Talking about food and climate change is tricky. It’s emotionally loaded, culturally and socially reinforced and people don’t like being told what they should and shouldn’t eat.
Fixing it is also unavoidable if we want to keep our planet liveable. Even if we stopped emitting fossil fuels today, our food system would tip us into dangerous levels of global warming (2°C+).
26-34% of global emissions come from food (for context, the EU’s emissions are 8%).
So this week on Climate Unf*cked, I chatted to sustainable food systems expert Paul Behrens from the University of Oxford Martin School. In my research and the episode, he said over and over:
“The biggest leaver for making our food system more sustainable is eating less meat and more plants.”
It’s a statement I’ve heard lots before, but it still makes me worried. Because food feels like one of the hardest things for people to change their behaviour around.
I may be biased because I initially found it difficult to go from eating meat 2x per day to vegetarian (obvs it didn’t happen overnight!). And before I cared about climate change, I’d have strongly objected to changing my diet.
I raised all this to Paul 11 mins in.
He had a few comforting and encouraging replies
“Surveys show that we quite severely underestimate one another in terms of how much they care, how much they’re willing to take action.”
“When you know other people are more willing to act than you realised, you’re also more willing to take action.”
“Our food system is already very actively shaped, and you don’t have the free choice you think you do”
“Now I don’t know about you, but I love chips. I love all different types of chips, but I can only have 2 or maybe 3 types of potato at the local supermarket if I’m lucky. So I don’t have free choice of the hundred and fifty other types of chips that I could be having out there.”
In other words, the task isn’t necessarily convincing each individual person to eat less meat and more plants. It’s also about making a system where that’s easy, tasty and normal.
A fab example is the Danish Plant Based Action Plan. They looked at the whole value chain right from farmers to supermarkets to chefs to restaurants (but particularly on the demand side) to incentivise, demystify and make eating plants enjoyable.
Reading and talking to Paul about the Danish plan made me feel genuinely optimistic about the changes it could make elsewhere.
After all, 80% of our total global agricultural land is used for livestock farming, but it only provides 17% of our calories. So eating more plants and less meat will help us individually and collectively.
As Paul counted out at 1hr 52 seconds, there are 17+ benefits of planthood.
If you feel inspired, you could either make a new plant based dish yourself, or chat to someone else about it.
Non-sponsored recommendation of a plant-based cookbook and person is Soph’s kitchen - instagram. We’ve made a few and they’re all incredible + high protein.
🚩 Watch Pauls’s episode at:
Have a lovely week,
Rob
P.S. Last Friday, I asked a very special person a very special question. She said yes (I think the Haribo ring helped)
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