‘Let them eat lentils’ won’t save us from animal farming – we must embrace meat substitutes
Do you hate the idea of animal-free meat? Many people do. Unsurprisingly, livestock farmers are often furiously opposed. More surprisingly, so are some vegans: “Why can’t people eat tofu and lentils, like me?” Well, the new products – plant-based, microbial and cellcultured meat and dairy – are not aimed at vegans, but at the far greater number who like the taste and texture of animals. Many others instinctively recoil from the idea of food that seems familiar, but isn’t.
So here’s a question for all the sceptics. What do you intend to do about the soaring global demand for animal products, and its devastating impacts?
Already, 60% of the mammals on Earth by weight are livestock. Humans account for 36%, wild mammals for just 4%. Of birds, poultry make up 71%, wild species only 29%. While the human population is growing at 1% a year, the livestock population is growing at 2.4%. Global average meat consumption per person is 43kg a year, but swiftly heading towards the UK level of 82kg. The reason is Bennett’s Law: as people become richer, they eat more protein and fat, especially the flesh and secretions of animals.
So, if you don’t like the new technologies, what solution do you propose? I keep asking, and the response is either furious or evasive. “It’s the wrong question!” “Who’s paying you?” “Do you want us to eat slime?”
So far, only one of the people I’ve asked has answered it directly: the food campaigner Vandana Shiva. “You blindly echo the myth that as people get richer they eat more meat. Indians continue to be vegetarians even when they become rich. Food cultures are shaped by cultural and ecological values.” But meat-eating in India is rising rapidly, though many people do it secretly. In other words, despite religious proscriptions, enforced with vigilantism and, in some cases, murder, Bennett’s Law still applies.
It’s as if we were urging people to burn less fossil fuel without offering a replacement: no solar, wind, geothermal or nuclear power. This issue is just as urgent, arguably even more so, as livestock farming attacks every Earth system. It’s the primary agent of habitat destruction and wildlife loss. It’s causing rivercide and dead zones at sea. It generates more greenhouse gas emissions than all the world’s transport. It sprawls across vast tracts of the planet, inflicting massive carbon and ecological opportunity costs. Both historically and currently, livestock farming is probably the world’s most powerful agent of colonial land grabbing and the displacement of Indigenous people. Meat is consuming the planet.
Substitutes for animal products can greatly reduce this damage. They can allow vast areas to be returned to dispossessed people and the ecosystems they defended.
The first cell-cultured meat recently gained regulatory approval in the United States. At the same time, the taste and texture of plant-based alternatives has greatly improved. I’ve recently eaten three products that are almost indistinguishable from the originals: a steak made by a Slovenian company called Juicy Marbles, a “lamb” fillet from the Israeli company Redefine Meat, and sushi and tempura “seafood” at the London restaurant 123V.
In response, Big Meat has ramped up its campaign of demonisation. That’s understandable. Less so is the support the animal industry receives from people who claim to be green, but happily recite its misleading propaganda. The professor of food and agricultural policy Robert Paarlberg compares this alliance to the inadvertent coalition of Baptists and bootleggers in the US a century ago. By lobbying successfully for the prohibition of alcohol, the Southern Baptists opened the door to gangsters trading in stronger and more dangerous drink. True environmentalists have a duty to break this ultra-conservative consensus.
Adoption of the new technologies is likely to follow an S-curve: slow, then sudden. At first, uptake will be low and will suffer repeated setbacks. But as scale rises and prices fall, market penetration is likely to reach 10% or more. That’s the point at which linear growth suddenly switches to exponential growth. It’s a trend we’ve seen in dozens of technologies, from refrigerators to smartphones.
The biggest hurdles will be political. As governments are pressurised by Big Meat, they will raise the kind of obstacles that, in the UK and US, have delayed the rollout of renewable electricity. The UK government, for example, is reported to be considering a ban on calling plant-based products “milk” and “butter”. What it will do about coconut milk and peanut butter is anyone’s guess. No VAT is charged on meat and milk here, but most plantbased alternatives must pay 20%.
