[DEBATE] : Can vegetarians save the world?

[Mandi Smallhorne]

And I say Bully for them! (pardon the pun)
Mandi

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Can vegetarians save the world?

A small town in Belgium has gone meat-free one day a week. A sign of  
things to come, says one food historian

     * Tristram Stuart
     * The Guardian, Saturday 16 May 2009

For decades, environmental arguments against eating meat have been  
largely the preserve of vegetarian websites and magazines. Just two  
years ago it seemed inconceivable that significant numbers of western  
Europeans would be ready to down their steak knives and graze on  
vegetation for the sake of the planet. The rapidity with which this  
situation has changed is astonishing.

The breakthrough came in 2006 when the UN Food and Agriculture  
Organisation (FAO) published a study, Livestock's Long Shadow, showing  
that the livestock industry is responsible for a staggering 18% of all  
anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions. This is only the beginning of  
the story. In 2008, Brazil announced that in the 12 months to July it  
had lost 12,000 sq km (3m acres) of the Amazon rainforest, mainly to  
cattle ranchers and soy producers supplying European markets with  
animal feed. There is water scarcity in large parts of the world, yet  
livestock-rearing can use up to 200 times more water a kilogram  
(2.2lbs) of meat produced than is used in growing wheat. Given the  
volatile global food prices, it seems foolhardy to divert 1.2bn tonnes  
of fodder – including cereals – to fuel global meat consumption, which  
has increased by more than two and half times since 1970.

Vegetarians have been around for a very long time – Pythagoreans  
forbade eating animals more than 2,500 years ago – but even as the  
environmental evidence mounted, they didn't appear to be winning the  
argument. Today in Britain just 2% of the population is vegetarian.

Thankfully, a more pragmatic alternative to total abstinence now seems  
to be emerging. In September 2008, Dr Rajendra Pachauri, chair of the  
UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a vegetarian  
himself, called on people to take personal responsibility for the  
impacts of their consumption.

"Give up meat for one day [a week] initially, and decrease it from  
there," he said. "In terms of immediacy of action and the feasibility  
of bringing about reductions in a short period of time, it clearly is  
the most attractive opportunity." This week the Belgian city of Ghent  
met his demands by declaring Thursday a meat-free day. Restaurants,  
canteens and schools will now opt to make vegetarianism the default  
for one day a week, and promote meat-free meals on other days as well.

This is not the first institutional backing for such a move. In  
Britain, the NHS now aims to reduce its impact on the environment  
partly by "increasing the use of sustainably sourced fish and reducing  
our reliance on eggs, meat and dairy". Last year, Camden council in  
London announced that it would be issuing a report calling for  
schools, care homes and canteens on council premises to cut meat from  
menus and encourage staff to become vegetarian. (In the end the  
initiative was shot down by Conservative councillors who insisted that  
people should not be deprived of choice.) While in Germany the federal  
environment agency in January called on Germans to follow a more  
Mediterranean diet by reserving meat only for special occasions.

These initiatives may sound novel, but in fact they reinstate what was  
for centuries an obligatory practice across Europe. The fasting laws  
of the Catholic church stipulated that on Fridays, fast days, and  
Lent, no one could eat meat or wine; on some days, dairy products and  
fish were also banned. Even after the Reformation Elizabeth I upheld  
the Lenten fast, insisting that while there was no religious basis for  
fasting, there were sound utilitarian motives: to protect the  
country's livestock from over-exploitation and to promote the fishing  
industry (which had the ancillary benefit of increasing the number of  
ships available for the navy).

Towards the end of the 18th century, two consecutive bad harvests in  
Europe created shortages. There was a huge public clamour for the  
wealthy to cut down on their meat consumption in order to leave more  
grain for the poor. The idea that meat was a cruel profligacy became  
current, and led Percy Bysshe Shelley to declare that the carnivorous  
rich literally monopolised land and food by taking more of it than  
they needed. "The use of animal flesh," he said, "directly militates  
with this equality of the rights of man."

