The way we eat is killing us – and the planet
Felicity Lawrence
The global food system is causing an ecological and health
catastrophe – individual action won’t be enough
Mon 28 Jan 2019 06.00 GMT Last modified on Mon 28 Jan 2019
09.46 GMT
The distinguished medical journal The Lancet has issued not
one but two apocalyptic warnings about our food in under a month. One of its
special commissions reported earlier this month that civilisation itself was at
risk from the effects of the current food system on both human health and the
Earth’s ecosystems. This week comes the next instalment from another special
Lancet commission which finds that pandemics of obesity and malnutrition are
interacting with climate change in a feedback loop and represent an existential
threat to humans and the planet. The modern western diet has become a highly
damaging thing that needs a complete overhaul if we are to avoid potential
ecological catastrophe. It concluded that we need to halve global meat
consumption, and more than double the volume of whole grains, pulses, nuts,
fruit and vegetables we eat.
Cue howls of indignation from big food and its cheerleaders,
the libertarian right. Those nanny statists have gone nuts eating their own
double dose of nuts! Cue cries of distress from champions of local, low-impact
agriculture who include grass-fed animals, and their meat and manure, in their
sustainable mix. These self-appointed experts don’t understand farming! Cue grim
food wheels with only a quarter of a rasher of bacon or a fifth of an egg a
day. Those miserabilist medics want us all to go vegan!
Yet the evidence that our diets are the largest cause of
climate change and biodiversity loss is now overwhelming. The global food
system is responsible for up to 30% of total greenhouse gas emissions, the
livestock sector on its own accounting for about half of that total or 14.5%.
The modern western way of eating is also making very large numbers of people
fat and sick as other parts of the world adopt it. Diet-related diseases now
cause roughly 11 million deaths a year as preventable cancers, heart disease
and strokes, obesity and diabetes have spread along with our way of eating.
More than 800 million people are estimated to be chronically undernourished,
and 2 billion suffer from micronutrient deficiencies, yet at the same time 2
billion are overweight or obese. In poorer counties you can even find obesity
and stunting within the same family as calorie-heavy but nutrient-light
processed industrialised foods are adopted.
In other words, something has gone horribly wrong and we
don’t have much time to fix it. The so-called “reference diet”, published in
the first Lancet report, has caused uproar in some quarters. This is a
theoretical attempt to answer the Malthusian question: if the global population
reaches 10 billion by 2050 (as is anticipated), will there be enough food to
meet everyone’s basic nutritional needs without cutting down more forest,
polluting more water courses and generally destroying the planet? The answer it
comes up with is yes, but only if we share things out differently, and stop
feeding a quarter of the world’s grain to animals.
The reference diet models each person globally having 14g of
red meat a day, 29g of chicken, a fraction of an egg, 250g of dairy, a little
fat or oil, very little sugar, and lots of grains and lentils, vegetables and
nuts. And here’s where the trouble begins, because calculated day by day and
universally these allocations make for a pretty depressing plateful. They
contain some odd judgments. Why favour industrialised chicken? Why palm oil?
They are plain weird if you try to interpret them as daily instructions without
thinking about the diet as a whole or what’s available to people locally –
hence the one-fifth of an egg, the quarter rasher of bacon. People don’t shop
and eat by numbers and fractions. And the fact that nutrition epidemiology –
the study of patterns in diet and disease – has got it wrong before does not
help. Remember when fears about dietary cholesterol were used to condemn eggs?
These instructions sound top down and, worse, appear to throw responsibility back
to the individual.
More than 800 million
people are estimated to be chronically undernourished, yet 2 billion are
overweight or obese
But that is to miss the point of these instructions. They
are calculations that give a sense of the scale of the problem and a
science-based framework for political action. Contrary to some claims, the
Lancet commission that undertook the modelling, supported by the philanthropic
EAT Foundation, received no funding from industry. And the uncomfortable truth
is that meat, and specifically the meat from intensively-fed livestock,
processed in the way it generally is in the western diet, is a hotspot when it
comes to greenhouse gas emissions and ill health. Well-produced meat and dairy
can have a place, but it will be a small one, and it is expensive.
Our diets are out of kilter with what’s good for both us and
the planet because powerful vested interests and misplaced economic incentives
have driven them in that direction, and this is the thesis underlying the
commission’s findings. The equivalent of $500bn in agricultural subsidies goes
each year to the wrong sort of food – corn, soya, meat and dairy, as cheap raw
materials for intensive livestock production and for highly processed foods.
About $5tn a year goes in subsidies to the fossil fuels which industrialised
agriculture uses so profligately. Big food has spent hundreds of millions
advertising unhealthy food and lobbying to block the sort of measures that
might help shift consumption.
Although individuals can make a difference by modifying
their diets, and send clear demands for action to politicians , we cannot
redraw the food system on our own. That will require not just governments, but
global agreement.
The Lancet says the problem is so big and so urgent that we
need an intergovernmental convention to agree a way forward, in the way that
the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change or the World Health
Organization’s Framework Convention on Tobacco Control have. Expect plenty of
hysterical, dark-money opposition to that. The Lancet, founded in the 19th
century, caused uproar back then by publishing the unwelcomenews that food was
routinely adulterated. It has once again kickstarted a vital debate about how
we eat. If it all sounds too gloomy, it’s worth remembering that the modern
western diet is a recent invention. The separation of livestock from the land
only took off in the 1950s, thanks to cheap energy to keep animals housed, to synthetic
fertilisers increasing grain production for feed, and to mass production of
antibiotics to control disease. It’s not so very long since most people ate in
the way we now need to rediscover.
• Felicity Lawrence is a special correspondent for the Guardian
and author of Not on the Label and Eat Your Heart Out
Sem comentários:
Enviar um comentário