The Missing Ingredient: Where’s The Beef?
The Missing Ingredient: Where’s The Beef?
Welcome back to The Missing Ingredient series!
The Missing Ingredient series revisits conservation programs I’m familiar with and examines how incorporating a sustainable food systems perspective could improve or enhance them.
We examined fish as food and the world wide food web in the last two posts. Now, it’s time to talk beef.
Turning down the heat
At the time I’m writing this post (July 2026):
→ A heat dome is moving across the East Coast of the U.S., which is expected to produce new record-breaking daily and all-time heat temperatures.
→ Europe has been experiencing its own heat dome, which has claimed hundreds of lives, and is a region that is warming twice as fast as everyone else (The New York Times, 2026).
→ Western U.S. states are battling one wildfire after another (there were 12 different fires in Utah this past weekend), burning hundreds of thousands of acres. And Europe is also battling a growing number of wildfires due to the heat.
(Even if you are reading this post a year or more from now, the weather and climate headlines will likely sound similar.)
These are not just parallel bad-weather scenarios caused by climate change.
Heat, dryness, and fires continually feed into one another in a daunting cycle that reduces forested areas and critical tree cover.
Click on the image above to learn more about the Climate-Fire Feedback Loop.
This cycle is super challenging to break, and it requires more than one solution to reduce emissions and temperatures, prevent new fires from starting, protect forests during fires, and restore burned forests as quickly as possible.
We can prevent wildfires.
P.S. If you haven’t read my post about the Smokey Bear campaign, you can dive into it here.
Increasingly, forest conservation projects are using a systems approach to prevent wildfires from starting and quickly mitigate those that have started, so they don’t cause widespread destruction.
A project I consulted on earlier this year focused on reducing forest loss from wildfires in South America, and was designing a comprehensive program that included all the following solutions:
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Improving the monitoring and enforcement of illegal fire activities to prevent fires from starting.
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Training and financially supporting farmers and ranchers to improve their land management practices so agricultural lands wouldn’t start fires or be as vulnerable to encroaching fires.
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Offering payment as ecosystem services to incentivize landowners to keep forested areas intact and not expand their agricultural land.
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Strengthening local and regional governance structures to co-create management plans, mitigation strategies, and lines of communication with neighboring communities.
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Building and updating early detection and warning systems so landowners know when fire risk is high, fire brigades can respond quickly to fires before they get out of control, and all households are warned about threats and evacuation needs.
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Equipping local fire brigades with all the skills and equipment they need to react quickly and put out fires.
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Motivating landowners and residents to prevent accidental fires from starting on their properties, report all risks and fires to the brigades, and play a critical role in communicating alerts to last-mile households.
I’m sure there is more, but that’s about all I can remember off the top of my head. Regardless, it’s an impressive set of ingredients (like a ratatouille recipe)!
You can begin to see how this program tackles the issue from all angles on the ground. It feels as if they’ve left no stone unturned.
Or should I say… untipped?
The Missing Ingredient: Where’s the beef?
I’ve been waiting my entire blog-writing tenure (10+ years) to have a reason to use this Wendy’s commercial slogan.
Throughout my short consulting stint on this project, I was waiting to hear one word that never came up: “beef.”
We agreed that the primary target audience is cattle ranchers and farmers, especially those growing soy (to feed said cattle), since they are the most likely to deforest neighboring land to expand their agricultural footprint.
We know that deforestation for agricultural purposes often results in a permanent loss of forest cover rather than a temporary one. (You know what else makes the planet hotter? Less trees!!!)
“Permanent agriculture is the predominant driver of tree cover loss in Latin America and Southeast Asia, accounting for 72% and 65% respectively.” (WRI, 2026).
We recognized the immense financial incentives and pressures these ranchers and farmers faced to produce more cattle and feed faster and more cheaply, which can lead to risky and lower-quality land management practices. (Government policies in many South American countries are even incentivizing agricultural expansion.)
And yet, we never talked about the number one driving force behind all of this: the amount of beef the world eats.
Even in a multi-pronged, systems-thinking program, nobody wanted to touch the food system ingredient with a 10-foot pole.
Slicing up the project
None of this is to say that the project’s approach isn’t valid. It’s still an impressive mix of solutions that will help communities prevent and mitigate the spread of wildfires, which is the number one goal.
However, ranchers and farmers will continue to feel pressure to expand their permanent agricultural land if demand for their products remains high. Even the introduction of agroforestry or silvopasture farming techniques requires less demand to support lower yields.
But imagine if this project teamed up with an organization already working to support dietary shifts away from our heavy reliance on resource-intensive beef and toward more sustainable protein sources like Beans is How, Have a Plant, and even the long-standing Meatless Mondays campaign.
Instead of adding a whole other intervention team to the program, the project could provide funding, communication, and support streams to link their wildfire work with reducing meat consumption. All of which leads to protecting critical forests.
They wouldn’t need to solve this problem on their own, but ignoring the problem – the driving force behind most of the challenges they’re working hard to address – isn’t the answer.
I get it.
These are massive, daunting problems, and the prospect of adding a hot topic (like beef) that requires many people to change their behavior makes us want to crawl under the bed.
But what the world eats impacts our conservation programs, directly and indirectly. (“You are what you eat” still holds!)
We can put blinders on and pretend the food system component doesn’t exist, or claim it’s not our lane to address, but at some point we won’t be able to ignore the cow in the room.
Finding the Missing Ingredient in Your Project
Is there a human behavior driving one or more of the challenges your project is addressing that you have not yet named? Even if it feels impossible to solve that particular problem, calling it out can help paint a fuller picture of the forces at play and could even open the door to unique partnerships.
You may enjoy chomping on these additional resources about forest fires and agriculture:
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The Latest Data Confirms: Forest Fires Are Getting Worse. WRI.
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Schelly, I. H., Rausch, L. L., & Gibbs, H. K. (2021). Brazil’s cattle sector played large role in fires during 2020 moratorium. Frontiers in Forests and Global Change, 4. https://doi.org/10.3389/ffgc.2021.760853