Moo ! Cows burp methane, so beef is 'middle finger to the planet'

On the night of September 28, that meat in Akhlaq Saifi’s fridge - was it mutton or beef? If it was indeed beef, did the mob who killed Saifi know if it was buffalo meat or cow meat? Did they know which slaughter house it came from? Did they know India is the world’s second largest exporter of beef? While the beef ban debate in India rages on a yes or no plane, there’s is an altogether different tonal quality to the beef question in the West - it’s about climate change. For the record, Uttar Pradesh, where Saifi lived and died over a box of refrigerated meat, allows the slaughter of buffaloes. For details on India’s state-wise laws on beef, click here to see The Indian Express report. Search Google for “India beef ban” and you get 5 million hits, search for “Dadri lynching” and you get more than a million - the shameful night when a 52 year old man who had just finished dinner was hammered to death over what we’ll never know was a cow or a goat or a buffalo.  Those two boys who set off the rage by hollering on a loudspeaker in a temple - their microphone is representative of not just how twisted is the instant nature of shaming and judgement on social, it proves that hatred and rage, like love, are irrational. What you may want to eat or not, is not about law, it’s about how you feel. Marijuana, for example, is taboo for many but it’s use in an appetite-inducing drug is the ultimate potion for chemotherapy patients on the brink. “They (emotions) depend on values and standards that are ultimately subjective. What is right, sacred and beautiful to one group of people need not be right, sacred and beautiful to another group of people. Every opinion and every decision depends on the prevailing myth” says India’s bestselling mythologist Devdutt Pattanaik in his new book Myth = Mithya. On that note, look at the disconnect between the facts and the rage that killed Saifi: India is second-largest exporter of beef, behind only Brazil. The paradox depends on a crucial ambiguity: “beef” in India can refer to the meat of either cattle or buffalo, and India’s water buffaloes do not enjoy the sacred status of its cows. Since the government began encouraging farmers to raise and slaughter buffaloes, exports of their meat have boomed. More than 95% of meat exports come from them, reports The Economist. During Narendra Modi’s first six months in office, India’s meat exports grew 16%. As you scroll down this story, you can be certain that millions of folks in the USA are chewing on a juicy beef burger or steak. Here in the West, the new debate on beef is up in the air, literally. Self policing on how much beef you eat is more than just about religion, culture or even cholesterol. There’s a new cool to going easy on beef - it’s climate change. Eating beef “has come to be seen, rightly, in certain enviro circles, as the new SUV — a hopelessly selfish, American indulgence; a middle finger to the planet,” says this special report on CNN. CNN’s John Sutter travels to the heart of beef country in Texas and reports from a massive farm where they’re measuring, guess what ! Cow burps ! Yes, you heard that right. Every time a cow burps, it belches out methane, a powerful greenhouse gas that is 25 times as potent as CO2. Here, folks take home beef by the pound. Half a kilogram of beef has the same effect on global warming as driving a car 100 km. “We are very polite, we call it eruptation,” chuckles the farm owner as he explains to Sutter how the methane cycle works in cows. When cows digest food, they produce methane in their stomach which goes back into their lungs and then let out through their nostrils, he explains. Each cow moos out 53 kg of methane per year on average. Like all things and all of life, this moo moo story is also cyclical. The methane factor is not limited to cow burps, it’s also about what they are fed —which is corn. The giant sized piles of fertilizer used to produce that corn release nitrous oxide which is 300 times as powerful as CO2. Some local restaurants have woken up to this and serve beef only on select days. Can’t call that a beef ban but it seems like a sensible thing to do for so many reasons - lower cholesterol, cleaner air for starters. “If Dharma is represented by a bull, it would have only one leg in Kali yuga before it is swept away…” says Pattanaik. The imagery of a bull with one leg kind of matches what’s going on in ‘Beefalo’ India, doesn’t it?