Transcript for Ep5. Less meat - win-win-win or elitist?
Matthew Kessler
What if we had a more compassionate approach to farming animals, where we raised and ate fewer animals - and so meat cost more? Would this be a win-win-win for animals, people and the planet or would it be an unrealistic and elitist vision?
Per Fredriksson
Kom då, korna korna korna korna, kom då korna…
Matthew
Welcome to the Less Meat future of the Meat the Four Futures podcast, presented by TABLE. I’m Matthew Kessler, your guide for the series.
Here we speak with farmers, researchers and campaigners who aren’t keeping animals only for meat and milk, but also for managing landscapes, recycling food waste, and being a key part of sustainable cropping systems.
Hannah van Zanten
How many animals can we actually keep respecting the planetary boundaries?
Per Fredriksson
I can’t see how I can produce cereals in a good way if I don’t have that cattle in the crop rotation.
Matthew
If you’re just joining us - this podcast explores the visions, motivations and evidence supporting four different futures for meat and livestock.
We’ve already heard from the efficient meat future that claims intensive animal agriculture is the only way to produce enough protein to feed a growing global population.
Jayson Lusk
We know people like to eat meat. How can we give them what they want while reducing the impacts that that consumption has on the environment and one way to do that is to try to increase efficiency.
Matthew
And we’ve heard from the alternative meat camp who are trying to replicate the taste and texture of meat in labs and kitchens to reduce our dependence on industrial livestock production.
Isha Datar
An obvious next step for humanity and a real win win win when you think not just about reducing environmental impacts, but also animals need not suffer anymore for food.
Matthew
Now we’ll hear from the group who are rethinking the role of livestock in our food systems.
They don't see large-scale intensive animal production as sustainable, but still see animals as playing an important role on our farms, in our landscapes and in our diets.
Tristram Stuart
Farming currently is the single biggest cause of deforestation. It is the main reason why we are in the middle of the mass extinction event.
Emma Kritzberg
We know we cannot eat this much meat. We can eat better meat, but regardless we need to eat less meat.
Matthew
As always, we hope you listen to all the episodes in the series to hear the whole story.
Part 1 - Meat as a happy byproduct
Matthew
Humans and grazing animals have a long history. Our diets and landscapes have co-evolved together for tens or hundreds of thousands of years. Can we learn something from this about how to work with grazing animals to maintain and manage some familiar landscapes?
We visit a farm in Sussex, in the South of England, that is championing the role that livestock play in supporting diverse plant life, feeding the soil that feeds us, and providing a home for a variety of insects, birds and small mammals.
Tristram Stuart
From where I'm sitting, I can look out onto an open landscape of the Ashdown forest.
Matthew
Tristram Stuart is the founder of a charity called Feedback and the company Toast Ale. He raises his belted Galloway cattle on a small scale farm in Sussex, right in the middle of Ashdown forest.
Tristram
Which is one of the very very valuable sites of lowland heathland, which is a more valuable habitat than tropical rainforest. And the UK has a significant proportion of the lowland heathland left in the world; and the Ashdown forest a significant proportion of that.
Matthew
It’s a valuable habitat for rare birds and butterflies, dragonflies, and other insects. They thrive in this habitat and nowhere else.
Tristram
It's a small pre-war farm. It was my great aunts, she ran a dairy here and other mixed farming. For the last 15 years, we've used the fields on this farm as permanent pasture to support the regeneration of traditional grazing practices that gave existence to the lowland heathland of the Ashdown forest.
Matthew
The trees that once covered this landscape were cleared approximately 3000 years ago, and since then,
Tristram
People used this landscape to graze animals that roamed wild. The landscape didn't become forest, it was open heathland with grasses and heather and gorse. You can see for miles around indeed, I can see all the way to the South Downs, which is the south coast of England, and all the way to the North downs, which is London.
Matthew
But those grazing practices were lost after the second world war. For the past 15 years, Tristram Stuart has been working to continue the family tradition of cattle farming. He aims to bring back those livestock not in order to produce as much beef as possible, but instead to graze, maintain and conserve the landscape.
