Cheese? Gee Whiz!

What follows may or may not ruin your day. May depend on what you can live with, or without.

According to a recent article in New Scientist, around 22,000,000 tons of cheese were produced last year. You don’t buy it by the ton, of course. So, that’s 44,000,000,000 pounds. Seems staggering, but again, with around 7 billion folks potentially eating cheese, well you can do the arithmetic. 

More important is that cheese production is now significantly greater than in 2000, which produced a still huge 15 million tons. Which brings to the expansion of milk production, from 480 million tons in 1970 to around 800 million tons today. 

One the fastest growing markets for cheese now is Asia, by the way.

That economic driver brings us to dairy cows, which in the US, for example, means a 13% increase in milk per dairy cow between 2007 and 2016. A growing cheese market, rising demand for milk, and voila more intensive efforts to get production figures up. And so the 20-year-life span that would occur naturally falls to around 5 for a dairy cow. The end is typically at the slaughterhouse.

Of course, as we are more and more sensitized to our carbon footprints, more and more studies are conducted to measure the impact of our foods, our clothing choices, our modes of travel, our lawn management practices, and the list goes on.

Milk and yogurt are going to generate about 1.5 pounds of carbon dioxide to produce around 1 pound of product. (I’m converting kg to lbs, roughly, but fairly, I think.) About 6 pounds of CO2 for your pound of cream, 10 pounds for your mozzarella, and 13 pounds for cheddar. 

The cheeses don’t stand alone when it comes to a carbon footprint. Most folks know beef production tops out at about 23 pounds of carbon for 1 pound of meat and lamb weighs in at 20 pounds.

Cheddar cheese on your burger? Groan a bit for this well-worn slice of wisdom: There is no free lunch.

Oh, for the mozzarella, about a gallon of milk to make 21 ounces of the cheese. Ouch! I always want extra mozzarella. 

Pork, chicken, and fresh fish, are lower in producing CO2 than cheese in general (Not all cheeses are equal—see above.) The big winner, if winning a smaller carbon footprint, would be the lowly bean which is almost 1 for 1 in CO2 vs actual product. 

Eat more beans, I guess. 

None of this information is meant to do any more than illuminate what I think the heart of all environmental, economic, political, and cultural issues—systems, the better word. The scale and complexity of the physical world with its growing human population, as one well-known personality discovered, complicate informed choices.

What to do? The best you can as you deem best.