Viewpoint: What about half the meat?
By Jeremy Williams
“At the risk of seeming unreasonable, may curses rain down on the fair-weather vegan,” began a recent article on meat eating from a certain national newspaper. It went on to lambast ‘fake’ vegans, or ‘fegans’. Sales of meat alternatives are falling, and “we should have known the vegan-newbies would turn out to be a bunch of flakes.”
It’s a perfect example of the all-or-nothing, black-and-white approach that so many take to eating meat. “People like me are lifers,” boasts the author of the article. There can be no such thing as a part-time vegan or a mostly vegan diet. Either you are or you aren’t.
This is a great way to alienate people from making better choices about their diet.
The world’s current meat consumption is unsustainable, a major driver of climate change, deforestation and pollution. It relies on animal misery at an almost unimaginable scale. And yet many people aren’t eating as much meat as they would like. Meat is aspirational and correlated to income – the richer you become, the more meat you are likely to eat.
As this chart shows, it’s also cultural, and people in Japan or the Netherlands eat half as much meat as people in Australia or the US, despite being similarly high-income. And that begs the question – could we make do with half as much meat?
Forget veganism for a moment, and vegetarianism too, useful though those commitments may be for those who want to make them. It’s a whole lot easier to suggest that people eat less meat than none at all.
A recent study estimated the potential effect of halving the consumption of animal products. This would be enough to stop further deforestation, and greenhouse gas emissions from farming would be reduced by almost a third by 2050. That’s not yet sustainable, but it’s a starting point and perhaps one that more people would be able to get behind.
Some campaigns know this already, like Meat Free Monday, Default Veg, or Jonathan Safran Foer’s plan to only eat meat at dinner and not before. If you’ll forgive me for using a word that I dislike even more than ‘fegan’, I’m pretty sure the future is going to be ‘reducetarian’. That’s the term favoured by the Reducetarian Foundation, which has a documentary and campaign called Meat Me Half-Way.
I plan to never use the word ‘reducetarian’ again, but you get the point. One of the big benefits of inviting people to meet halfway is that it is the start of something. The decision to be vegan or not leaves no room for improvement unless you change everything entirely. Inviting people to reduce meat consumption might start with a day a week, but it is unlikely to finish there if people are serious. And ultimately millions of people choosing to eat less meat will have a greater impact than thousands of people eating none at all.
First published in The Earthbound Report.