Tristram
And so the job of these cows, first and foremost, is to graze the heathland in order to conserve it. The beef that will result, eventually, because it takes two or three years for a calf to grow to full beef weight, will be a happy byproduct of that conservation system. I cut one field of hay, and that helps to feed them over the winter when forage is really really scarce. And other than that, they're pretty much zero inputs into this farming system, they just graze naturally, as if they were a wild herd of cows.
Matthew
This may sound like an old farming system, but Tristram Stuart doesn’t shy away from new technology. He has installed no fence collars that go around the neck of the cows, and are connected to satellites. Without putting up any posts or wire, he is able to draw a boundary on his phone. As the cows approach that boundary, the collar starts to play music. Beyond that, they will encounter an electric fence that's generated by the collar, which will give them a jolt, but they learn quickly.
Tristram
And what no fence has done is essentially allow us to use this ancient method of farming letting the livestock free in the landscape, but brought it into the 21st century, so that now I can draw a boundary across a fast road to prevent my cows roaming on to them and causing a traffic accident. I can use my no fence boundary to protect a particular orchid or protect a river from soil erosion or pollution. It's really a wonderful 21st century piece of technology that allows an ancient, indeed, I would argue an evolutionary relationship between us, the animals were farming, and the landscape that they are naturally part of.
Matthew
But a trade off in this low to no input system is, of course, much less beef.
The goal for Tristram Stuart is to conserve a particular landscape with grazing animals, and as he says, meat becomes a happy byproduct of the system.
Tristram wants us to reimagine the role of farming in the future.
Tristram
Farming currently is the single biggest cause of deforestation, the biggest cause of soil erosion, by far the biggest user of freshwater. It is the main reason why we are in the middle of the mass extinction event that we eat our way into on a daily basis. But equally I think that the food and farming system is the most effective, cost efficient and readily available system to use to undo all of those problems.
We can use food and farming to sequester carbon in soils by using compost and biochar and manures and all of the things that we know about can put carbon back into the soil thus increasing fertility whilst sucking carbon out of the atmosphere and putting it into the ground. We can use food and farming to replenish aquifers rather than depleting them to create habitats rather than destroying them.
My cows are bringing in nutrition from a part of the landscape that I cannot otherwise make part of my food system, they're an additional ecological benefit as well as source of nutrition.
If we farm the landscape in that way that evolved through nature, we can supply ourselves, albeit with a much smaller quantity of meat, dairy, eggs, and those livestock products. We can do that in a way that is in harmony and beneficial to the natural environment. That does mean from the perspective of the consumer, eating a lot less meat and dairy and only eating that which has been farmed in an ecological way.
Matthew
Tristram Stuart, farmer, author, entrepreneur, and campaigner.
So that’s one vision of this future - using grazing animals to protect nature, with meat taking a backseat as a by-product rather than being the primary objective.
Another vision of this future highlights livestock’s ability to recycle nutrients, which makes them integral to sustainable cropping systems.
Consider this: when you cultivate crops like wheat, pulses, and oil seeds each year, they deplete similar nutrients from the soil. But if you incorporate grass and clover, and graze animals there in the years in between growing these crops, you get several ecological benefits. You can build the soil and you can reduce your reliance on synthetic pesticides and fertilizers.
Part 2: A cow in my next life
Matthew
My colleague at Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences and Meat the four futures producer Ylva Carlqvist Warnborg joins free range cattle farmer Per Fredriksson in southern Sweden on a sunny winter’s day, when he’s moving his herd of about 30 cattle.
Per Fredriksson
Kom då, korna korna korna korna, kom då korna…
Ylva Carlqvist Warnborg
It's time to move into a new field with new food. And we as well as the cattle are making our way through deep snow. And regardless of the weather, the Hereford cattle herd belonging to farmer Per Fredriksson always spend their time outdoors. They are free range cattle, and their owner believes in the concept, let's eat less but better meat. Animal welfare is key to his way of farming.
Per
I want to be a cow on this farm in my next life. If that happens, I don't think it will. But still, I have to think that it should be such a good life as I could be able to have it as my life. Here they are, like totally free to go pretty much wherever they want. They could eat whenever they want. They have a lot of friends, you have your 30 friends with you. And if there is someone in the group you don't like as much, well hang with the best ones you like.
Ylva
They’re personalities.
Per
Yes. They definitely are.
