed back into the land as part of the carbon cycle—no waste collection or management needed. However, that’s not the case for the vast majority of dairy farms, even many smaller-scale ones. If you’ve got more cows than land that can accommodate their waste, or if you keep your animals in a barn for part or all of the year, that waste is going to accumulate fast, and you have to figure out what to do with it.
How farmers deal with manure can help reduce the methane it gives off as it breaks down—composting it as bedding, storing and spraying or injecting it onto fields as fertilizer—if it’s managed properly. You could do a whole podcast of waste management case studies where every farm’s circumstances and strategies would be unique. The best option for a particular farm will depend on their scale, their facilities, their labor force, and a variety of other factors, which can include grants, credits, or other financial incentives.
One way a farm may store waste as liquid in holding tanks or in-ground lagoons. This form of handling waste is also practiced in large, consolidated factory farms raising pigs—something that I learned a lot about growing up a few hours away from the pork-producing stronghold of Eastern North Carolina.
Raising animals at this scale may offer operational efficiencies, and some researchers argue that it’s actually more sustainable in terms of land use than grazing or other less concentrated methods. But concentrating livestock together also concentrates their waste. One popular solution for livestock operations—including those raising beef cows and pigs as well as dairies—is capturing the methane that’s given off by that liquid waste as microorganisms break it down, then burning the methane as fuel that can meet some or all of the farm operation’s energy needs. Any excess can be sold to an energy utility or converted into natural gas and sold on that market.
It’s easy to understand the operational and economic benefits of biodigesters, both for massive, industrial-scale operations in the Southwest or for a modestly-sized dairy with a thousand or so cows in Vermont: The farm has a way to deal with its waste while lowering or eliminating its energy costs, can be eligible for tax credits and renewable energy credits and, with excess energy to sell, maybe even add another revenue stream, which just about any dairy farm can benefit from.
When you look at net emissions from farms that use biodigesters compared to other types of operations, the numbers look really good. A 2019 brief published by the University of Wisconsin-Madison described how researchers modeled the emissions generated by five dairy farms that used grazing, one conventional dairy farm, and one conventional dairy farm with a biodigester. The conventional model had the highest overall emissions by a slim margin, with the different grazing scenarios coming in anywhere from about 10-15 percent below that—with emissions from manure making the most difference between the conventional and grazing models. But the really significant finding of this study is that the energy generated by the biodigester offset more than 50% of the emissions from the other models, as well as lowering emissions attributed to animal waste.
That data looks really good—you can see the chart in the show notes. And with biodigesters being heavily subsidized and framed as a solution not only to dairy farm viability but to environmental degradation, climate change, and as a source of renewable energy over the past couple of decades, it’s understandable that farms at a large enough scale to benefit might decide to install one of these systems. Seems like a win-win scenario.
So there can be a lot of pros, but there are some cons to this system when we zoom out from the level of an individual farm, which is where we see those big reductions in net emissions thanks to the energy generated by capturing that methane and using it as fuel. Where we don’t actually see a climate benefit is when we zoom way out to the national or global level—because although we may be generating additional energy from biodigesters, as well as truly renewable energy sources like solar and wind power, we’re not actually using it to replace fossil fuels. We’re adding to our energy supply, but we’re not lowering our use of fossil fuels like oil and gas by the same amount—meaning that we’re not actually getting a net climate benefit by generating this energy.
There’s also the fact that although methane is many times more potent as an agent of global warming as CO2—and therefore a more urgent climate threat in the short term—we are still generating carbon emissions in the form of CO2 when we burn it for fuel. There’s the fear that the way some of these state and federal-level incentives and energy credits for biodigesters function could actually drive dairy farm consolidation, which has been a big problem in the industry for the last several decades.
RUTHIE LAZENBY: Federal and state governments have created an environment where facilities, in order to make it work, have to operate at a massive scale where they are imposing really significant harms.
That’s the voice of Ruthie Lazenby, who I spoke with while she was an environmental law and policy fellow at UCLA Law’s Emmett Institute on Climate Change & the Environment. Incidentally, she’s also a former cheesemonger. Ruthie studied the environmental justice impacts of biodigesters in California’s Central Valley and published her findings in a really thoughtful paper called Rethinking Manure Biogas: Policy Considerations to Promote Equity and Protect the Climate and Environment. It’s linked in the show notes and I highly recommend you read the whole thing.
RUTHIE LAZENBY: It’s challenging because, on the one hand, like industrial scale, dairies are right when they say that their margins are super tight and it’s very challenging and they’re operating in a difficult environment, but it’s also true that they’re imposing enormous harms, and so it’s not a question I think of like dairy farmers as bad actors. It’s a question of how our law and policy have created a situation where this is the kind of farm that can succeed.
