There’s no meat in this argument for going veggie
THERE was a time when science was about finding out the facts. It was down to politicians, policymakers and the rest of us to decide what to do about them. But it is becoming increasingly hard to tell where science ends and environmental activism begins.
Many people will have woken up yesterday morning to hear that “scientists” are telling us to cut drastically our intake of red meat, to no more than the equivalent of one sausage a week. It turns out that the widely-reported story came from a paper published in the medical journal The Lancet.
I don’t doubt that there are a lot of people who could benefit their health by cutting their intake of red meat, which has been linked in some medical studies to a moderate increased risk of heart disease and cancer. It is also true that the growth of livestock farming has caused many environmental issues. But the shrill tone of The Lancet report goes well beyond simply laying down the facts. It looks all too much like a war on meat.
The Lancet paper is the work of something called the EatLancet Commission, which claims to have brought together 38 dietary experts to solve the world’s nutrition problems. On closer examination, nine of the report’s 18 co-authors are associated with a single institution: the Stockholm Resilience Centre, which describes its role as carrying out “sustainability science for biosphere stewardship research”. They are more eco-warriors than nutritionists, in other words.
AND the group’s claims verge on the hysterical. They are expressed in jargon that is indistinguishable from that of green lobbying groups. For example, the Commission calls for a “Great Food Transformation”, as well as making the extraordinary claim that “food is currently threatening both people and the planet”. You would never think that we actually need food to keep us alive.
It also claims that 820 million people around the world “have insufficient food” – the implication being that if the world moved to a more vegetarian diet there would be enough for everyone. What it doesn’t tell you is that, but for a small rise in the last couple of years, global hunger has fallen dramatically in the past 30 years.
In 1990, there were a billion people living in hunger, according to the UN. Hunger has fallen in spite of the global population rising by more than half in the intervening years. The proportion of the world’s population who are hungry has fallen from 23 per cent to 13 per cent.
That is a triumph that has not been achieved through the promotion of vegetarianism but through a free-market global food industry that has responded to consumer demand, including meat. As for the assertion that our diets are killing us, our food is evidently not so unhealthy as to prevent soaring rates of longevity throughout the world. In 1955 global life expectancy was 48 years. By 1995 it had grown to 65 and by 2025 is projected to reach 73 years, with no country in the world having a life expectancy of less than 50.
This incredible rise in life spans has been achieved at a time that the world has increasingly adopted what used to be called a “Western” diet higher in meat and other animal protein. There is good evidence to show that too much meat and dairy involve some risk to the health, but the charge that our diets are some huge medical emergency that requires a “great food transformation” towards vegetarianism simply doesn’t fit with the evidence of improved health around the world.
What The Lancet doesn’t draw attention to so much are the medical hazards of vegan diets. While some studies have shown that vegetarians have modestly lower levels of cancer and heart disease than nonvegetarians, others have shown that vegans have a higher risk of bone fractures and vitamin deficiencies associated with neurological disorders and heart disease.
As for The Lancet group’s other charge, that meat-eating is killing the planet, I am sure that livestock farming could improve its impact on the environment, but it is a bit rich singling out the world’s cows for their greenhouse gas emissions – a charge that vegans are forever making. Much of the carbon emissions attributed to livestock farming comes from the clearance of forestry to create pastureland – which is a one-off process.
E‘Group’s claims are verging on hysterical’
VEN so, deep within its text, The Lancet report admits that in fact carbon emissions from food production have been pretty stable since 1990 – in spite of the rapidly-growing global population. If methane from belching cattle is a problem it is one that is already being tackled: by keeping cattle indoors, where the methane can be collected and burned to generate green electricity.
The same is true of soil degradation, another reason The Lancet group cites as a reason for all but giving up meat – technology is overcoming the problem through “hydroponic” agriculture, which involves growing food in glass houses, without any soil. Lessening the environmental impact of farming hardly requires the world to convert to eating beansprouts.
If vegans, vegetarians and environmental extremists want to deprive themselves of meat, milk and whatever, that is fine by me – they can eat what they like. But for all their preaching, one thing they cannot deny is that humans have been omnivores for many tens of thousands of years. It would be perverse suddenly to restrict our diets now.