Ylva
Per is a third generation farmer. He actually grew up on this very farm. But while his grandfather and parents were dairy farmers, he chose to switch to meat production.
Per
Number 28. That's a fairly old cow. She must be like at least eight years old.
Ylva
Does she have a name? Or is she “28”?
Per
No, she will just be number 28. But she's still good looking.
Ylva
Standing here looking at them. These are your colleagues so to speak, you work with them every day? What's your sort of connection to the animals would you say?
Per
Well, I kind of like them, because they are a very important part of my crop rotation. They are an important part of how I see myself as a farmer, and how I see that I could manage the land, both in 2022 and even in the future. I think they are a very important part of how we could solve both food for our human beings and they also produce a lot of space for other animals or fungus or worms or birds. So they are like an important part of all the nature.
Ylva
The crop rotation on the farm means that half on the farmland is always used for grazing; to feed the cattle, to store carbon, to fix nitrogen and to make room for biodiversity. After three years of supplying feed for the cattle, those fields are then sown with oats or some variety of wheat.
Now as we stand here in the field, it's a beautiful winter's day, but yesterday the wind was howling, it was really a snowstorm. Do people ever question the way you keep the animals outdoors all the time and all that?
Per
When you have cows like this, always keep in mind that I will be the only one that is freezing.
Ylva
Right. So they find shelter within sort of the group and with trees and so on.
Per
Yes, and then they also have a food melting system. So they produce their own heat from the inside out. So that way they will have a fairly good time and a lot of fresh air which is very important for animals.
Ylva
Per calls himself an active citizen of the society and of the world. And although he lives on the farm where he grew up, he has traveled the world and has worked on farms in Canada, Congo Brazzaville, and Russia, bringing home new ideas and new ways of thinking and working. We leave the field in his blue tractor and make our way to the farm with its warm kitchen, where the cat is waiting.
Per
Here's Signe and she's in charge here.
Ylva
Looking through the windows out on his fields, this is the kitchen where Per often enjoys the meat from his own farm, from animals that he knows for sure, had a good life. But meat is not on the table every day.
Per
Why have we chosen meat to be such an important thing? It's like the same with, who has the nearest car standing outside the house? I think we have to see meat as a healthy good thing. But it's not necessarily the most important to show how happy or successful you are.
Ylva
Meat from animals produced this way may be more expensive than meat produced in a different way. And that could lead to not so many people being able to buy it because it's too expensive. Is that okay?
Per
Well, not every people could buy a Rolls Royce. I still have to produce the meat that I think is very good. And, of course, I hope as many people as possible could buy it. But my meat or expensive cars, there will not be for everyone. And there is actually people that probably never going to eat meat in their whole life. And they may be happy with it. So it's not a human right to eat meat.
Ylva
Do you find there is any legitimate critique of how you raise your cattle and produce your meat?
Per
I could see that some people could see that well, ‘you’re using too much land’. But well, as long it's okay to build big stores on productive agricultural land, or that we can allow that the desert is growing so much, and we don't really do anything about it. I can't see how if I use a few more acres than the average, that could not be the problem for the planet. These are the other problems we have to deal with.
Ylva
The scale and intensity of meat production aren't in themselves the big issues for Per Fredriksson. But animal welfare is. So if we can't produce sufficient meat, giving the animals a good life first, we have to rethink what sufficient means.
Per
I could not see any reasons at all why we shouldn't treat animals good. That's totally against how I see how we should handle both humans and animals. My old grandma always said, if you're not nice to animals, you probably have a problem being nice to the people around you too. So that was her way of saying it. And you're never feeling better than your sickest cow. So that's why it's important to keep your animals in good shape.
Per
Kom då, korna korna korna korna, kom då korna…
Matthew
That was producer Ylva Carlqvist Warnborg and livestock farmer Per Fredriksson.
Both Tristram Stuart and Per Fredriksson present a different vision from what we heard in the efficient meat episode, where productivity and keeping the animals in good health are the primary goals. In this future, livestock are seen to have many benefits. They are a good source of nutrition, they’re nutrient recyclers, and they help manage the landscape.