Just because biodigesters can be a win for the farm and a win for energy supply doesn’t mean nobody loses. In parts of the country like California’s Central Valley and eastern North Carolina, high concentrations of megadairies and hog farms have been shown to negatively affect not just water quality and air quality, but the health of the people who live in those communities.
When massive factory farms with tens of thousands of animals are concentrated in one area—such as California’s Central Valley, which has the highest concentration of dairy farms with anaerobic digesters in the US, or in Eastern North Carolina, where massive multinational corporations own hundreds of hog farms and process thousands of animals per day—it’s not just the animals who suffer, but the people and communities around them, who are statistically more likely to be Black, Brown, Indigenous, and low-income.
RUTHIE LAZENBY: In terms of the impacts, it’s what you would expect, sort of air and water quality. I mean, the Central Valley in California has some of the worst air quality in the country already. It’s the federal non-attainment area for a number of different pollutants, including particulate matter. And so there are already all these health impacts that result from that.
There are also water contamination issues, contamination of private wells throughout the Central Valley. Those are the two main community health based issues that folks are pointing to. And of course, there’s odor and quality of life stuff, but there are other environmental impacts aside from those, like the overuse of water in a place that’s already extremely short on water.
Problems with odor, air quality, and water quality issues from storing and processing animal waste on such a massive scale can cause health problems, negatively affect quality of life, make homes unsellable, and effectively drive people from their communities. For advocates who have been pushing back against these massive operations in their backyards, incentivizing biodigesters means incentivizing these megadairies to continue these harms.
It’s that top-down, widespread support of biodigesters at the expense of other strategies for reducing the climate impact of animal agriculture that Ruthie sees as the problem with the approach that government and industry have taken with this technology.
RUTHIE LAZENBY: My primary beef with digesters is not with the technology of digesters. It’s with embracing digesters as the solution at the expense of alternatives, particularly in the context of this California policy, the Low-Carbon Fuel Standard, which has created, really, the national market for digesters on industrial-scale dairies. One of the major issues there is that that program is intended to reduce the life cycle greenhouse gas emissions of transportation fuels, and as a result, emissions from transportation fuels are their focus in that program, and they don’t adequately contend with emissions from agriculture.
Instead, their baseline is they see the manure that already exists as a potential to reduce emissions from transportation fuels by displacing conventional transportation fuels. But because the transportation fuel side is their lens, they’re not looking at agriculture and saying, “Well, how, holistically, do we reduce emissions from agriculture?” They’re just taking as given these massive manure lagoons in the Central Valley and saying, “Great, we’ll replace normal, conventional gasoline for cars with this. This manure can serve as as as a feedstock for some alternative fuel.”
So I think the critique is less about the technology itself, like I can totally see a context in which it makes it’s great for a smaller scale operation if it works for them to add a digester. It’s just seeing digesters as the one solution, putting a lot of public money into that, and also not considering the ways that an embrace of digesters could preclude other kinds of changes or make other, broader changes more difficult.
So even though an anaerobic digester can be a positive solution for an individual dairy farm, incentivizing them at this really massive scale isn’t actually providing as much of a climate benefit as we think—and can even promote and entrench harm to marginalized communities who live in and near the communities where they’re concentrated. This is one mitigation strategy that isn’t actually changing how we operate at a systems level, but ends up reinforcing the profit-driven, bigger-is-better approach that got us into this mess.
RUTHIE LAZENBY: As you’ve probably seen, and can imagine, this is a real political juggernaut. It’s really hard to critique effectively at the public level, because it’s obviously very supported by the industry. The biogas piece in particular is also supported by the natural gas industry. Regulators like it because it’s politically easy for those reasons, and they can claim emissions reductions, so it’s tricky to inject some nuance into that discussion.
Biodigesters are just one type of climate solution—one that’s tech-driven, really high startup costs, even with grants and loans, and most suited to dairies well above the country’s average herd size, which has steadily grown to 337 cows as of 2022. This solution is by no means one-size-fits-all, and it doesn’t do much to change how our agriculture or energy sectors operate at the systemic level. Of course, there are many other ways for dairies to manage manure in such a way that cuts carbon emissions—ways that might be more accessible and better suited to smaller-scale dairies or other dairy farms where a biodigester doesn’t make sense.
I first learned about this next mitigation strategy deployed by a very different dairy farm than most of the ones you’re familiar with while I was conducting my DZRA research. I don’t mean to juxtapose it with anaerobic digestion as a polar opposite, and both methods have their pros, cons, champions, and skeptics. But there are some pretty stark differences in how these two mitigation strategies function, their origins, who they’re created for, their accessibility, and their potential climate benefit.
