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A diet to feed the planet while not destroying it that you could persuade people to eat
tbloxham
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
https://www.bbc.com/news/health-46865204
So an interesting article popped up on the BBC for me this morning. Its a conceptual diet designed to limit carbon emissions, have no expansion of farmland, feed 10 billion people (up ~30% from today), use the same amount of water, and also be something that as many people as possible would be happy to eat.
Here's their breakdown for the diet...
Nuts - 50g a day
Beans, chickpeas, lentils and other legumes - 75g a day
Fish - 28g a day
Eggs - 13g a day (so one and a bit a week)
Meat - 14g a day of red meat and 29g a day of chicken
Carbs - whole grains like bread and rice 232g a day and 50g a day of starchy vegetables
Dairy - 250g - the equivalent of one glass of milk
Vegetables -(300g) and fruit (200g)
It's an interesting discussion which I've seen happen a few times in other threads, what should we eat. What can we actually PERSUADE people to switch to eating. Would Americans REALLY cut back their meat consumption from 276 grams per day to 43 grams per day? How much of this proposed diet is just the researchers imposing their european views on the whole world, there is (for example) a big section about why Africa needs to cut back on starchy vegetables. But why? Are we just sacrificing their starchy vegetables for our meat. Maybe people in the USA should go down to 20 grams of meat a day and then people in Africa (and the US) can have all the starchy vegetables they want.
Do we even need to change our diet to save the planet? Its all too simple a calculation to say, "Oh, we should just all be vegetarian", but if you look at the world average most people don't eat very much meat at all, we LOVE doing it when we can but the level of meat consumption in most of the world is at the level where you could feed the animals with the roots, stems and leaves of plants which we grow but can't eat and then effectively get their meat 'for free' since they will also do great composting for you. We either feed animals that we then eat, or we feed those steams and leaves to bacteria and moulds which we don't. So maybe it's just America and Europe who need to change their diets, much of the rest of the planet isn't doing too badly.
For example, if I keep sheep and raise lambs to eat them, it takes ~360 kg of dry plant matter to eat over 15 weeks (dry grass is the example, and clearly I'm using sheep here because I can't find the numbers for goats who will just happily eat whatever stems you have). So I can convert 360 kg of dry plant matter into ~ 60 kg of lamb. About 50% of this is meat, so 30 kg of meat. Plants are about 55% water, and 'dry' plant matter is about 10% water, so to make 360 kg of dry plant matter, I need about 720 kg of plants (or I can just feed those plants to the animals)
So 720 kg of plants make 30 kg of meat. Or 1 kg of meat requires 24 kg of plants.
If I grow tomatoes and peppers etc as my vegetables in this diet then the weight of the plant I must grow is about between 50% of the weight of the vegetables, and 100% of the weight of the vegetables. Lets say 75%. So, if I eat 300 g of vegetables a day, that means I've got 225 grams of excess plant to figure out what to do with. Thats 82 kg of plant waste per year. I'm also eating 50 g of starchy vegetables, and 232 grams of grains. Thats another 78 kg per year, for a total of 160 kg. This means with my food waste alone I can share in the feeding of enough sheep (really it would be goats, because goats are willing to eat whatever) to eat 6.6 kg of goat meat per year. Thats 18 grams per day, which is close to what a lot of the world already eats. And amusingly close to the total they came up with. Ha, well that was a waste of your time. Turns out those science folks are pretty smart.
Still, can we save the world and still enjoy a quarter pounder with cheese?
So an interesting article popped up on the BBC for me this morning. Its a conceptual diet designed to limit carbon emissions, have no expansion of farmland, feed 10 billion people (up ~30% from today), use the same amount of water, and also be something that as many people as possible would be happy to eat.
Here's their breakdown for the diet...
Nuts - 50g a day
Beans, chickpeas, lentils and other legumes - 75g a day
Fish - 28g a day
Eggs - 13g a day (so one and a bit a week)
Meat - 14g a day of red meat and 29g a day of chicken
Carbs - whole grains like bread and rice 232g a day and 50g a day of starchy vegetables
Dairy - 250g - the equivalent of one glass of milk
Vegetables -(300g) and fruit (200g)
It's an interesting discussion which I've seen happen a few times in other threads, what should we eat. What can we actually PERSUADE people to switch to eating. Would Americans REALLY cut back their meat consumption from 276 grams per day to 43 grams per day? How much of this proposed diet is just the researchers imposing their european views on the whole world, there is (for example) a big section about why Africa needs to cut back on starchy vegetables. But why? Are we just sacrificing their starchy vegetables for our meat. Maybe people in the USA should go down to 20 grams of meat a day and then people in Africa (and the US) can have all the starchy vegetables they want.
