Can You Be an Environmentalist and Still Eat Meat?
Thirty years ago, before becoming vegan, I was commissioned to make a film about the impact that meat, dairy and fish have on the global environment (Devour the Earth). After trawling through endless research and BBC archive footage, to say I was ‘gobsmacked’ would be an understatement. With all the zeal of a new convert, I told anyone who would listen to me that they needed to go vegan to save the world.
One of the recipients of my proselytising was a friend who also happened to be the director of a leading UK environmental campaign group. He sipped his beer silently as I gave him the full Monty:
“Just about every environmental problem, you can think of stems from animal agriculture – extermination of wildlife and other species, deforestation, spreading deserts, deadly blooms of algae, loss of soil fertility …. And the oceans are dying from overfishing. You have to change your policies!”
He was silent for a while, took another sip, and said: “I know all that but I’m not going to tell people to go vegan.” When I asked why, he replied: “I will lose my members overnight and I’m not prepared to do that.” So, there it was, an inconvenient truth.
And therein lies the fundamental problem of change. All or nothing is often too stark for many people, particularly when the messaging is so contradictory. For the one isolated voice demanding you change your ways, there is a myriad others telling you everything is just fine and you’re OK as you are – every takeaway menu and supermarket flyer that drops through your letterbox; almost every TV cookery show; endless newspaper and magazine articles and adverts salivating over and eulogising about meat, dairy and fish in one form or another, supporting the status quo.
Government is no different, with numerous ministers making their position clear: In April 2018, then Environment Secretary, Michael Gove described meat as “a crucial part of a balanced diet” and more recently, as Minister of State at Defra, Angela Eagle told Viva! “The government recognises that plant-based food products are generally less carbon intensive to produce than livestock products. However, the Prime Minister has been clear that he would not tell people how to behave to achieve net zero”. They then throw huge subsidies at meat, dairy and fish with the implication that these products are vital to life. Their reasoning is much the same as my environmental friend’s – they don’t want to lose voters.
So, what’s a person to do? The first thing is probably to ascertain the facts and understand if and why animal agriculture is so damaging; and there’s plenty of science out there from global organisations such as the UN Environment Programme, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change plus piles of academic research.
It all boils down to one simple fact – breeding animals is an incredibly inefficient way of producing food. Take a beef steer for example; it can take up to 10 kilograms of good quality vegetable protein to produce just one kilogram of meat protein. The rest is essential to keep him alive and functioning. To a lesser degree, it is much the same with all farmed animals, where a large proportion of their feed is ‘wasted’, with poultry and fish being the least wasteful, although still highly inefficient compared to producing plant foods.
This has a knock-on effect in that an average diet containing meat requires more than four times as much land as a vegan diet (more than two-and-a-half for a vegetarian diet). With over 80 billion farmed animals being killed every year across the world and increasing, there is no longer sufficient land to support their appetites and it’s from here that all the environmental problems arise.
New land has to be found to graze animals and grow fodder for them but as writer Mark Twain said: “…land; they’re not making it anymore!” Even grazing is now considered uneconomic and 75 per cent of all animals are factory farmed; even higher in the US.
And so forests are cleared, swamps drained, land reclaimed and chemicals use to maximise production – pesticides, herbicides, fungicides and oil-based fertilisers. You get some idea of the vast quantities involved with the panic that ensued when the strait of Hormuz was closed and the passage of huge fertiliser bulk carriers was stopped – on a par with the panic over oil.
Despite this, in 2006, a landmark report was published by the Food & Agriculture Organisation of the UN, Livestock’s Long Shadow, and it said all the things I’ve just said plus some bits of colourful rhetoric such as: “We are staring into the abyss!” It established that livestock farming is one of the biggest emitters of greenhouse gases.
What enraged big ag was that lead author, Henning Steinfeld, had spent almost his entire career at the UN FAO encouraging producers to grow more, bigger, better, heavier animals. The game keeper had turned poacher – but they needn’t have worried because the report had about as much impact as a clap in a thunderstorm.
Nevertheless, new official excuses began to appear to support animal agriculture and the current top hits are that free-range animals actually help to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Not true, according to another landmark report from researchers at Oxford University which analysed the environmental impacts of food production using data from 570 studies and about 40,000 farms across 119 countries.
Another favourite one is that Britain is responsible for just one per cent of global emissions so what’s the point of trying? Of around 200 countries in the world, 190 emit one per cent or less and even industrial Germany accounts for only 1.5 per cent. So, let’s all sit back and do nothing!
So, back to the question, can you be an environmentalist and still eat meat? Well, you’re clearly a more effective environmentalist if you don’t eat meat plus you save countless animals from suffering but over my years at Viva!, I’ve learned that major changes such as going vegan are rarely Damascene conversions but rather the result of slow-growing awareness.
It often starts with something fairly restricted such as cutting out red meat – not a bad start as it’s classified by the World Health Organisation as probably being carcinogenic.
It’s this first step that’s so important because it’s the product of consideration; you’ve thought about it, weighed the evidence and reached a conclusion. It is, however, a process that doesn’t end there, which is why there are invariably further changes as people start to confront the things they’ve previously purposely ignored.
It is fairly well-trodden path that they are following and while that first step is so important, I would encourage everyone to scramble along it as quicky as possible because, put simply, we are running out of time.
About the author
Tony Wardle
I have been with Viva! since its launch, helping Juliet with precious few resources – staff or money! My title is associate director and I can turn my hand to most things that Viva! does, and can talk on almost all the subject areas we cover. But my time is consumed mostly with words, writing for and editing our supporters magazine, Viva!life, checking, editing a large output of written material as well as conceiving and writing much of it.
