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Eat your veggies

I am not a vegetarian but I wholeheartedly support this week’s National Vegetarian Week.

Why? Because for a whole variety of reasons we simply cannot continue to eat the way we are eating.

In my lifetime the global population has doubled but our meat consumption has quadrupled; and while the global population is set to increase by another 50% by 2050, meat production is predicted to double. This is not sustainable and it’s definitely not healthy.

Meat production is responsible for the greatest proportion of this and in 2006 the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) estimated that livestock production is responsible for up to 18% of global emissions. Since that time meat consumption has increased, scientists have used different calculation methods, and more complex analyses have suggested the figure may be much higher.

Big agriculture

I think there is a very human tendency, when we think of climate change, to want to point the finger of blame at big oil companies, car manufactures and the aviation industry. We’ve got a lot of longstanding data on the damage these industries do. But in recent years there has been increasing focus on the globalised food system- Big Agriculture – from all sorts of angles. From scientific, ethical, political and cultural points of view, there’s an awful lot wrong with the way we try, and generally fail to feed the world.

From an environmental point of view agriculture is responsible for around half the global greenhouse emissions and emissions from livestock make up a significant proportion of this – around one fifth of global GHG emissions. In a world where climate is becoming more and more unstable and unpredictable thanks to the hand of man, and where population is increasing this is not sustainable. Where land and water are becoming more and more scarce and where the gaps between the rich and the poor show no sign of closing this is unsustainable.

Eat less meat

I know how to do the maths, which is why I have cut my own and my family’s meat consumption right down. This is a conscious decision based in part on my knowledge of the unfairness, the profligate waste of the globalised food system and the pollution and the toxins that are so prevalent  in mass produced foods, particularly meat, and dairy.

And it’s why it’s such an honour, once upon a time, to be the founding director of the Meat Free Monday campaign in the UK, which made if fun, delicious and practical for everyone to cut back on meat consumption. It’s a campaign that continues to this day and one that I continue to support.

We promote the same principles of sustainable agriculture and sustainable diets here at Natural Health News, which is why we promote organic agriculture as more than a niche or lifestyle choice and why the recipes section features mostly vegetarian options which many readers may not have thought to try before.

Making an impact

We can’t wait for governments to fix the problem. They are too much in thrall to the lobbying of big business. It is estimated that cutting your meat consumption in half would cut more emissions than cutting your car use in half. If all the meat eaters of the world did this just one day a week and could force a drop in livestock production we could drop our GHG emissions by 14%. But by taking the decision to cut our meat consumption we are consciously choosing to be a part of the solution instead of a part of the problem.

And along the way we can solve other problems too, such as spirally chronic health problems that plague the developed world.  Two recent studies we’ve featured on this site have shown how quickly eating good food – low meat, high soluble-fibre, and organic diets – can make profound changes in health in as little as two weeks.

Change the world and get healthy at the same time? That’s some tasty people power in action!

Pat Thomas, Editor