Do we even need to change our diet to save the planet? Its all too simple a calculation to say, "Oh, we should just all be vegetarian", but if you look at the world average most people don't eat very much meat at all, we LOVE doing it when we can but the level of meat consumption in most of the world is at the level where you could feed the animals with the roots, stems and leaves of plants which we grow but can't eat and then effectively get their meat 'for free' since they will also do great composting for you. We either feed animals that we then eat, or we feed those steams and leaves to bacteria and moulds which we don't. So maybe it's just America and Europe who need to change their diets, much of the rest of the planet isn't doing too badly.
For example, if I keep sheep and raise lambs to eat them, it takes ~360 kg of dry plant matter to eat over 15 weeks (dry grass is the example, and clearly I'm using sheep here because I can't find the numbers for goats who will just happily eat whatever stems you have). So I can convert 360 kg of dry plant matter into ~ 60 kg of lamb. About 50% of this is meat, so 30 kg of meat. Plants are about 55% water, and 'dry' plant matter is about 10% water, so to make 360 kg of dry plant matter, I need about 720 kg of plants (or I can just feed those plants to the animals)
So 720 kg of plants make 30 kg of meat. Or 1 kg of meat requires 24 kg of plants.
If I grow tomatoes and peppers etc as my vegetables in this diet then the weight of the plant I must grow is about between 50% of the weight of the vegetables, and 100% of the weight of the vegetables. Lets say 75%. So, if I eat 300 g of vegetables a day, that means I've got 225 grams of excess plant to figure out what to do with. Thats 82 kg of plant waste per year. I'm also eating 50 g of starchy vegetables, and 232 grams of grains. Thats another 78 kg per year, for a total of 160 kg. This means with my food waste alone I can share in the feeding of enough sheep (really it would be goats, because goats are willing to eat whatever) to eat 6.6 kg of goat meat per year. Thats 18 grams per day, which is close to what a lot of the world already eats. And amusingly close to the total they came up with. Ha, well that was a waste of your time. Turns out those science folks are pretty smart.
Still, can we save the world and still enjoy a quarter pounder with cheese?
"That is cool" - Abraham Lincoln
So It Goes on
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This doesn't apply to all meat production by a long shot of course.
i hope you don't mind if i throw around your post with my vegetarian and vegan friends to get their reaction while i also try to form my own opinion.
Just rename them “land shrimp”.
It’s totally a cultural thing, because crickets are pretty damn good if cooked properly.
Depends where and how. In sone environments it involves a lot less water. In some more.
Usually the shit contamination is more of an issue.
I don't eat much meat, never really enjoyed a lot of the things listed though. It would be a pretty substantial increase in the quantity and diversity of foods I keep and a big increase in preparation time.
I'm down for changes in diet but so many fads promise so many things (usually vague health benefits) that better for Earth is a hard sell. People already don't give a shit about simple things like wasteful resource use.
Edit: Adoption of a diet of these foods when I was younger would have gone a long way. I bet it's probably more true now, at least when I was a kid the most junky food in the school cafeteria was a chocolate milk twice a week.
But a lot of these things only become problematic when we look at US levels of meat consumption. Animal shit is an incredibly valuable resource, and, having animals eat your plants and then poop it out takes you from chunky stems and leaves to piles of spreadable glop in 8 hours, rather than the 7 days it would take even the most efficient bacteria in the healthiest composting pile with the most vigorous mixing, or the months to years it would take soil bacteria with low levels of agitation from worms and moles. If you have too much animal shit, then you have a massive problem, because you can't count on soil bacteria to kill the guy bacteria fast enough that you can just deal with it by putting it in the field. If you have only a small amount, then its trivial. Deal with the herbivore shit by putting it on the fields that you are using to grow the vegetables you eat and the roots, leaves and stems the herbivores do. The soil bacteria and weird environment will obliterate the gut bacteria, and you have fertilized healthy soil.
