Less meat, more veg: a diet to save the planet
Half a rasher of bacon a day. That’s as much red meat as you should eat, according to a new report, if you want to protect your health and that of the planet, said Kat Lay in The Times. You should also limit yourself to 28g of fish a day, equivalent to about half a fish finger, and try not to have more than about one-and-a-half eggs a week. At the same time, you should double your consumption of fruit and vegetables, and eat many more nuts, seeds and pulses. The report, published last week in The Lancet, was commissioned by EAT, an Oslo-based non-profit that believes urgent change is needed if we are sustainably to feed a projected world population of ten billion people by 2050.
“The well-being of our planet and its people are clearly in jeopardy,” said Georgia Ede in Psychology Today, so there is a pressing need for rigorous, science-based guidance. Alas, this report does not provide it. Its dietary guidelines rely heavily on epidemiological studies – which are “wildly inaccurate, questionnaire-based guesses about the possible connections between foods and diseases” – rather than clinical trials.
In many cases, it’s plain that the report’s authors have “simply pulled a number out of thin air”. Their environmental stance also lacks credibility, said Rod Liddle in The Sunday Times. “If I give up eating free-range Welsh lamb, say, and replace that protein with nuts imported from South America and lentils flown in from Turkey, how is this helping the world, given our concerns about global warming?” Rather than forcing everyone to turn vegan, wouldn’t we be better off trying to rein in population growth instead?
The “planetary health diet” has some similarities to the Mediterranean one, so it’s not such an alien concept, said Harry Harris in the New Statesman. And we’d all benefit from eating less meat. Where the report goes wrong is in not properly acknowledging the cultural aspect of food. If you’re “attempting to unravel years and years of recipes, stories and histories that food embodies”, you must tread carefully. “There’s nothing wrong with asking people to change their diets – eat less of something, more of something else, whatever. But if we keep doing it in this didactic way, nothing will ever stick.”