Fun fact: What would happen if you chose beans over beef?

Did you know that more than a quarter of the world is used for cows? Did you know that if it wasn’t, if the world stopped eating red meat, greenhouse emissions would drop by up to 70 percent and world hunger would no longer exist?

“A relatively small, single-food substitution could be the most powerful change a person makes in terms of their lifetime environmental impact—more so than downsizing one’s car, or being vigilant about turning off light bulbs, and certainly more than quitting showering,” according to The Atlantic.

This small change to stop eating beef (even if continuing to eat other meats) can be more powerful than going from SUV to hybrid, switching to energy-efficient light bulbs, cutting down your shower time or toting your reusable bags to the grocery store.

To break it down for you, cows are fed soybeans (because they are cheaper and grow quickly). When cows digest these soybeans, they emit large quantities of greenhouse gases. In addition to this, it takes large amounts of soybeans for cows to produce small amounts of meat to be consumed by humans.

Therefore, if humans simply ate those soybeans instead of feeding them to cows (even though cows should really be eating grass but that’s a whole other thing), then humans could eat more food (simply beans instead of beef) and skip the greenhouse gases.