In addition, with a small population of meat animals proximate to large areas of vegetable and grain production, the transport weight of wet plant matter is a much smaller problem. And so I can feed my animals plants rather than dry feed. If you feed sheep high water content plants rather than low water content dry food (as in my example above), their daily need for clean water drops from 4 gallons per day to less than 1 gallons. If they eat entirely fresh grass from a field, the amount of excess water they need is nearly zero (fresh grass is even higher water content, so they eat even MORE than 720 kg)
So both animal shit, AND water needs being problematic are a product of the gigantic amount of meat people eat in the USA and Europe. If you consume a far smaller amount of meat, the shit becomes a valuable by product, and the water is mainly provided by the fundamental inefficiencies of plant growth. Can't have plants without them being full of clean water.
(in this example, I'm assuming that we feed all our waste beans, nut husks, fruit debris and so on to our chickens to get our eggs and chicken meat, clearly we could do another calculation there and see if that is enough, but they seemed to come up with the same number I did for red meat the first time)
No.
No I do not.
You don't have to give UP bacon here. You can have ~1 rasher a day and half an egg. Meaning a decent breakfast of bacon and eggs (4 rashers and 2 eggs), with a slice of toast twice a week. You just have to have porridge for breakfast the other days.
You can then have fish for dinner twice a week, and chicken twice a week.
To me the more interesting part of this is that this is seems to be the calculation of the 'fully sustainable and efficient' level of meat, fish and dairy production. As in, that level of meat, fish and dairy you can eat and not feel one bit guilty about it, because it was either eat them, or let bacteria in the soil eat all those waste plants.
I think you'd do much better at getting Americans and Europeans to switch to less meat, rather than no meat.
http://www.fao.org/docrep/018/i3253e/i3253e05.pdf
Crickets produce about twice as many calories of edible material per input calorie than chickens. About 4 x as many as pigs (which are about the same as sheep)
So, you can swop out your 18 g of red meat per day for 72 g of cricket power if you'd like. Or trade your 29 g of poultry for 58 g.
But again, I think you'd do better at persuading people to adopt it if you DIDNT need them to eat crickets. Sure, you could eat crickets, and have more calories if you want. But, I think I'd rather eat goat once a week than cricket 4x a week.
I'm all for moderate improvement in child nutrition.
Edit: I saw the guidelines this morning and am considering giving it a shot for a month actually.
I do make an exception when someone invites me for a home-cooked meal (which is quite rarely), because I would consider it rude to force the hosts to cook something special just for me.
I'm still way over the EAT-Lancet recommendation in the OP, though.
Yeah we have an obesity epidemic right now. If people can't be expected to diet for their own sake, expecting them to diet for the sake of the climate is not reasonable.
"Orkses never lose a battle. If we win we win, if we die we die fightin so it don't count. If we runs for it we don't die neither, cos we can come back for annuver go, see!".
I get that it's not. Its complicated but shouldn't be. We have as much emotion and wrought shame bundled in food selection as we do sex and body image. People are difficult.
Edit: I have concerns regarding calorie needs not being one size fits all. I'll have to read some stuff this weekend.
This is true, and speaks to the need for political action beyond 'make impassioned arguments and hope folks who largely have more immediate problems to deal with, change their behavior'.
Banning advertising of unhealthy food entirely, at least to children, would be a good start.
I don't even know where you would start - American's cultural attitude towards meat prioritizes:
1) Eating as much of it as you can,
2) For as cheap as possible
If someone gave me a hamburger that looked like a hamburger but was made from cricket I'd be all about it.
Right now land based meats can be obtained for ~$2 per pound if you are looking to be frugal.
So, eating meat at a US level (~10 oz per day) costs you ~$1.25 (at a minimum).
If prices rose, how expensive would they need to be before you decided "I will cut back meat to 2.5 oz per day"
For me, I think if the VERY cheapest meat I could get was $50 a pound, meaning that eating 2.5 oz a day would cost $8 that might be all I would consume. Likely just have meet a few times a week and on special occasions.
edit - Although, in marginal hilarity, crickets are about ~$40 a pound... So persuading me to cut back on cricket is already practical... These are dried crickets though, and probably premium grade, which I guess is how you would buy them?
https://shop.aketta.com/products/crispy-aketta-whole-crickets-edible-insects?variant=11910902918
If we eliminated indirect subsidies to beef (examples: corn subsidies cheapening cattle feed, grazing rights on federal lands), how much more expensive would American beef be?
