Are bison the answer to sustainable meat?

Beef: We’ve had too much for dinner. Beyond chicken, red meat is our favorite at the table, with Americans consuming on average nearly 65 pounds of beef per person per year, according to the 2000 U.S. Census. It’s this love affair that experts suspect has contributed to a wealth of our health woes, including heart disease and cancer.

According to a decade-long study of more than 500,000 Americans published in 2009 in the Archives of Internal Medicine, “11 percent of deaths in men and 16 percent in women could be prevented if people decreased their red meat consumption by one-fifth.”

Still, even with this information, prying away our steak knives has not gone well. Americans eat nearly 8 ounces of meat a day—that’s double what the rest of the world consumes. And though the United States accounts for only 5 percent of the world’s population, we process 15 percent of the total meat supply, according to the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization, which also estimates that U.S. livestock production generates nearly one-fifth of the world’s greenhouse gases.

What we need is a meat to meet us in the middle—something just as delicious as beef, easier on the arteries, that walks with a gentler environmental hoofprint. Indeed, another contender has slowly grazed its way into the spotlight, garnering attention from health- and eco-conscious consumers for doing just that. Buffalo (which should actually be called bison if they are from North America) may just be the answer to our lust for beef thanks to the meat’s sustainability, low fat content and reduced calories. But is this “other red meat” too good to be true?