Categories: General
Date: Sep 9, 2008
Title: selling the "eat less meat" message
At last there is a real debate in high places about how we need to eat less meat to reduce carbon emissions. The highly respected Chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Dr Rajendra Pachauri, has now pitched in saying: “meat production accounts for
about 18% of the world’ s total greenhouse emissions so among options
for mitigating climate change changing diets is something one should
consider.”
It was the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations that
in 2006 estimated the greenhouse gases associated with the livestock
industry to be 18% of global emissions. That’s partly because cows burp
methane (and cows in the industrialised meat industry that are fed
processed feedcake burp more methane than those that eat grass), but
also because of the fossil fuels that are used to grow grain to feed to
cattle, to make processed feedcake for cattle to eat, to pump water for
cattle to drink, to refrigerate meat, to transport refrigerated meat
and to sell meat in supermarkets in open fridges and freezers.
The UK government’s own website www.direct.gov.uk says: “the production of
meat and dairy products has a much bigger effect on climate change and
other environmental impacts than that of most grains, pulses and
outdoor fruit and vegetables. A Cornell University study concluded that
animal protein production requires more than eight times as much
fossil-fuel energy than production of the equivalent amount of plant
protein. It would be a far better use of resources if we humans simply
ate some of the vegetable protein directly.
It’s only in the last 50 years that we have massively increased the
quantity of meat and dairy we consume, whilst at the same time doing
less manual work. Our bodies simply cannot cope with so much animal
protein. And of course we now eat poor quality meat, often stuffed with
antibiotics, growth promoters and other chemicals, and we prepare it
badly as well. There’s no getting away from it – large quantities of
cheese burgers and pepperoni pizzas are simply not good for you. On
present trends half of all children in the UK in 2020 will be
clinically obese because they eat too many poor quality burgers and
other junk food, and because they do not do enough exercise.
This is not a call for everyone to go vegetarian. This is about eating less meat, and making sure that when we do eat meat it is better
quality meat, to help both the planet and our health.