But there are some climate consequences of this approach that are worth pointing out. For example, animals not raised in these highly efficient systems would be emitting more greenhouse gasses for each kilo or tonne of meat or milk produced. And giving animals more space to grow and roam would also require more land. In episode 1 we talked about how food production uses half of habitable land, and animal agriculture uses over 75% of that. So increasing the land footprint of animal agriculture would put even more pressure on our already limited land resources - which could lead to further deforestation, habitat destruction, and loss of biodiversity.
This is why raising fewer animals and eating fewer animal products overall is absolutely crucial to this scenario.
We’ll talk more about this and other consequences – like meat becoming more expensive – later in the episode.
Part 3: Less, but better?
Matthew
We almost called this episode “less but better” meat. But the whole premise of this podcast is that each of these futures is presenting what its advocates believe to be a ‘better’ vision of the future!
Kajsa Resare Sahlin is a PhD candidate at Stockholm Resilience Centre, whose research focuses on the concept of Less but better meat. Less is easy to understand, but what does “better“ mean?
Kajsa Resare Sahlin
It means different things to different people, and also different actors in the food system. We recently conducted a systematic review of all the scientific literature where we actually reviewed how this concept is being used. And we found that there is some kind of coherency at least, that better means improved animal welfare, that it should be more healthy, and also more environmentally sustainable. But then, when we start to unpack this, what does it actually mean? That it's better for animal welfare, or more environmentally sustainable? There is quite a big lack of clarity.
Matthew
What do you picture when you hear more environmentally sustainable meat? Is it meat that’s better for the climate, for biodiversity? Is it raising animals as efficiently and productively as possible, or is it grazing animals on pastures?
And what’s better animal welfare? Is it like what we heard in Per Frederiksson and Tristram Stuart’s farms, where the animals spend their time outdoors in natural settings with lots of open space to roam. Or is having more protection from extreme weather conditions and predators?
Kajsa
I kind of like to think of less but better as a mindset or almost as a way of rebuilding a kind of relationship to food in high income and western settings where we have very rapidly moved from eating meat more as a kind of expensive luxury product, you would have kind of the Sunday roast and the special meat dishes for holidays. So we've moved very quickly from that into having meat really as a staple food that a lot of people eat every day, and like three times a day.
Matthew
So, one way to understand ‘less but better’ is by thinking back to how meat was eaten one or two generations ago, when most people could only afford to eat meat a few times a week, a few times a month, or only on special occasions.
There are a lot of different factors that make meat better to different people. Just as beauty is in the eye of the beholder, ‘better’ is in the mind of the eater.
Kajsa
Consumers actually determine quality based on a range of different cues.
Matthew
So what’s seen as better is often connected to peoples’ values. If you buy meat from your local butcher or farmers’ market, does that make it better quality? Or maybe it’s the occasion where you’re eating it - do you remember meals more fondly in a parking lot outside of a drive-thru or at home with your family and friends?
Kajsa
We can also see that the origin of the meat matters quite a lot to consumers. And we actually tend to favor domestically produced meat. So me being from Sweden, I would feel that Swedish meat is better quality, just because it's familiar, and it's from my home country.
Matthew
Since different countries have different animal welfare standards and regulations, preferring meat from your own country doesn't necessarily mean choosing animals living in better conditions or having lower environmental impacts.
But people do seem to have a taste for meat from home.
Kajsa
Consumers in the EU have a stronger preference for grass based meat because production here is more grass based. And for example, compared to consumers in the US. Some research suggests that they prefer the flavor of more grain-fed meat because that's what you're used to eating.
Matthew
So less, but better - or less and better, can mean different things. Kajsa Resare Sahlin points out the concept could be a useful middle ground against the extremes in the meat debate.
Kajsa
One of the real pros of this concept is that it tries to take this more kind of pragmatic approach between ‘keep eating meat the way we do today’ and ‘stop completely’. Because stop completely alienates quite a lot of consumer groups. And this is trying to find a little bit of a middle way.
And it also tries to provide some kind of response to “Okay, so what do you do instead?” And not just stop all kinds of livestock production. Don't eat meat. Don't keep any livestock at all. That's perceived as quite extreme, both from consumers and producers. So the less but better strategy is a little bit more pragmatic. And I think, then it could also be relevant to more people.
Matthew
It’s important here to emphasize that the people who call for less meat aren’t calling for less for everyone.