Biochar is wood or other plant material that’s been heated to a very high temperature in low-oxygen conditions. Archaeological records point to its earliest known use in the Amazon basin thousands of years ago, and when applied to land, biochar can help raise the pH of degraded soils, mitigate the effects of heavy metal contamination, increase soils’ ability to hold water, and promote beneficial microbes and enhanced fertility. It can also help dairy farms manage stored animal waste in a way that reduces some of those localized issues, like odor, as well as carbon emissions.
SAM DIXON: The better you run your farm, the lower emissions you’re going to have.
Meet Sam Dixon, longtime pasture manager at Shelburne Farms in Shelburne, Vermont. Shelburne has a herd of Brown Swiss, including about 100 milking cows, whose milk is transformed into award-winning cheddar cheese. Shelburne Farms isn’t your average dairy operation—it’s a nonprofit that was once a country estate of William Seaward Webb and Lila Vanderbilt Webb (yes, those Vanderbilts) that was designed by iconic landscape architect Frederick Law Olmstead. That’s probably why it’s also the most beautiful dairy farm I’ve ever been to—it sits right on the shores of Lake Champlain, just north of where my partner’s family is from, so I have a soft spot for it.
Shelburne Farms has set a goal to reach net zero emissions on the farm by 2028. They’re doing that by trying to sequester more carbon in their pastures and woodlands and by reducing emissions from manure. That’s where the biochar comes in.
SAM DIXON: One of the big issues we have is we’ve got these manure pits that we installed when we were really concerned about water quality to try to increase the amount of storage that we had, so that we had seven months of manure storage on the farm, but that creates these big, giant lagoons that that can emit a lot of nitrous oxide if they’re not covered. So we looked at how we could get a crust formed on the tops of the pits so that there would be less emissions from like the wind blowing or the rain falling on the pits.
Biochar was the solution. Because of Vermont’s cold winters, dairy farms can’t spray liquid manure on their fields while the ground is frozen. Rather than being absorbed, it would simply run off into Lake Champlain, causing algal blooms that make swimming in and drinking water from some parts of the lake really dangerous. So during those months, that stored manure gets a layer of biochar on top.
SAM DIXON: This material has got some real value to agriculture, because it can trap a lot of nutrients and make them in a more stable form so they’re less volatile, but it also is a great way of capturing a lot of carbon instead of having it go off into the atmosphere. So we cover our manure pits with this biochar material, and it forms a crust across the top of the pits that actually traps some of the gases. And then also, as the gases are emitted, it captures some of the nutrients too, so it reduces the environmental impact.
In addition to reducing the nitrogen and methane emissions from the manure pits at Shelburne Farms, applying biochar to liquid manure that will later be sprayed on pastures can enhance the benefits of this fertilizer, and may even be able to sequester carbon longer-term than untreated soils.
SAM DIXON: I’m not going to take credit for the quality of our soils. We’ve got well-drained, Palatine shaly loam soils that are really high-calcium soils, so they’re really productive. Some of them are rolling in slopes, so they’re not not good cropland, but it’s super, super pasture and hay land. So we have plenty of that, and that’s made all the difference having that. I do think the management strategy that we chose of having permanent hay and permanent pasture makes it more resilient when things are really wet or really dry. So it’s primarily the soils, but it’s also how we manage them.
Aside from those benefits, incorporating biochar into Shelburne Farm’s existing waste management strategy was a pretty low-lift modification for an operation of their size.
SAM DIXON: One of the reasons why we were looking at this biochar product to help us form a crust and then capture more of the nutrients and reduce emissions is we are able to use our existing equipment. We don’t have to buy any new equipment or have an expensive construction project. We’ve looked at biodigesters several times probably over the years,I’ve been here, maybe three or four times. We’ve investigated biodigesters, and our scale is just not large enough for the capital investment involved to create a methane digester.
Shelburne Farms is only a few years into its biochar journey, so Dixon doesn’t yet have hard numbers to put on its impact. It has been just one promising solution in its toolbox as the organization works to meet its climate goals. But as with biodigesters, using biochar doesn’t necessarily make sense for every farm. And while it’s certainly more accessible and appropriate for smaller dairies who want to reduce carbon emissions from their manure lagoons and support the health of their pastures in the long term, biochar, too, has a scale problem.
For one, the process for making biochar does result in the creation of CO2, which can be captured and burned as a fuel—still resulting in emissions and displacing energy created directly from fossil fuels only in a best-case scenario that doesn’t currently exist. And while all kinds of feedstocks, or raw materials, can be transformed into biochar, like dead wood and brush from fire-prone landscapes, crop residues, and even the solid digestate left over from anaerobic digestion, widespread implementation would require massive amounts of feedstock—so much that we’d be growing plant material just to transform it into biochar.
