| Apologies to John Lennon. But yes, we should eat more peas! A new study reveals what we have known for quite some time: producing one single kilogram of beef has the horrifying side effect of producing 15-25kg of greenhouse gas emissions.
Across Europe a movement towards avoiding meat one day a week to help address the impact on the climate is gathering pace and adherents. The obvious aim is to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from cattle.
This follows a similar initiative in the Belgian town of Ghent, where town officials will eat non-meat meals once a week; from September schoolchildren, too, will go meat-free for a day.
Closer to home you have the brilliant series, up every Mondays by beach babe in fl who does a stellar job of gathering mouth-watering (meatless) recipes on this site. |
| If we are serious about meeting greenhouse gas reduction targets, meat production has a big part to play. LOCAL or IMPORTED? Local, whenever you can. Conventional or organic? Organic if available and at a reasonable cost. Can you make choices that will keep your diet healthy and reduce your carbon footprint? Yes. Try to cut meat by not ONE but Two days! That is my challenge. Actually it's not much of a challenge, eating less meat is a no brainer, and when I'm back in September I'll show you a few tricks with a range of new vegetarian recipes, as well as shellfish & game recipes that use only produce that is farmed or gathered ethically. But that is for September.
From the New Scientist:
Now it may surprise you to learn that our diets account for up to twice as many greenhouse emissions as driving. One recent study suggested that the average US household's annual carbon food-print is 8.1 tonnes of "equivalent CO2 emissions" or CO2eq (a measure that incorporates any other greenhouse gases produced alongside the CO2). That's almost twice the 4.4 tonnes of CO2eq emitted by driving a 25-mile-per-US gallon (9 litres per 100 kilometres) vehicle 19,000 km - a typical year's mileage in the US.
Cutting back on beefburgers and bacon could wipe $20 trillion off the cost of fighting climate change. That's the dramatic conclusion of a study that totted up the economic costs of modern meat-heavy diets.
The researchers involved say that reducing our intake of beef and pork would lead to the creation of a huge new carbon sink, as vegetation would thrive on unused farmland .
But the environmental arguments are only half of it. A draft report from the World Wildlife Fund and proposed dietary guidelines from Sweden have pointed out that we simply don't need to eat as much meat as we do and furthermore, meat at every meal has grave health consequences. Having cut out meat from most meals (I still do the odd steak and roast chicken but I have said goodbye to pork and lamb) I feel a lot healthier, and lighter.
Swedes chew through an average of 180g of meat and cured meat products a day, for instance - when just 140 g per day is sufficient to cover their iron and protein needs. Reduce the excess and you'll reduce the risk of developing certain types of cancer, says Sweden's National Food Administration.
The recent comprehensive report by the WHO and FAO concludes that changes in diet in the second half of the 20th Century have seen 'traditional, more plant-based diets swiftly replaced by high-fat, energy-dense diets with a substantial content of animal foods'
This, they conclude, has played a 'key role' in the upsurge in diet-related preventable diseases. To counteract the trend, nutritional experts from the two organisations make the same
dietary recommendations as many others before them: reduce consumption of saturated fats (particularly from red meat and dairy foods) and increase consumption of fruit and vegetables to at least 400 grams per day.
Breaking the excessive meat addiction is important for our survival as individuals, and for the planet. Radical as you may think, if a steak became a treat and not every pot had a chicken in it every night of the week, the food system could rear less and farmers would still receive fair returns.
As Colin Tudge pointed out in his powerful book, "So Shall We Reap":
When livestock are raised according to the tenets of good husbandry (the ruminants to eat the grass on the hills and wet meadows, the pigs and poultry to clear up the leftovers) they hugely increase the overall economy of farming. Agriculture that includes the appropriate number of animals judiciously deployed is more efficient, not less, than an all-plant agriculture. But when livestock is produced in vast (and ever increasing) numbers, needing correspondingly vast inputs of cereal, they compete with the human species. IfIf present trends of meat-eating continue, then by 2050 the world's livestock will be consuming as much as 4 billion people do: an increase equivalent to the total world population of around 1970, when many were doubting whether such human numbers
could be fed at all.
Much of that growth will come in China and India, where a burgeoning middle class is rapidly "moving up the food chain" in terms of increasing per capita levels of meat consumption of every kind. You do the sums.
Farm animals also compete with people for other precious resources, notably water. Lack of water is now recognized as the greatest single threat to yields from arable farms, making it vital to develop food production systems which minimise water reliance. Each calorie of meat takes far more water to produce than a calorie of grain, so one of the simplest ways to increase the ratio of food produced to water consumed is to reduce dependence upon meat.
As a vegetarian or a conflicted carnivore (such as myself), the very least we can all do to save our planet is to challenge our way of life, both as consumers (through our purchasing power) and as citizens (we write letters to our elected leaders as well as consuming less). Without such a transformation in our attitudes and behaviour, any prospect of a sustainable, secure and safe future for humankind is (insert your doomsday view here).
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