The regulators that might approve the new products are often overwhelmed. Brexit has dumped a massive workload on the UK’s Food Standards Agency and its budget falls far short of what it needs. At the same time, it has been flooded with applications for CBD (cannabidiol) products: it could be years before it can assess alternative proteins.
None of these questions should be left to industry and government. Environmental campaigners should be working not to destroy the green alternatives but to ensure they are regulated properly and, through effective antitrust laws, do not become as concentrated in the hands of a few corporations as the meat trade is. As always, this will be a political struggle as much as a technological one. And we need to decide which team we are on.
George Monbiot is a Guardian columnist
tances. And so it has proven. She begins 2023 with her most recent album, Good Morning Gorgeous, garlanded with six Grammy nominations, including record of the year and album of the year. Last year, her Super Bowl halftime performance succeeded in stealing the show from her co-stars Dr Dre, Eminem, Snoop Dogg, 50 Cent and Kendrick Lamar. Clad in an outfit emblazoned with 10,000 Swarovski crystals, she gave a reading of No More Drama only marginally less intense than at Glastonbury, the highlight of a show that subsequently won an Emmy. Her US tour grossed $34m. She launched her own festival in Atlanta, announced the arrival of her own talk show, The Wine Down, and won Billboard’s Icon award. Google revealed she was the year’s second-most searched music artist in the US, behind Maroon 5’s scandal-hit frontman Adam Levine. In truth, her career began picking up not long after Glastonbury – her 2017 album Strength of a Woman, was her highest-charting in eight years; the following year, her performance in the period drama Mudbound saw her nominated for an Oscar and a Golden Globe – but the sense of a dramatic increase in momentum over the last 12 months is hard to miss.
Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised at Blige’s resurgence: she was a scrapper from the start. She fought her way out of a horrendous childhood in Yonkers’ Schlobohm Housing Projects – domestic violence, sexual abuse, an alcoholic, PTSD-stricken Vietnam vet father who left the family a few years after her birth – to release a debut album that literally changed the face of pop music. It’s not an exaggeration to say that we still live in a musical world that What’s the 411? helped create. Responding to what he called the “raspy, gutter, ghetto pain” of her voice, not to mention the toughness of her upbringing – Blige has a scar on her face that she has consistently refused to discuss – producer Sean Coombs set it to music explicitly influenced by hip-hop.
The sound proved so pervasive, in time essentially consuming the entire genre of R&B, that it’s hard to imagine how striking it sounded on arrival, in an era where female-fronted R&B hits still tended to the soft-hued and poppy: Shanice’s I Love Your Smile, Vanessa Williams’ Save the Best ’Til Last or Mariah Carey’s Let It Go. It wasn’t just the forward-thinking sound that stuck out but the raw, gripping potency of Blige’s voice. For all her hip-hop-inspired image, it seemed to key into a much older soul tradition that the 80s had done its best to try and eradicate from the mainstream: a point Blige would underline some years later, on 1999’s Mary, a classicist soul-inspired album that pointed up the blues and gospel elements of her vocals.
While What’s the 411? sold 3m copies in the US alone, Blige became embroiled in a troubled relationship with singer Cedric “K-Ci” Hailey. A nadir of public humiliation was reached when she appeared live on The Word, and, having suggested the pair were engaged, was shown a video of Hailey on the same show loudly denying their engagement, although clearly worse was going on behind closed doors: Blige subsequently accused him of physical abuse. Her drinking escalated and she became addicted to cocaine. By the recording of her second album, My Life, she said she was suicidal. The musical results were astonishing: one of the landmark R&B albums of the decade, the largely self-written record offered an unsparing, wrenching document of a life in torment, “down and out, crying every day”, as she put it on the title track. It was often heavy emotional terrain – even the closing Be Happy is only cautiously optimistic at best – that introduced the notion of Blige as latter day R&B’s equivalent of a confessional singer-songwriter: her travails so public that Blige the person and Blige the artist seemed indivisible. Thereafter, she seldom shied away from a lyric that other artists might have rejected as too blunt: “I don’t have a lot of friends,” she sang on 1999’s Deep Inside. “Is it cash they see when they look at me?”