There are also limitations on how much—and where—biochar may be able to improve the performance of soils to capture carbon and reduce the need for additional fertilizers, both touted as serious benefits to growers. The capacity for biochar to absorb carbon when applied to soil is not infinite, so there will be a limit to how much sequestration potential it can offer. And research has shown that applying biochar can help increase crop yields by an average of 25% in tropical areas, but so far, the same level of success hasn’t been demonstrated in temperate regions.
If biodigesters are an example of a sort of big tech, industrial-scale climate solution for addressing carbon emissions in waste management on dairy farms, biochar is a crunchier, more accessible, maybe more holistic example that’s a little more human scale. That doesn’t make it better or greener or more effective, just maybe better suited to a particular farm. Both types of solutions come with negative tradeoffs when implemented at scale, and neither is going to suddenly make the entire dairy industry carbon-neutral with widespread adoption. They’re just two tools in our toolbox for lowering agriculture’s carbon emissions.
But, if we stick with this slightly clunky metaphor, what we really need to build the future need isn’t more tools. We need blueprints and a crew and a foreman and the money to make it happen. So take these individual solutions on their merits, try to understand their pros and cons, and be wary of anyone promoting a single product or strategy to “solve” climate change—and keep pushing for the widespread, comprehensive changes that a sane world would already be doing in response to this crisis.
Talking about dairy and climate change means talking a LOT about farming, because, as we learned at the top of the episode, that’s where the bulk of emissions come from. But before we wrap up, I want to talk about some individual-scale ways to address climate change that anyone can do, whether you’re a farmer or cheese industry person or not. Yes, I know I JUST said we need a massive coordinated effort, but until we get it together, it’s important to work on what you have control over.
Changing the food we buy and eat is one of the few ways consumers have to make even a tiny impact on the climate. I don’t shop or eat the same way I did 10 years ago, when I worked at a place that sold local and organic groceries, or even 5 years ago during the earliest stage of the ongoing pandemic, when I was suddenly cooking nearly every meal for my two-person household.
I still rely on cheese, yogurt, and milk—mostly just a splash in my morning coffee—as daily staples in my diet. One thing that’s changed is that I eat a lot less meat of all kinds than I used to, and when I buy it to cook at home, I try to do so direct from the person who raised those animals personally, or at least be able to look them in the eye at the farmers’ market. There are exceptions, of course—our system is not set up to make good choices easy or even possible, and I know myself well enough to know that placing too many restrictions around the food I eat does not support my mental health.
In place of meat, I eat more (local) eggs, beans, tofu, tempeh, and, yes, dairy. Sure, I occasionally succumb to a craving for crisp-edged pepperoni cups on takeout pizza or a chicken maroosh—basically a shawarma hoagie drenched in yogurty garlic sauce—at Saad’s, an iconic Lebanese spot in West Philly. But I direct more of my food dollars to smaller-scale, local food sources and away from industrial sources. I redirect some of my shopping, cooking, and eating away from the foods with the highest carbon impact and sub in some foods with a lower carbon impact while still enjoying many of the foods in the middle.
In an imperfect food system, it’s not possible to make perfect choices or run a perfect business. But if you’re able to prioritize climate and environment in some way as you eat and shop for food, I encourage you to do so. And if you’re not, maybe you can do something else that’s beneficial for the climate in another area of your life. Project Drawdown recently released their SHIFT guide—that stands for the Super High-Impact Initiative for Fixing Tomorrow.
It’s a fun little online questionnaire that walks you through different types of meaningful climate action you can take in your daily life, not just food, and generates a guide for you with next steps. I’ve linked it in the show notes—if you’ve been feeling powerless to take action, I recommend checking it out. Many of the changes are easier to make than you might think.
We will be revisiting mitigation again in the last two episodes of this series. After all, mitigation, adaptation, and resilience are overlapping efforts rather than discrete strategies. We’ll hear more perspectives—a dairy farmer in Puerto Rico, a goat herder in California, a cheesemaker in Vermont, a shop owner in Florida—and tackle topics like pastured livestock and degrowth.
Thank you so much for making it with me to the end of this very info-packed episode. I’m really grateful to you all for listening and coming with me on this journey. I’ll see you next time.
Milkfed: Notes on Cheese, Culture, and Climate is researched, written, and hosted by me, Alexandra Jones. It’s edited by Abby Cerquitella. I’m grateful for the support of the Daphne Zepos Teaching Endowment, which made my research and this podcast possible. You can learn more and donate to this amazing cheese education nonprofit at dzte.org. You can learn more about me at my website, alexandrajones.net, and subscribe to my newsletter—also covering cheese, culture, and climate—at milkfed.news. Thanks again for listening.