Burger King is fighting climate change in its own unique way, by reducing cow farts. It’s a well-established fact that cow farts actually release methane emissions which are more damaging than carbon. By changing the diet of their livestock, Burger King can reduce methane emissions (cow farts & burps) by 33%.
And in Burger King fashion, this information was given to us via a catchy new song on their Twitter channel. This reduction will be accomplished by adding 100 grams of lemongrass to their cow’s diet.
You can taste their new lemon grass-fed Whoppers in some restaurants in Miami, New York, Austin, Los Angeles, and Portland starting on Tuesday.
Are Cow Farts That Significant?
A big part of the movement away from traditional meats, like beef, is because livestock releases 7.1 Gigatonnes of emissions each year. That’s 14.5% of all global greenhouse gas emissions. And yes, cow farts make up quite a large percentage of that.
Yet, even with this information, politicians downplay the significance of science.
In fact, they take advantage of just how ridiculous it sounds to say that cow farts are a factor in climate change to downplay the whole topic.
Why Does Lemongrass Help?
Cows have a complicated digestive system, and as a result, they can eat things that humans cannot, like grass. However, the issue is that their digestive system produces a small amount of methane releases whenever a cow passes gas.
This would not be significant if the cows were in nature as intended. However, that is not the case.
In just the US, 39 million cows are used each year to produce our food. Thus, even if it is a small amount of methane, when you multiply it by the ridiculous number of cows around the globe, it becomes a much scarier number.
Lemongrass helps solve this problem by assisting the digestive process of the cow to produce even less methane than normal.