Yet, while this is fantastic on an individual level, when you look at the scale of meat production – and the colossal greenhouse gas emissions associated with its production – it’s clear that convincing people to go vegan just isn’t going to tackle this problem quickly enough. I’m obsessed with finding ways for people to carry on eating meat because, realistically, we’re going to need more than one solution to the global conundrum of meat production.
At the moment, that system is totally broken. Farming 70 billion animals each year so we can kill and eat them is absolutely awful. It’s a tragedy from an animal welfare perspective, and it’s terrible for the environment too. Just over a quarter of all greenhouse gas emissions come from food production. Once you break down where those emissions come from it’s quite clear just how outsized the impact of meat is. Livestock and fisheries contribute 31 per cent of all greenhouse gas emissions from food production, with the land used to farm livestock and grow crops to feed them accounting for another 22 per cent. In other words, more than half of all the emissions from food are linked to meat production. Transport, which is often (mis)spoken about as a major source of carbon emissions in food, accounts for just six per cent of all emissions.
Despite all this, I don’t think that asking people to give up meat is a climate solution at a global level. For one thing, meat consumption will continue to climb in the coming decades. According to the OECD, global meat consumption in 2029 will be 12 per cent higher than it is now. Look further ahead into the future and by 2050 the Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations projects that the world will be producing more than 450 million tonnes of meat annually. Today’s production stands at around 350 million.