For decades, environmental arguments against eating meat have been largely the preserve of vegetarian Web sites and magazines. Just two years ago it seemed inconceivable that significant numbers of western Europeans would be ready to put down their steak knives and graze on vegetation for the sake of the planet. The rapidity with which this situation has changed is astonishing.
The breakthrough came in 2006 when the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) published a study, Livestock’s Long Shadow, showing that the livestock industry is responsible for a staggering 18 percent of all anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions. This is only the beginning of the story. Last year, Brazil announced that in the 12 months to July it had lost 12,000km² of the Amazon rainforest, mainly to cattle ranchers and soy producers supplying European markets with animal feed. There is water scarcity in large parts of the world, yet livestock-rearing can use up to 200 times more water a kilogram of meat produced than is used in growing wheat. Given volatile global food prices, it seems foolhardy to divert 1.2 billion tonnes of fodder — including cereals — to fuel global meat consumption, which has increased by more than two and half times since 1970.
Vegetarians have been around for a very long time — Pythagoreans forbade eating animals more than 2,500 years ago — but even as the environmental evidence mounted, they didn’t appear to be winning the argument. Today in Britain just 2 percent of the population is vegetarian.
Thankfully, a more pragmatic alternative to total abstinence now seems to be emerging. Last September, Rajendra Pachauri, chair of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a vegetarian himself, called on people to take personal responsibility for the impacts of their consumption.
“Give up meat for one day [a week] initially, and decrease it from there,” he said. “In terms of immediacy of action and the feasibility of bringing about reductions in a short period of time, it clearly is the most attractive opportunity.”
This week the Belgian city of Ghent met his demands by declaring Thursday a meat-free day. Restaurants, canteens and schools will now opt to make vegetarianism the default for one day a week, and promote meat-free meals on other days as well.
This is not the first institutional backing for such a move. In Britain, the country’s health service now aims to reduce its impact on the environment partly by “increasing the use of sustainably sourced fish and reducing our reliance on eggs, meat and dairy.”
Last year, Camden council in London announced that it would be issuing a report calling for schools, care homes and canteens on council premises to cut meat from menus and encourage staff to become vegetarian.
In the end the initiative was shot down by Conservative councillors who insisted that people should not be deprived of choice.
In Germany the federal environment agency in January called on Germans to follow a more Mediterranean diet by reserving meat only for special occasions.
These initiatives may sound novel, but in fact they reinstate what was for centuries an obligatory practice across Europe. The fasting laws of the Catholic church stipulated that on Fridays, fast days, and Lent, no one could eat meat or drink wine; on some days, dairy products and fish were also banned. Even after the Reformation Elizabeth I of England upheld the Lenten fast, insisting that while there was no religious basis for fasting, there were sound utilitarian motives: to protect the country’s livestock from over-exploitation and to promote the fishing industry (which had the ancillary benefit of increasing the number of ships available for the navy).
RSS