Eat Less Beef. Eat More Ostrich?

A few months ago, I found myself in an unexpected conversation with a woman whose husband raises cattle in Missouri. She, however, had recently raised and butchered an ostrich for meat. It’s more sustainable, she told me. Sure, I nodded along, beef is singularly terrible for the planet. And ostrich is a red meat, she added. “I don’t taste any difference between it and beef.” Really? Now I was intrigued, if skeptical—which is, long story short, how my family ended up eating ostrich at this year’s Christmas dinner.

I eat meat, including beef, and I enjoy indulging in a holiday prime rib, but I also feel somewhat conflicted about it. Beef is far worse for the environment than virtually any other protein; pound for pound, it is responsible for more than twice the greenhouse-gas emissions of pork, nearly four times those of chicken, and more than 13 times those of beans. This discrepancy is largely biological: Cows require a lot of land, and they are ruminants, whose digestive systems rely on microbes that produce huge quantities of the potent greenhouse gas methane. A single cow can belch out 220 pounds of methane a year.

The unique awfulness of beef’s climate impact has inspired a cottage industry of takes imploring Americans to consider other proteins in its stead: chicken, fish, pork, beans. These alternatives all have their own drawbacks. When it comes to animal welfare, for example, hundreds of chickens or fish would have to be slaughtered to feed as many people as one cow. Meanwhile, pigs are especially intelligent, and conventional means of farming them are especially cruel. And beans, I’m sorry, simply are not as delicious.

So, ostrich? At first glance, ostrich didn’t seem the most climate-friendly option (beans), the most ethical (beans again), or the tastiest (pork, in my personal opinion). But could ostrich be good enough in all of these categories, an acceptable if surprising solution to Americans’ love of too much red meat? At the very least, I wondered if ostrich might be deserving of more attention than we give to it right now, which is approximately zero.

You probably won’t be shocked to hear that the literature on ostrich meat’s climate impact is rather thin. Still, in South Africa, “the world leader in the production of ostriches,” government economists in 2020 released a report suggesting that greenhouse-gas emissions from ostrich meat were just slightly higher than chicken’s—so, much, much less than beef’s. And in Switzerland, biologists who put ostriches in respiratory chambers confirmed their methane emissions to be on par with those of nonruminant mammals such as pigs—so, again, much, much less than cows’.

But Marcus Clauss, an author of the latter study, who specializes in the digestive physiology of animals at the University of Zurich, cautioned me against focusing exclusively on methane. Methane is a particularly potent greenhouse gas, but it is just one of several. Carbon dioxide is the other big contributor to global warming, and a complete assessment of ostrich meat’s greenhouse-gas footprint needs to include the carbon dioxide released by every input, including the fertilizer, pesticides, and soil additives that went into growing ostrich feed.

This is where the comparisons get more complicated. Cattle—even corn-fed ones—tend to spend much of their life on pasture eating grass, which leads to a lot of methane burps, but growing that grass is not carbon intensive. In contrast, chicken feed is made up of corn and soybeans, whose fertilizer, pesticides, and soil additives all rack up carbon-dioxide emissions. Ostrich feed appears similar, containing alfalfa, wheat, and soybeans. The climate impact of an animal’s feed are important contributions in its total greenhouse-gas emissions, says Ermias Kebreab, an animal scientist at  UC Davis who has extensively studied livestock emissions. He hasn’t calculated ostrich emissions specifically—few researchers have—but the more I looked into the emissions associated with ostrich feed, the murkier the story became.

Two other ostrich studies, from northwest Spain and from a province in western Iran, indeed found feed to be a major factor in the meat’s climate impact. But these reports also contradicted others: In Spain, for instance, the global-warming potential from ostrich meat was found to be higher than that of beef or pork—but beef was also essentially no worse than pork.

“Really, none of the [studies] on ostrich look credible to me. They all give odd numbers,” says Joseph Poore, the director of the Oxford Martin Programme on Food Sustainability, which runs the HESTIA platform aimed at standardizing environmental-impact data from food. “Maybe this is something we will do with HESTIA soon,” Poore continued in his email, “but we are not there yet …” (His ellipses suggested to me that ostrich might not be a top priority.)

The truth is, greenhouse-gas emissions from food are sensitive to the exact mode of production, which vary country to country, region to region, and even farm to farm. And any analysis is only as good as the quality of the data that go into it. I couldn’t find any peer-reviewed studies of American farms raising the ostrich meat I could actually buy. Ultimately, my journey down the rabbit hole of ostrich emissions convinced me that parsing the relative virtues of different types of meat might be beside the point. “Just eat whatever meat you want but cut back to 20 percent,” suggests Brian Kateman, a co-founder of the Reducetarian Foundation, which advocates eating, well, less meat. (Other activists, of course, are more absolutist.) Still, “eat less meat” is an adage easier to say than to implement. The challenge, Clauss said, is, “any measure that you would instigate to make meat rarer will make it more of a status symbol than it already is.”

I thought about his words over Christmas dinner, the kind of celebration that many Americans feel is incomplete without a fancy roast. By then, I had, out of curiosity, ordered an ostrich filet (billed as tasting like a lean steak) and an ostrich wing (like a beef rib), which I persuaded my in-laws to put on the table. At more than $25 a pound for the filet, the bird cost as much as a prime cut of beef.

Ostrich has none of the strong or gamey flavors that people can find off-putting, but it is quite lean. I pan-seared the filet with a generous pat of butter, garlic, and thyme. The rosy interior and caramelized crust did perfectly resemble steak. But perhaps because I did not taste the ostrich blind—apologies to the scientific method—I found the flavor still redolent of poultry, if richer and meatier. Not bad, but not exactly beefy. “I wouldn’t think it’s beef,” concluded my brother-in-law, who had been persuaded to smoke the ostrich wing alongside his usual Christmas prime rib. The wing reminded me most of a Renaissance Fair turkey leg; a leftover sandwich I fixed up the next day, though, would have passed as a perfectly acceptable brisket sandwich.

I wouldn’t mind having ostrich again, but the price puts it out of reach for weeknight meals, when I can easily be eating beans anyways. At Christmas, I expect my in-laws will stick with the prime rib, streaked through as it is with warm fat and nostalgia.