Harrowing or not, My Life was another hit, as was the album after it, and the album after that. Her quality control seemed to start wobbling around the turn of the millennium, although, initially at least, her commercial dominance did not – her 2006 single Be Without You spent 15 weeks at the top of Billboard’s Hot R&B HipHop Songs chart. By the 2010s however, there were signs of trouble: an advert she made for Burger King was criticised as racist, there were issues with the IRS, her albums no longer went multi-platinum, the title of 2011’s My Life II suggested an artist casting back to their former glories.
So what’s behind her resurgence? The prosaic answer is that 2017’s Strength of a Woman and Good Morning Gorgeous are better albums than those that immediately proceeded them. Some of it is probably down to prevalent trend for 90s and early 00s nostalgia – the appearance of Kendrick Lamar notwithstanding, that was certainly what the Super Bowl half-time show was ultimately founded in, with its performances of Still Dre, In Da Club, California Love and Lose Yourself.
But there’s also a peculiar dichotomy to Blige. On one hand, she seems a very modern pop star. Current pop music prizes relatability, and Blige’s music was always relatable: “I’m every young girl in every hood,” as she once put it. It’s not so much that she’s continually approached by fans in the 2021 documentary My Life, it’s that every single one of them wants to tell her how her songs reflected their own experiences, whether divorce, abuse or coming out. We also live in an era where we expect artists to collaborate far beyond their genre, and Blige always did that, too: her voice was far more adaptable than the “gutter, ghetto pain” assessment suggested, and she seemed every bit as comfortable and imperious collaborating with U2, George Michael, Elton John or the Rolling Stones (footage of a 2012 live performance of Gimme Shelter with the latter offers a gripping glimpse of Blige in old-fashioned blues wailing mode) as with Method Man and Jay-Z.
But in another sense, she kicks against modern standards, not least the wearying desire for perfection, where artists are Auto-Tuned, choreographed, Photoshopped and media-trained to within an inch of their lives. It’s a climate that makes the Blige who was, as one writer put it, “opinionated to the point of abrasiveness”, who interrupted an interview with Veronica Webb to offer the model-turned-journalist outside for a fight (the latter happened after her management had sent her on a 17-week etiquette course), a strangely appealing, unvarnished character. Meanwhile, as David Dundas, who designed her Super Bowl outfit, noted, Blige is hard to choreograph onstage because “her movements are impulsive … some artists plan every step but Mary reacts in the moment”.
“There’s no time for pretty girl shit,” Blige once said of her stagecraft. “It’s time for ugly faces, sweat, spit flying – you got to get it going on.”
Whatever the reason, Blige’s resurgence is a hugely pleasing state of affairs: an abundantly talented, genuine musical pioneer having the full glare of the spotlight returned to them and clearly relishing it. “If you never seen me, or never met me, or you never went to any of my shows, you know exactly who I am after Super Bowl,” she said last year. “I’m super proud of myself. And I never thought I’d ever be able to say that in my lifetime.”
