The September 30 issue of New Yorker Magazine includes the best article I’ve read on this topic. Staff writer Tad Friend spent six months reporting the piece which runs 12,000+ words (about 35 pages). I don’t know many with the attention span to read something of that length so here are a few excerpts I found interesting.

The piece focuses on Pat Brown, “a sixty-five-year-old emeritus professor of biochemistry at Stanford University and the founder and C.E.O. of Impossible Foods. By developing plant-based beef, chicken, pork, lamb, dairy, and fish, he intends to wipe out all animal agriculture and deep-sea fishing by 2035.”

• Agriculture consumes more freshwater than any other human activity, and nearly a third of that water is devoted to raising livestock. One-third of the world’s arable land is used to grow feed for livestock, which are responsible for 14.5 per cent of global greenhouse-gas emissions.
• Because methane is a powerful greenhouse gas, some twenty-five times more heat-trapping than carbon dioxide, cattle are responsible for two-thirds of the livestock sector’s G.H.G. emissions. Every four pounds of beef you eat contributes to as much global warming as flying from New York to London—and the average American eats that much each month.
• the Impossible Burger requires eighty-seven per cent less water and ninety-six per cent less land than a cowburger, and its production generates eighty-nine per cent less G.H.G. emissions. They made it nutritionally equal to or superior to beef.
• Ninety-five per cent of those who buy the Impossible Burger are meat-eaters.
• The three largest meatpacking companies in America have combined annual revenues of more than two hundred billion dollars.
• Researchers at the University of Minnesota found fecal matter in sixty-nine per cent of pork and ninety-two per cent of poultry; Consumer Reports found it in a hundred per cent of ground beef.
• Cooked beef contains at least four thousand different molecules, of which about a hundred contribute to its aroma and flavor and two dozen contribute to its appearance and texture.
• at least ninety-five per cent of American beef cattle spend their last four to six months being fattened on grain at feedlots.
• American broilers, chickens raised for meat, are bred and confined in ways that make them more than four times larger than broilers were in the nineteen-sixties; as a result, they often collapse from their own weight.