No one can accuse a pair of commentators given some prime Opinions page real estate in the Washington Post this week of pulling their punches. Here’s the lead to their column, titled “To fix the climate, take meat off the menu:”
“More than 50,000 U.N. officials, scientists, environmental advocates and a few heads of state will gather this coming week in Rio de Janeiro for a conference on sustainable development. They’re assembling 20 years after the first Earth Summit was held in the same city, and the goal now, as it was then, is to figure out how to cut dangerous greenhouse gases and help the 1.3 billion people living in extreme poverty. Or to put it more starkly, how we can live ethically without threatening the ability of future generations to live at all?
“That’s what’s on the agenda.
“But what we want to know is: What’s on the menu? Specifically, will this large gathering on climate change be serving meat—whose production and consumption are major contributors to climate change?”
Yes, that’s what we all want to know, whether a gathering of tens of thousands of people will be forced to eat veggie-only foods for a week. As if that’s the answer to climate change.
The commentators, Frances Kissling, a visiting scholar at the Center for Bioethics at the University of Pennsylvania, and Peter Singer, the Ira W. DeCamp Professor of Bioethics at Princeton University (who was profiled here last week) obviously believe it is. What’s troubling is that their simplistic anti-meat argument is likely to be swallowed by plenty of policymakers who don’t have a pro-vegetarian agenda that consumes and colors their thinking.
They acknowledged that, “No one really believes that the Rio+20 meeting will result in a new agreement to limit greenhouse gas emissions.” As the kids say, true dat.
But they go on to make their main point: “In that case, the best thing the conference could do for the climate is to remove meat from the menu—and to make a big deal about it. Everyone at that meeting should know that meat is a major contributor to climate change.Cutting out meat would do more to help combat climate change than any other action we could feasibly take in the next 20 years.”
I read proclamations like that, and I start channeling Elizabeth Barrett Browning, as in, “How do I loathe thee? Let me count the ways.”
The real source of the problem
First feasibility. Does anyone—even born-again veggie believers—really think it’s feasible to eliminate the contributions of animal agriculture to the global economy and the nutritional value of animal foods from humanity’s diet inside of a couple of decades? Or that such a radical development, were it even possible, wouldn’t have disastrous repercussions for the very people across the developing world for whom Kissling and Singer wax eloquent?
They seem blissfully unaware that more than a billion people—often those at the bottom quintile of economic status—depend on livestock for their very sustenance. Take that away and the world would face a famine worse than anything we’ve witnessed in the last century.
And by the way, most of the people tending cattle, sheep, goats, pigs, chickens, water buffalo or other livestock, don’t have access to the production technologies that producers in the developed world deploy to lower the greenhouse gas emissions connected with meat production.
Even Kissling and Singer recognize that, albeit with a backhanded acknowledgment, writing: “We found out that priority will be given to ‘organic foods in catering services.’ Which sounds nice enough, except that ‘organic’ cattle typically produce even more methane per pound of beef than their less-well-treated brothers and sisters.”
Second, do either of the two understand how ironic it is that they’re demanding vegetarian foods—based on vegetable proteins, primarily soybeans—for people attending a conference in Rio de Janeiro? There’s not a country on Earth that has done more to contribute to the threat of climate change than Brazil, mainly by wiping out millions of acres of rainforest to cultivate soybeans and sugar cane, among other crops.
Indeed, conservative estimates (from USDA, among other agencies) put Brazil’s annual soybean output at more than 72 million metric tons, grown on approximately 60 million acres of farmland, much of that formerly covered in carbon-sequestering rainforest. (U.S. soybean acreage is about 75 million acres).
One could make a plausible argument that the more people who give up eating meat and switch to vegetable protein alternatives, the worse the situation becomes regarding the greenhouse gas emissions over which Kissling and Singer spill so much ink.
Most importantly, the idea that livestock are the problem, not industrial activity consuming enormous amounts of fossil fuels, not billions of cars and trucks spewing pollution, not thousands of coal-fired power plants worldwide pumping out soot and smoke is ludicrous on its face.
The reality is that commentators like Kissling and Singer, well-meaning as they might be, know all too well that if they started hectoring the affluent population that is their primary audience to give up their cars, stop buying all the household appliances and electronics that are embedded in our lifestyles and move into smaller, simpler, less luxurious housing, they’d lose not only all credibility but their entire audience, as well.
By contrast, giving up meat feels much nobler, much simpler, much less of a sacrifice.
And even less of a possibility it will ever happen. ÿ
The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of Dan Murphy, a veteran food-industry journalist and commentator.
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