Gaga's High Carbon Footprint Meat Mess

Lady Gaga's meat dress is a meaty mess. She is certainly not the first person to wear a meatkini, or a little meat dress. It has been done before, and with pretty much the same result - people are getting all weirded out.

I don't really get it, though. It is ok to kill a cow, butcher it, then sear its flesh and eat it with gusto. But put a few slabs of the same meat on your body and it is somehow repugnant. Why?

Is it because this fleshy fashion statement has such a high carbon footprint? It must be - what else could be wrong with it? Especially if you throw the garment on the BBQ after and feed it to your friends and family.

No, what must twist people out is the massive green house gases (GHG) that meat couture involves. Careful calculations show that the creation of Lady Gaga's MTV Awards meat dress produced 140 lbs of CO2 equivalents. Yikes! That is the same CO2 production as driving a small car 200 miles.

Included in the 140 pound calculation is the 20 - 40 oz. of cow farts and belches exuded by the cow that the small amount of 'fabric' for the dress came from. It should be noted that methane has 23 times the global-warming potential than CO2. The 140 lbs also includes GHG produced by growing the 100 pounds of plant protein required to grow the amount of meat required.

This, I conclude, is what everyone must be so upset about in the whole meat dress debacle. Curious about how things might be different if Gaga's wardrobe went vegetarian, I calculated what kind of a carbon footprint a fashionable veggie dress would have.

I crunched a few numbers and came up with a ballpark figure of between 4 to 5 pounds of C02 equivalents for a 100% meatless dress.

Get with the program, Gaga. Real ladies are concerned about their carbon footprints. Better start working on your vegkini and little brussel sprout dress for the next photo shoot or awards ceremony.