ness signals from your body. Slowing down and being mindful can help to prevent overeating.Annabella Zeiddar,
therapist and coach Up the intensity
To grow stronger, your body needs to be pushed beyond its comfort levels. For example, if you’re going for a 15minute run every day, try to gradually increase the distance you’re running in that time, rather than the length of time you spend running. You’ll need to build your stamina bit by bit and be mindful of your body’s limitations to avoid injury.Duncan Attwood, personal trainer
Use a heart monitor while cycling
There is plenty of technology that can help you tailor your workout to your body’s needs. If you’re new to cycling or building your strength, I recommend alternating your energy levels, going hard for one minute then easy for two, and repeating for the duration of your workout.Kelsey Mitchell,
Olympic cycling champion Meditate
It’s good for relaxation, but meditating after exercise will also help to lower your cortisol levels and ease you back into balance. It can boost those feelgood endorphins when you’ve completed a workout.Chloë Webster, meditation
teacher Be accountable
If you write your goals in your diary you’re more likely to stick to them. You can also try arranging to meet a friend for an exercise session. By making it a part of your schedule – especially if others are involved – you’ll find it easier to carve out the time.Tori Sharp, personal
trainer Practise breathing techniques
Functional breathing exercises, which you can learn online, can boost your health and fitness by supporting faster recovery and enabling you to train more comfortably for longer periods.Matt Bagwell,Paralympic andTeam GB instructor
Set ‘Smart’ goals
When you’re starting your fitness journey, it’s important to know exactly what you want to achieve before deciding how you’re going to get there. Once you know that, it’s time to implement the Smart theory by setting goals that are specific, measurable, attainable and relevant, as well as being time-sensitive to your own needs.Kirsten Whitehouse, women’s fitness and mindset coach
Gamify routines
If you find it hard to get going with basic exercises, try gamifying the process. Strava segments, streaks, virtual badges, online medals and personal bests are popular ways to boost your motivation.Michelle Flynn, health coach
Try hypopressive training
These are brilliant low-impact, breath-led exercises for women to help strengthen the pelvic floor. They take just 10 minutes a day and can help you to build the confidence you need to train – without worrying about embarrassing accidents.Kirsty Victoria, postnatal
health practitioner Ditch the all-or-nothing attitude
From eating well to exercising, staying healthy can seem overwhelming. It’s not realistic to become a health guru overnight, but adopting some healthy habits (such as walking or eating an extra piece of fruit) all the time is better than doing everything at once when the motivation hits.Becks Hamill, fitness trainer
Join a group activity
Being part of a group is a great way to build motivation and exercise in a fun, sociable way. From high-intensity interval training classes in the park to five-a-side football with colleagues, there are plenty of choices available. By making it fun, you’re more likely to learn to enjoy movement.Carole Dowling,
personal trainer Prioritise your form
When it comes to learning new exercises, quality is more important than quantity. Practise getting your technique right with your trainer (or through online videos) before you start to increase your reps.Adele Andersen,bootcamp founder and online trainer
Eat 30 plant-based foods every week
We know fruit and vegetables are healthy, but so is variety. Research shows that eating many different types of plant-based food improves gut health and protects against disease. It’s also important to slow down while eating, chew well and take a few deep breaths before a meal to increase stomach acid and improve digestion.Anna Mapson, nutritional therapist
Try a tempo run
By running at a pace that is hard but at least 10% less than maximum effort, you can train your body to maintain speed for longer. Kalia Lai, fitness influencer
Immerse yourself in cold water
Studies show that cold water exposure has numerous positive benefits for the body, including preventing and treating muscle soreness, boosting the immune system, and reducing stress and depression. It can also reduce insulin resistance and protect against cardiovascular diseases and obesity.James Davis, psychologist and health coach
Get your body moving in water
Exercising in water is much easier on your joints, making it an ideal choice for beginners. If swimming isn’t for you, why not join an aquafit class or try your hand at synchronised swimming? If there is no team in your local area, you could always try setting one up with friends.Pippa
Best, health coach Turn the music on
Find yourself getting bored during exercise? Playing music while you train can distract from pain and fatigue, reduce perceived effort, and increase stamina and enjoyment.Emma McCaffrey, fitness trainer
Start with basic full-body sessions
To build muscle, start with a simple routine and repeat it three times a week, giving yourself time to rest in between. Try doing three sets of each exercise, with 10 reps for each. Examples include squats, deadlifts, shoulder presses, rows, biceps curls, dips and triceps overhead extensions.Alexandra Wren, bodybuilder and trainer
Up the antioxidants
Foods rich in zinc, vitamin C and antioxidants reduce inflammation, which is especially important when you’re exercising. Try adding more herbs, berries, onions, and nuts to your diet, as well as beans and whole grains.Hannah Hope, nutritionist
Be sceptical of costly fads
People can get fit and healthy without special equipment or expensive diets. Try cooking easy meals that can be made in large batches, such as soups and casseroles, rather than splashing out on protein powders and weightloss supplements.Andrew Telfer, head
coach at Wild Strong Use mind drills
Instead of saying “if I exercised” or “if I quit smoking”, change your language to “when”. By shifting your focus from possibility to actuality, you’re more likely to adopt new healthy habits.Anji