Carnivorous diets don’t hurt anyone? What a load of pollocks!

Is the carbon cost of meat eating worth paying?

It is a generally accepted fact that in order to dramatically reduce your carbon footprint, and to live in a more sustainable manner, you should choose public transport over driving and in no circumstances step onto an aeroplane. What isn’t as publicised though, is that whilst the entire world transport system produces 13.5% of global greenhouse gas emissions, livestock and fishing industries are responsible for a larger 18%.

Looking beyond this simple measurement, our huge consumption of meat and fish is damaging to the environment in all kinds of ways. If you can remember back to those food chains at GCSE biology, it is hugely inefficient for us to get our energy from meat. For every 17kgs of vegetable protein eaten by animals, they produce 1kg of meat. In a world plagued by food shortages this is grossly unfair. While 40 million tonnes of food would eliminate the most extreme cases of world hunger, 540 million tonnes are fed to animals in Western countries every year. The world's cattle alone consume the same amount of calories as it takes to nourish 8.7 billion people - more than the entire human population on Earth. The countries which produce the bulk of these fodder crops are the most impoverished – those with crushing burdens of landlessness, food insecurity and starvation-related diseases.

Breeding animals for food contributes to environmental degradation, including deforestation, water shortages and desertification. Since 1950, half of all the world's rain forests have been destroyed to make way for grazing animals. 70% of cleared Amazon rainforest is used for grazing cattle while most of the remaining 30% is used for soya production for animal feed. It takes 2,500 gallons of water to produce a pound of meat, but only 25 gallons to produce a pound of wheat. A totally vegetarian diet requires 300 gallons of water per day, whilst a meat-eating diet requires more than 4,000 gallons of water per day. This water use can have drastic effects - arid and semi-arid lands girdle the world and make up one-third of the total land surface. Some 72% are degraded, primarily by grazing animals.

The fishing industry just isn’t sustainable. 82% of species are being fished beyond safe biological limits. Farmed fish is not any better because for every tonne of farmed fish produced, four tonnes of wild-caught fish are killed to provide their food. Taking one species out will destry entire marine eco-systems, having a profound impact on the health of our oceans.

So this all sounds pretty scary, but it isn’t as if we can’t do anything. It always surprises me how little attention these facts are given in the media compared to, say, changing lightbulbs and cycling more. Perhaps it is because trying to persuade people to eat less meat and fish is regarded as a more unpopular move.

Personally, I think it is the easiest way you can live more sustainably. Being a bit of a champagne environmentalist myself, I struggle with a lot of my own advice. To be fair, some of this can’t be avoided. Well, perhaps all the new clothes, and maybe I shouldn’t have flown to Vienna for a weekend, but I do live in an area of the country where you really need to drive if you want there to be more to your life than watching sheep. However, apart from a couple of salmon incidents, I’ve been a vegetarian for almost two years now and it’s really not that difficult.

The sheer number of alternatives means that nobody living in Britain needs to eat meat or fish, whatever your mother tries to tell you about iron levels. If you don’t think you can manage to cut it out completely, try to cut down by having meat just once or twice a week. A meal of meat or fish was once seen as a luxury but now is seen as a right, and as you can see above, this has not come without a cost. Celebrate the end of National Vegetarian Week by pledging to eat less meat: it's good for your wallet, the planet and your health.

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