Plant-based burgers are very popular worldwide. U.S restaurant sales have grown by 400% since 2019. Even the threatened meat giant Tyson Foods started making their own hybrid burgers. As Tyson’s former CEO Tom Hayes said, “If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em, right?” It seems this trend of taking the beef out of burgers is here to stay because of environmental and health reasons but students at CdM have a different perspective.

The production of beef burgers has been linked to the larger issue of global warming which has contributed to the veggie trend nationally. “There are many ways of producing meat but it’s clear that the annual farming and slaughter of 50 billion animals for meat worldwide leaves a massive footprint in terms of land use, crop consumption, emissions, and water pollutions,” according to TheWeek.com. Of the students polled at CdM 85.4% prefer beef to veggie burgers and 54.9% agreed that the meat industry is contributing to global warming while 18.8% say it does not and 26.4% don’t know what to think.

Research shows that veggie burgers are healthier than beef burgers, The Week.com states that, “Consuming meat is believed to increase the risk of cardiovascular disease and colorectal cancer, and humans can develop unsafe resistance to antibiotics by eating animals fed those drugs.” Some critics say though that meatless burgers have more sodium than meat burgers and have less nutritious proteins. Regardless of personal preference, the long term, global impact of meat consumption is yet to be seen.