With meat substitute sales growing by 451% in the European market in the four years to February 2018, there’s no doubt our diets are becoming increasingly meatless. But is this a positive thing? Would a meat-free society solve our climate issues, or would it toss the food industry into economic uncertainty? Here, we take a look at both sides of the argument…
“Eating meat will become like smoking” Anna Jennings, 28, London
I like to think of myself as a bit of a clairvoyant (I have a 90% success rate of accurately predicting the gender of friends’ pregnancies) and as a result, I’m pretty confident in my predictions for the future, including one about the future of meat consumption.
I predict that by the time my generation (90s kids) have retired, eating red meat will be viewed in the same way as smoking is today. In restaurants, people will ask to be seated away from the meat eaters. There will be health warnings on supermarket joints, “red meat causes cancer”, “red meat causes high blood pressure” and meat products have huge taxes placed on them to compensate for the environmental damage they have caused. We’ll say to our grandchildren, “when I was young, everyone used to eat meat. We were told it was good for us!” and they’ll retort with “No way, that’s so crazy!”
To some extent, attitudes are already changing and there’s already an overwhelming number of peer-reviewed studies suggesting that red meat has a negative effect on health, with links to bowel cancer, high blood pressure and heart disease. The NHS recommends cutting down on the amount of red meat in our diets to below 70grams per day (equivalent to three, thinly cut slices of ham).
Then there’s the evidence pointing to environmental distress. According to the most comprehensive analysis of the damage farming does to the planet, published in the journal Science, researchers found that the biggest thing we can do to reduce our environmental impact on the planet is to stop eating meat. It also found that without meat and dairy consumption, farmland could be reduced by 75% and still feed the world, which is important considering that loss of wild land to agriculture is the leading cause of mass extinction of wildlife.
On the flip side, there are still claims that meat is good for us. The NHS advises that lean meat is a good source of protein, and, of course, protein is important for optimum function of every cell in the body. But, then again, protein can also be obtained from non-animal sources, with pulses, nuts, beans and vegetables covering all of the essential amino acids necessary for a healthy diet. Plus, think about what society used to say about smoking – ‘smoking is good for health’, ‘smoking is recommended by doctors’, ‘smoking is a great social activity’ – and look how that turned out.
Of course, everyone is entitled to their own opinion, and I also understand the economic concerns of the people who rely on the meat industry. But the ever increasing body of volume of evidence pointing that meat is bad for health and detrimental to the planet forms a trajectory that points to a future that doesn’t condone meat eating.
“Farming isn’t the problem” Lauren Smith, farmer, 29, East Anglia
I come from a family of farmers, who have been rearing cattle for meat consumption for generations. The changing attitudes towards eating meat and the increased number of people adopting a vegan diet worries me. It’s affecting our livelihood, with financial pressures becoming too much to bear. When you add this to the long hours and isolation that comes with the profession, the future looks incredibly bleak.
What the public doesn’t understand, and what isn’t communicated by the media, is that not all farming is the same. There’s intensive farming, which involves a high output per cubic unit of agricultural land, and there’s extensive farming, which involves far lower outputs. Intensive farming is horrific, both in terms of animal welfare and environmental damage. The meat produced as a result of intensive farming is low quality and often full of hormones (and in some countries, even chemicals like chlorine). However, meat produced from extensive farming is high quality and a great source of protein, has a much lower environmental impact and also helps to cultivate and keep land.
Farming isn’t the issue here. The problem is a global food industry that is only interested in profit, rather than animal and human welfare. We need to radically review the way that we rear meat, banning intensive farming and the production of cheap, low quality meat.
