It seems as though meat is under attack from all sides at the moment . Admittedly we could all cut back a bit as we are not all Olympic athletes needing to consume vast amounts in order to produce that amount of energy.
What I dislike is the Vegan/ Vegetarian attitude that they are saving the planet! The Simon Reeve programme tour around the Mediterranean was a real eye opener. Especially when he visited Southern Spain! 50 sq miles of plastic poly tunnels used for growing vegetables for the European market. The workers, immigrants ! Were treated as slaves and some had died working in the extreme heat! The other thing raised in the programme was the way in which the old plastic sheeting was disposed of! It was just dumped, and ended up finding its way into river courses and finally the sea.
What was also pointed out , was that the farm was right next to a main road clearly visible to EU officials who seem blind as they pass by it!
Yes this is the problem..
A very complex issue gets reduced down to
meat=bad
Veg =good.
It's far more complicated than that.
Basically we need to relocalise,
(that doesn't mean no imports of stuff like tea coffee chocolate and the odd banana)
Grow more of our own food, more carefully.
Some of which can be meat and milk.
But more plant based on the whole.
Stop wasting so much food, and cease trucking it about so far, and over packaging it..
There are no simple, broad brush solutions to this complicated problem.
Producing sufficient, nutritious, appropriate food, for everyone could be done.
We just need different approaches.
We kill them already! We won’t completely stop growing animals today, it will be a gradual thing. As demand falls so will supply.
We already produce more than enough food globally to feed everyone now, and into the future. For various reasons we’re not very good at distributing it, that’s quite a big issue in my opinion.
Yes we've passed the point now where globally there are as many health problems caused by overeating, as there are caused by lack of calories.
It's the wrong food, in the wrong places that's the problem.
Not a global lack of calories.
And right now a lot of those food calories, are produced, and distributed by fossil fuel calories.. This cannot continue.
Tis unsustainable planetarywise
The trouble is that most of the journalism, and research, and talk is done by folks who haven't spent much time working in the food or farming industries.
Or who don't really understand how natural ecological systems (of which we are a part) actually work.
They think they can just charge in, with the next big idea, ignore generations of 'boots on the ground' knowledge, and throw some new tech, whether that's machinery, chemical, or gene editing at it, and that all will be well.
The same mindset, that created the problem.
It takes decades to learn really. good farming and growing (I'm not there yet) and understand how a particular piece of land works.
But it also takes observation, humility, and acceptance that we are not 'top of the tree' as humans.
This is our main problem I think - sheer arrogance, that we can dominate, and endlessly exploit, the very natural systems upon which we depend.
Can we learn to live more lightly, in time?
Remains to be seen.