Courtesy 123RF.com
First-world diets are having a significant impact on the planet, as well as our waistlines. Increasingly, research is indicating that food production - and meat consumption in particular - has a massive knock-on effect on global warming. By Thin Lei Win.
Rome, Italy. January 2022. If you, like me, are a big fan of jamón, chorizo, morcilla and suchlike this is going to be a difficult read. But it’s also a necessary read, because it’s important that consumers like us who love these products - and the traditions that come with them - know the conditions that come with them.
Thin Lei Win is moving off meat - slowly (she lives in Italy, after all).
I came across a really interesting paper in Nature Food by an international team of researchers, that described a significant carbon “double dividend” - lower emissions plus more land to capture carbon - if 54 rich countries made the switch to more plant-based diets. This is because about 70% of food-system emissions come from livestock, particularly cattle, in high-income countries. And the people in those high income countries also eat a lot more meat (six times as much as poor countries in 2013). In addition, the area needed for grazing and growing feed takes up about 80% of all agricultural land, or about 35% of the total habitable land in the world.
On top of this, another recent study from Tulane University and University of Michigan showed how swapping just one high-impact food item from American diets could result in people making significantly smaller carbon and water footprints. This is principally due to the consumption of beef, whose production creates a staggering 8-10 the emissions of chicken production and 20 times that of nuts, seeds or legumes.
But we can’t just blame the US. Heated debate in Spain around industrial pork mega farms has surfaced after the country’s consumer affairs minister criticised them as environmentally-unfriendly in a recent Guardian story. And because the issue isn’t just about beef (the Spanish pig industry is both environmentally- and socially-exploitative) we also need to look at the lack of competition in the meat industry overall. A recent White House fact sheet noted that the current meat packing industry is “hurting consumers, producers and our economy”. For example, just four meat-packing companies control 85% of the global beef market and another four firms control 54% of poultry market plus some 70% of the pork market.
According to British author and academic Dr. Paul Behrens, we don’t just need an Energy Transition - we need a Great Food Transition. “We know that current food systems on their own can push us above 1.5 degrees,” he says. “And some foods result in more emissions than others.”
Current levels of beef production contribute massively to global warming. Courtesy J dePutter
So, if we could focus dietary changes on the rich countries that represent almost 70% of global gross domestic product yet only 17% of population (as described in the Nature Food paper), we could target consumers that already eat far more meat than is healthy and who already emit the most greenhouse gases per capita due to their consumption patterns. Even more significant, those are the people who have choice - ‘high-income’ nations classified by the IMF have a ready availability of plant-based protein options whereas lower-income countries often lack these options and eat less animal protein anyway. And the Tulane/Michigan paper also notes that swapping beef for other foods could save us water, another important aspect since agriculture is responsible for 70% of global freshwater withdrawals.
So simply changing to an alternative EAT-Lancet healthy yet sustainable “plant-forward diet” could prevent millions of early deaths, cut greenhouse gas emissions and preserve land, water and biodiversity too. Just by doubling our intake of nuts, fruit, vegetables and legumes, and eating half as much meat and sugar.
“Biodiversity, water quality, air quality, access to nature, all these would come” - Dr Paul Behrens. Courtesy P Behrens.
Better still, if rich countries moved to this diet would reduce annual emissions from direct agricultural production by 61.5%, and spare more than 426 million hectares of land - an area slightly larger than that of the European Union. This could then provide substantial opportunities for carbon sequestration, and could potentially remove nearly 100 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere by the end of the century, equivalent to 14 years’ worth of current agricultural emissions. Because just four countries - the US, France, Australia and Germany - all have large populations and diets that are intensive in animal products, changing diets only there would make a massive difference.
“This is a total opportunity,” argues Behrens. “Not only because of the reduction in emissions and the potential for but capturing carbon but also “biodiversity, water quality, air quality, access to nature, all sorts of different benefits that would actually come from this across so many different things in human health and human welfare.”
In fact a changed diet in these four countries alone could provide half of total agricultural emissions reduction, as well as improved carbon sequestration through land spared from livestock farming. This would be a major contribution to a reduction in global warming, note the both papers.
Bearing in mind that all the previous calculations are based on agricultural activities alone, and not the whole food systems, there could be even more benefits from dietary change. Ones that result from trickle-down changes to transportation, processing, refrigeration, wholesale and retail demands. Time to move from meat? 2022 could be the year.
Thin Lei Win is a food and sustainability journalist and commentator based in Rome. Check her newsletter at news.thin-ink.net.