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
i think one thing to consider is that we could actually supplement the lack of meat with fish.
all these considerations for meat and how much it fucks up the world to eat so much meat don't (i think) apply exactly to fish. so if we ate way more fish, i wonder how would that change all the calculations.
there are insane amounts of protein biomass in the ocean, probably more than enough to feed us, especially if we don't only fish for tuna and salmon, etc.
where does the original 28g of fish come from? it seems really low, doesn't it?
The beef industry is already vulnerable, to for example agroterrorism, but it means a huge knock on effect because the cattle industry brings billions of dollars into the economy.
The challenge here would be convincing people to adopt it. Even if you demonstrate to them via first-hand experiment it'll give them enough energy through the day, etc, there's a lot of mental barriers to penetrate.
More fish would likely be very bad. We are fishing a lot of places past sustainable levels already, and that's before the damage climate change is causing.
Looking at 8 oz of steak on a plate is much different psychologically than looking at 2.5 oz.
But if you put that 2.5 oz of beef in a stir fry all of the sudden it feels like a perfectly fine amount of meat for a meal.
Also, you need to convince people that of your 2.5 oz meat meals, only 20% of those are beef (and pork?). 40% are fish and 40% are chicken!
I'm pretty sure current fishing practices are actually even less sustainable than current cattle farming practices.
I don't think there's going to be top-down changes to people's diets for the purpose of health, cruelty or environment, considering where (North American at least) politics are at right now. The only thing I realistically see changing is that meat and fish will get more expensive as climate changes (edit: and overpopulation) fuck up food supplies. So my pessimistic and selfish response is to eat whatever I like now, while us poor people can still afford tasty things. Sorry.
I think it would be less if it was a common thing, you can get about 1000 fully grown live crickets for $15 or so at a pet food store.
Desptie being, y'know, me I actually have poor hopes for insect protein and lab meat to become main staples. I could go into detail on both (and probably will when I get some time).
What I genuinely believe is that a proposal like the one in the OP is the only realistic way to reduce meat consumption per capita across the world.
No one will give up meat en masse, lab meat and insects will always be a niche food product, and it would be near impossible to convince enough people to go completely vegetarian or vegan to make a difference.
It might be possible to convince (or force, through economics or policy decisions) people to cut their meat intake to nearly, ballparking, an eigth or less of what they currently consume.
This would have a drastic effect on agricultural greenhouse emissions, especially if we also encourage more local farming co-ops to limit food mileage.
What this particular plan needs is a break down of what you'd be eating meal by meal rather then the average numbers.
I almost wonder if crickets are really what we should be considering here. There's a 28 gram seafood budget there which the article is clearly spending on 'fish'. 1 oz per day is probably a pretty sustainable amount of generic fish for a human to eat, some would be farmed, some harvested. In fact, thats 22 lbs of fish a year, which is more than what people in north America eat right now. FIsh is a LOT harder for me to do any figuring on, because its often wild, and farmed fisheries don't have anywhere near as much publically available data than say the sheep industry does. I wonder how much additional 'popular' protein you get if you say, "we're going to feed our waste vegetable biomass to shrimp instead of sheep".
Again, you'd probably use a slightly non familiar animal here, the Crawfish instead of the shrimp because its happier to be completely vegetarian.
I actually went and found some feed conversion efficiency tables, and seafood is actually a solid contender here, and I can see why they are including it in the diet...
https://www.aqua-techna.com/en/productivity/experts/feed-conversion-ratio-farmed-fish
Here FCR for pig is listed as 3, and is a bit more vague. I'm going to say all these numbers need to be multiplied by 1.333 to bring them in line with the other conversion factors we've seen.
The numbers seem to come out (for the same amount of input food)...
0.333 lb beef
1 lb lamb
2 lb chicken
2.2 lb shrimp
3 lb salmon
4 lb cricket
Now shrimp are eating both meat and vegetables in farms, so thats right out (unless we feed them ground bones from other animals we have, which I guess is OK), but I bet you'd do a bit better substituting Crawfish in there and going wholly vegetarian.
So, would the diet look any more realistic if we dumped the red meat entirely and replaced it 2-3 x as much seafood?
18g red meat + 29g chicken + 28g 'varied fish'
OR
54g farmed salmon/shrimp + 29g chicken + 28g 'varied fish'
I bet you'd get more takers to replace lamb (red meat) with shrimp and salmon than with cricket.
Yeah, weekly would make it a bit more realistic. I think there are 1 or 2 vegetarian 'days' in the week, and most days are going to have meat at one meal rather than 2.