Keeping count on your food miles
Your diet could save the world, one meatless meal at a time.
ON Sunday, three weeks ago, my brother watched as I picked bits of mutton out of my supper of maggi goreng with chopsticks and placed them gingerly onto a saucer.
“Do you really have to weigh everything?” he asked, amused, as I balanced the saucer atop a tiny plastic weighing scale from Daiso. “Yes, all the meat,” I insisted. I’m no bodybuilder trying to optimise my proteins. It was my third day on a new diet designed to save the planet and I had to know how much red meat I was about to eat. The low-meat “planetary health diet”, as it’s called, is meant to be healthy and ecologically sustainable. A day’s quota consists of 14g of red meat, including pork, and less than 30g each of poultry and fish.
Most of the 2,500-calorie diet is made up of whole grains, fruits and vegetables.
It can’t be too hard, I thought at the start. Vegetarian food has been gaining ground here in the last few years, with new products and eateries focused on plant-based foods being introduced. Movements like Meatless Mondays, which advocates cutting out meat once a week, have also found their way here.
Hospitals, university dining halls and even high-end restaurants have begun offering more meatless options due to the growing interest.
And last year, Earth Society Singapore vice-president Low Chip Khoon said that more young people are willing to reduce their meat consumption due to greater climate change awareness and education.
But vegetarianism is still far from mainstream. As a heavy meat-eater myself, I thought it might be interesting to try to eat more sustainably.
Want to go flexitarian? Do it gradually.
So I started carrying a weighing scale around and documenting what I ate. I did it for three weeks, spanning Chinese New Year and its temptations as an added challenge.
Once I announced my self-directed experiment on social media, I started getting encouragement and recommendations from vegetarian or vegan friends - there were more of them than I’d realised.
I also started to notice vegetarian options for pizza, Mexican food and Indian food, and even vegetarian chain restaurants like Greendot that I had never paid attention to.
In the first week, the novelty was still fresh and it was fun to gamify my meals. I ended the week quite pleased with myself for being well below my aggregated quotas.
Doing this consistently, however, was harder than I thought. That weekend, I gave myself a “cheat day” to eat what I normally would, just to see how it would measure up.
A plate of chicken rice and a mentaiko pork cutlet set meal later, I had blown nearly all of my quotas for the second week in one day.
And as the novelty of weighing everything wore off and slowly became an annoyance, a question I kept getting asked was: “Will you stick with it after the three weeks?”
Well, the weighing scale had to go, but I started to ask myself what it would take to commit to reducing my meat intake in the long run.
Ethical consumption can be difficult or nigh impossible, given the complexity of our modern societies.
A friend snidely observed that I was eating less meat to reduce my carbon footprint, but continued to order food delivery, thereby adding to it.
That made me think about the climate impact hidden in long supply chains; Singapore imports over 90% of the food we consume.
This concept of “food miles” originated in the 1990s. Some researchers say the overall impact of food transportation is negligible compared to the energy used to produce the food or to cook it.
But all other things being equal, is it more ethical to eat a strawberry trucked in from Malaysia than an air-flown Korean one?
What a rabbit hole to go down. I asked myself: If I care about this, shouldn’t I give up air travel?
If I give up plastic straws, shouldn’t I give up online shopping and its excessive packaging?
If I am appalled by shark’s fin soup, shouldn’t I also be outraged at the human suffering caused by the production of fast fashion, smartphones and diamond rings?
Though adopting this diet started out as an exercise in climate change mitigation, it quickly became refocused on ethics. But most of all, it made me think of animal suffering, though we are unlikely to witness it.
While the diet creators’ recommendations were based on environmental and health concerns, many of my friends said they avoid meat to be humane to animals.
These views were not new to me. In my first year of university, I encountered moral philosopher Peter Singer’s arguments against eating meat on the basis of the suffering it causes to sentient animals.
I recall agreeing with Singer, arguing in support of his conclusions in class, and then promptly shelving his premises when the semester ended, continuing to eat meat at almost every meal despite not being able to justify it morally.
A Buddhist friend pointed out that factory chickens live comparatively lower-quality lives compared with pigs or cows. So poultry and eggs may be easier on the environment, but beef and pork could cause less direct suffering per kg of meat.
It can be tempting to give in to cynicism, but those trying to live more ethically shouldn’t be discouraged.
As my Buddhist friend put it: “It’s helpful for me to remember that it’s okay to be morally imperfect. What really matters is that I’m trying, most days, to be better.”
What do we owe to what we eat? Perhaps trying, at the least, to be a bit more aware and compassionate.
By the time Chinese New Year actually came around, I found it much easier to resist the allure of bak kwa. Too high in salt, fat and suffering.
I’ve laid aside my weighing scale for now, but I too will try to be better, one meatless meal at a time. – The Straits Times/Asia News Network