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Death row inmates put a lot of thought into their final meal choice. After all, it's the last food they will eat on this Earth. And their choice is telling for overwhelmingly, in the United States at least, they want meat.
Pork chops, filet mignon, steak, hamburger, meatloaf, fried chicken, sausages… with not a lentil, slice of haloumi or vegetarian lasagne in sight. Prisoners on death row might not be the most representative of groups, but their choices give an inkling of the central role meat plays in our diet.
The very earliest fossil evidence of human eating habits bears the unmistakable signs of animal consumption, and our dental structure is designed for a diet that will tackle anything, whether animal or vegetable: canines and incisors for cutting and tearing, pre-molars and molars for grinding.
Today, the human diet, especially that of Westerners, revolves around meat. Livestock products provide one third of humanity's protein intake. According to a 2005 report from Australian government research agency, the CSIRO, an average Australian eats 35 kg of beef, 21 kg of pork, 36 kg of chicken and 13 kg of lamb each year - roughly 290 g of meat per person, per day.
It takes 16 million sheep, 8 to 9 million head of cattle, 5.6 million pigs and nearly half a billion chickens just to meet the meat requirements of Australians. And there's a reason we eat so much meat: it's a great source of protein, iron, zinc, vitamin B12 and long-chain omega-3 fatty acids. But there are other, perhaps less well known, facts about meat.
The U.N. Food and Agriculture Organisation found that livestock are responsible for 18% of global greenhouse emissions - more than transport. Feeding and watering livestock accounts for over 8% of global human water use, and of the total combined weight of land-based animals, livestock makes up 20%.
Meat is extremely popular in Australia thanks to the barbeque, the meat pie, and the grand Aussie tradition of the sausage sizzle. The red meat industry alone is worth $15 billion annually, and we're eating more meat than ever before. While beef consumption might be very slightly down and lamb consumption well down from the 1960s, these days we are eating two to four times more pork and chicken per person.
But how many of us have dared take a close look at what we eat, and wonder what impact changes to our diet might have on our environmental footprint?
Probably not too many of us - after all, as anyone who has ever tried to lose weight can attest, changing your diet is no easy task. But now is the time to do so, because meat is the one ingredient in our diet that does more harm to our environment than any other.
Meat is not really doing our health any favours, at least in the quantities we currently consume, says nutritionist and dietician Dr Rosemary Stanton, who is a member of the New South Wales Health Department's Food Advisory Committee. Meat might contain plentiful amounts of essential nutrients such as iron, zinc and vitamin B12, as well as protein, but those things are also found in dairy products, legumes, nuts, grains, seeds and vegetables.
Even if meat was your sole source of these essential nutrients, the National Health and Medical Research Healthy Eating guidelines say you need just 65 g to 100 g of meat a day. "That is really tiny portion and so the amount that people eat is far greater than that," says Stanton - two to four times greater, in fact.