Kajsa
The concept is not relevant in settings where diets are usually nutritiously inadequate, or where there are people who are even struggling with hunger, and in a lot of those settings, more and better could perhaps be a more relevant way of thinking about this. And it's also in a lot of these contexts, people often don't have a lot of options available to them in terms of what they choose to eat.
Matthew
Kajsa Resare Sahlin is now finishing up her PhD at the Stockholm resilience Centre in Stockholm University.
Matthew
As we’ve heard in the previous episodes - these futures might be offering solutions to different problems. So what problems are the ‘less meat’ future trying to solve?
Hannah Van Zanten
I think one of the main challenges that we are facing is climate change, food insecurity and unhealthy diets. One of the reasons that those challenges are happening is because of the imbalanced use of resources at the moment.
Matthew
Hannah Van Zanten, professor at the Farming Systems Ecology Group at Wageningen University in the Netherlands, wants us to rebalance our food system.
Hannah
We first of all talk about making sure that we produce enough healthy food for a growing population while respecting the boundaries of the planet.
Matthew
What does it mean to stay within planetary boundaries? Essentially, it means to try and produce food in a way that doesn’t put too much pressure on the climate and on earth’s limited resources. So what does that actually look like?
Hannah
If we look at high income countries for example, we see that we actually produce or have a high food intake. We also waste a lot of those products at the end.
Matthew
One of the imbalances Hannah van Zanten refers to is we are consuming too much food in some regions and not enough in others.
Estimates suggest over 800 million people are facing food insecurity across the world. And while there are widespread issues with hunger and undernutrition, you can also find evidence of the opposite: overconsumption and overnutrition.
This is where you eat more calories than are needed, which can contribute to a number of health issues. Producing too much food can also be a driver of food waste. Hannah Van Zanten’s research explores if we can take better advantage of different types of waste produced from the food system.
Hannah
If we talk about a circular food system, if you think about reducing this environmental impact, we can do this by minimizing the losses. But if we produce those losses, then we should also use them in the most efficient way.
Matthew
So what’s a more efficient way to use these losses? One idea is to feed them to animals or to use them as an agricultural fertilizer. So what was previously destined to become waste, can either be recycled or upcycled through the animals.
She also says it could be more efficient for us to eat the corn and the soy that are currently fed to livestock. So then what would the animals eat?
Hannah
So if we are only feeding the animals with products that we cannot consume or do not want to consume ourselves - so with the losses of the food system - we avoid this feed-food competition and therefore we contribute to food security, while at the same time reducing the environmental impact.
Matthew
Hannah van Zanten is describing this concept called Livestock on leftovers, that asks, what if we only ate meat that was produced on leftovers. So livestock would eat what humans couldn’t eat themselves - like grass and forages on pastures, food waste, the residues from crops, and other byproducts from industrial food production and processing.
Hannah and her team input all these possible feeds from waste streams for different livestock and modeled what animal production was possible in different regions of the world.
Hannah
If you think about the role of livestock in high income countries, I definitely see that this means a reduction in livestock numbers, and that we should also make sure that we redistribute livestock.
Matthew
So in this future – how we farm and what we eat really depends on what the land and nearby resources can support. This means that we might not only be eating less meat, but also different types of animals.
This livestock on leftovers approach favors animals who are better recyclers. So ruminants, multiple stomached animals, like cattle, sheep and goats - who can turn grass and other fiber-rich materials into nutritious meat and milk would be preferred here. And so would pigs to some extent, since they’re pretty happy to eat anything you give them. On the other hand, chickens are picky eaters - and most of what they eat, we can eat ourselves. This is what Hannah means by avoiding feed-food competition.
So in this future you could be farming pigs in urban areas and feeding them all the food waste produced by cities. And ruminants could be grazing on pastures and grasslands in rural areas, that we can’t grow crops on.
To respect planetary boundaries and build a food secure future for all, Hannah Van Zanten says we need to take different approaches across the world when thinking about the production and consumption of meat.
Hannah
At the end, in high income countries, it means a reduction in livestock numbers. While in low income countries, it might mean an increase in livestock numbers. So I think it is really important to not give one picture.
Matthew
Hannah Van Zanten, researcher at Wageningen University.
