You may not have heard of the Canadian Roundtable for Sustainable Beef, but if you’ve had a burger at McDonald’s or Harvey’s lately, you might have eaten beef that’s been certified sustainable by the Calgary-based multi-stakeholder Roundtable.McDonald’s became the first company in Canada to serve up a portion of its Angus burgers (at least 30 per cent) from certified sources last year. Then Harvey’s began partnering with the Roundtable in August for its Original Burgers, joining A&W, Earls, Cactus Club Cafe and other food outlets in an effort to serve more environmentally responsible beef.The fact that these restaurant chains are concerned about sustainable beef is welcome news. But what exactly is sustainable beef? The devil is in the details, and a closer look at the requirements imposed by the Roundtable reveals that they can be hazy and rife with loopholes.The cattle conundrumBeef cattle have been the bêtes noires of environmental movements for almost half a century.Frances Moore Lappé skewered them in her bestseller of the 1970s, Diet for a Small Planet. She noted that it takes at least seven pounds of high-quality staples to produce one pound of grain-fed beef, in effect manufacturing scarcity and contributing to global hunger.More recently, cattle have become symbols of consumer excess in the age of global warming. Our beef habit has been blamed for the carbon dioxide released when grasslands and forests in the Brazilian Amazon — long revered as the mainstay of global climate stability — are uprooted to grow soybeans for animal feed.On top of that, the digestive systems of the animals themselves deserve part of the responsibility for the release of methane — a gas with more than 20 times the global-warming impact of carbon dioxide. Although scientific studies vary considerably in their estimates, cows and steers are said to account for two-thirds of greenhouse gas emissions coming from li ...
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