In the wake of last year's food crisis and with mounting concern over  
global warming, we appear to have reached a similar crisis moment.

The vegetarian argument is complicated, however, by the fact that in  
terms of environmental impact, no two pieces of meat are the same. A  
hunk of beef raised on Scottish moorland has a very different  
ecological footprint from one created in an intensive feedlot using  
concentrated cereal feed, and a wild venison or rabbit casserole is  
arguably greener than a vegetable curry. Likewise, countries have very  
different animal husbandry methods. For example, in the US, for each  
calorie of meat or dairy food produced, farm animals consume on  
average more than 5 calories of feed. In India the rate is a less than  
1.5 calories. In Kenya, where there isn't the luxury of feeding grains  
to animals, livestock yield more calories than they consume because  
they are fattened on grass and agricultural by-products inedible to  
humans.

In a paper published last month in the American Journal of Clinical  
Nutrition, food ecologist Annika Carlsson-Kanyama showed that kilo for  
kilo, beef and pork could produce 30 times more CO² emissions than  
other protein rich foods such as beans. On the other hand, the paper  
also indicated that poultry and eggs had much lower emissions than  
cheese, which was among the highest polluters. So do meat-free days,  
and arguments for vegetarianism in general, take adequate  
consideration of these subtleties, or should we all be chucking out  
the cheese and going vegan?

"A vegetarian day is a simple message that people can understand,"  
says Carlsson-Kanyama, "though probably what we ultimately need to do  
is eat less animal products overall."

Alex Evans, fellow at the Centre on International Cooperation at New  
York University, points out that more and more people – including Sir  
Nicholas Stern, the author of a 2006 review on the economics of global  
warming – accept that the only equitable way of achieving an  
international agreement on climate change is for rich and poor nations  
to converge on an equal per capita "fair share" of carbon emissions.  
"The same ought to apply to food," Evans says, "but currently there is  
no agreed method for calculating what is my 'fair share' of the  
world's food supply – in particular how much meat."

Based on the global food production figures published by the FAO, I  
did a few preliminary calculations. Global average consumption of meat  
and dairy products including milk was 152kg a person in 2003. Average  
EU and US consumption, by contrast, was over 400kg, while Uganda's was  
45kg. In order to reach the equitable fair share of global production,  
rich western countries would have to cut their consumption by 2.7  
times – and this doesn't include the fact that the butter will have to  
be spread even more thinly if the global population really does  
increase by another 2.3 billion by 2050.

However, still further reductions would be necessary because global  
meat production is already at unsustainable levels. The IPCC among  
other bodies, has called for an 80% reduction of greenhouse gas  
emissions by 2050. Since high levels of meat and dairy ­consumption  
are luxuries, it seems reasonable to expect livestock production to  
take its share of the hit. For rich western countries this would mean  
decreasing meat and dairy consumption to significantly less than one  
tenth of current levels, the sooner the better.

It is all very well for 2% of the population to live in a monastic  
state of meatlessness while everyone else gorges their way towards  
environmental meltdown or the nearest heart clinic. Vegetarianism is  
good for the willing minority, but not much use as a campaign tool.  
Beginning as Ghent has done, with one meat-free day a week, is a  
historically-proven idea palatably re-fashioned for the age of eco- 
consciousness. It also appears to be gaining popular approval, even if  
McDonald's need not fear for the survival of its Big Mac, yet.

• Tristram Stuart's Waste: Uncovering the Global Food Scandal, will be  
published by Penguin in July. His history of vegetarianism, The  
Bloodless Revolution, was published by HarperCollins in 2006

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About this article
Close
Tristram Hunt visits a small town in Belgium that has gone meat-free  
one day a week
This article was first published on guardian.co.uk at 00.07 BST on  
Saturday 16 May 2009. It appeared in the Guardian on Saturday 16 May  
2009 on p30 of the Saturday section. It was last updated at 00.56 BST  
on Saturday 16 May 2009.
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