And speaking of not giving one picture - it’s important to say that overproduction doesn’t necessarily lead to food security. If you look at the United States and Brazil, two of the world’s agricultural powerhouses, you’ll find tens of millions of citizens in each country experiencing food insecurity. While food production is part of the answer to achieving zero hunger, another key aspect is distribution. How do we ensure that everyone, and not just the wealthy, have access to healthy and nutritious food? And that cheap calories without much nutrition are not the only option? We’ll come back to this later.
Next we speak to The Sustainable Food Trust to hear their vision, motivation and supporting evidence for why the future of livestock and the food system should be transformed.
Matthew
The Sustainable Food Trust is a campaigning organization in the United Kingdom founded over a decade ago to offer an alternative to industrial animal agriculture.
Richard Young, can you introduce yourself?
Richard Young
I’m Policy Director of the Sustainable Food Trust. I'm also an organic farmer. I went organic in 1974 on a steep sloping farm on the Cotswolds, where most of the land is only suitable for grazing.
Matthew
Richard Young is concerned with the animal welfare issues associated with the increasing intensification of livestock. But for The Sustainable Food Trust, it’s not only about improving animal welfare in confined indoor systems.
Richard
The animal should have an opportunity to fulfill their natural behavior instincts. And the idea that animals can be kept in genuine health if they're locked away in sheds without any natural daylight, simply fed synthetic vitamin D as a substitute for daylight, is well, perhaps, difficult to prove in scientific terms at the moment. It’s something which we intuitively feel that if we're eating animals that are produced in those unnatural conditions, that they'll have a long term negative effect on the psychology, the health of the human population.
Matthew
From Richard Young’s farm where he raises sheep and dairy cows, he observes how different animals can build strong relationships with each other and he works to nurture that.
Richard
To see the relationships between cows and calves and ewes and lambs that are really bonding, strong relationships. And to not to take the young ones away from their mothers, for example, until they're naturally weaned. So they're happy about that, they've got their next baby coming along. So you get quite extended family groups building up over the generations. And we have a few free range hens just for our own eggs. And they get shut away at night for the fox to be on the safe side. And if we're late, letting them out in the morning, they're really angry. They've already worked out what they're going to do with the day. One goes dashing off in one direction to lay an egg where she's got a hiding place. Another one goes off to scratch some soil and look for worms. I know that they actually know, they're actually waiting there to come out. And my heart bleeds for those hens that are shut away and are never going to have a chance to experience that sort of thing. That's the sort of difference I'd sort of make between pure welfare and contentment.
Matthew
The Sustainable Food Trust is not only concerned about the well-being of farmed animals, but also the high rates of biodiversity loss caused by the modern industrial food system.
We see species declining globally with the destruction of tropical rainforests for soy and palm plantations, and also locally in the United Kingdom.
Richard
Hedgerow removal, coppice removal, ditches drained, and over cutting of habitat where predatory insects and predatory beetles and things like that reside. But then there's also the much more insidious aspect of the loss of, for example, insects, which some studies say that we've got an overall loss of 60% of insects over recent decades.
Matthew
Some nature conservation organizations advocate for reversing biodiversity loss by turning agricultural land into forests. But Richard Young sees this another way.
Richard
They aren’t really interested in ensuring that the land that's farmed is farmed in what we would say, as a genuinely sustainable way. Their primary interest is just to take more land out of agriculture and give it over to conservation. We recognize the importance of having some breeding areas for wildlife. But actually, they don't need to be that huge. If you think about birds, if they've got a small area of woodland or a small area of grass that is fenced off, a lot of ground nesting birds and others can actually do their breeding in those areas. What for us is most important is that where they're going to be foraging for food, there will be for insect eating birds, that will be insects that haven't been got rid of by neonicotinoids, or glyphosate. That there will be grassland with some weeds and seeds. So that seed eating birds have got food, throughout the winter, and so on.
Matthew
It’s worth saying that while there are biodiversity tradeoffs in every landscape, the massive conversion of land and sea into food production is one of the major drivers of global biodiversity loss, together with climate change, pollution and the spread of invasive species.
Another factor here is that while some plants and animals can exist in a wide range of ecosystems, others thrive in specific conditions. What’s important is having a sufficiently large area of undisturbed or carefully managed natural habitats for species that can only thrive in those environments - this could be forests or grassland, depending on the ecosystem. This in combination with open areas such as agricultural fields or managed forests could create an appropriately scaled patchwork of different landscapes. These could offer a range of suitable habitats with breeding areas and food sources for a diverse set of plants and animals.
It's worth noting that people can value different types of biodiversity and different kinds of landscapes very differently. The importance of values when thinking about biodiversity is something we'll return to in a later episode.
The Sustainable Food Trust identifies an overuse of pesticides and herbicides as a main culprit in declining biodiversity. Richard Young is actually sympathetic to the situation that many farmers find themselves in, where they are locked into using synthetic farm inputs to deal with pests and weeds.
Richard
Campaigners will say farmers should use less pesticides. But actually, farmers can't just stop using pesticides unless they've got a farming system that actually deals with the problems that pesticides address in a different way.
Matthew
Essentially, The Sustainable Food Trust calls for increasing diversity on the farm and moving towards more mixed-farming systems that grow both crops and livestock, rather than highly specialized ones that require more inputs each year to maintain a high yield.
The Trust sees ruminant livestock, in rotation with legumes, grass and clover as essential to achieving the goals of a sustainable farming system.
Robert Barbour, senior research officer with the Sustainable Food Trust joins the conversation.
Robert Barbour
I’m currently living in Bristol, but my family run an organic Hill beef and sheep farm in Highland Perthshire. Also producing trees for timber as well.
Matthew
Robert returns to the fact that we’ve already discussed; that grazing livestock are great recyclers.
Robert
You know, one of the other benefits is that grazing livestock in particular, are excellent at converting grass and other inedible feeds and waste streams. Upcycling goes into really nutrient dense food, that when eaten in, you know, sensible quantities, are highly beneficial for human health.
Matthew
So what’s the big vision of The Sustainable Food Trust for the future of food and farming systems?
Robert
Those systems would be kind of mainly pasture based systems that ensure high levels of animal welfare, but also animals able to express their natural behaviors that aren't consuming large quantities of arable feed and imported protein crops, soybean meal being the obvious one.
A kind of obvious consequence of moving towards that sort of approach to livestock production is that there will be quite major changes in levels of production and therefore consumption of animal sourced foods. And that is obviously a very important aspect of this whole debate.
Matthew
The Sustainable Food Trust produced a report in 2022 called Feeding Britain from the Ground Up , which explored what a transition to these pasture based livestock systems would look like and the report also analyzed what are the implications for eating meat in the United Kingdom.
Robert
With livestock production practiced in the kind of ways that we've just outlined already, the consequence of that for the UK production of meat would be a sort of 50% reduction in total meat terms. So a big reduction. And that's as a consequence of feeding much less cereals, and eliminating the use of soybean meal and other imported protein feeds. But the big cause for that reduction in meat production was in the pork and poultry. We modeled both of those, seeing major reductions of about 75% compared with present. Beef and lamb however, in our model, declined by much smaller percentage. They did decline a little bit, but not terribly much. So production remained fairly, fairly steady compared with the present day.
Matthew
This is a good example of what advocates of this Less Meat future call for. They envision much less pork and poultry production, since humans are able to eat the grains and soy that are being fed to pigs and chickens. They also say cattle should not be raised on these feeds either.
Farming ruminants more extensively is one way to take better advantage of the forages grown on a farm, and converting otherwise inedible landscapes into nutrition in the form of meat and milk.
If you’ve been listening from the beginning of the series, this call to favor ruminant production – the largest contributors to global greenhouse gas emissions in the food system – might seem a little confusing.
We’ve heard earlier criticisms that cows, sheep and goats are much less efficient than pigs and chickens, so I asked Richard Young and Robert Barbour for their views on this debate.
Richard
But what people forget is that ruminants are far more efficient at turning grass into protein than monogastric animals. In terms of the actual comparison about carbon footprint. So this is where it gets very, very complex depending on what metric you choose.
Matthew
How we measure the environmental and nutritional dimensions of different foods is the subject of ongoing debates.
A key point that The Sustainable Food Trust brings up is ruminants’ ability to turn grasslands and pastures into meat and milk.
Robert
There's the type of land that you're looking at. So, you know, comparing land footprint you need to take into account whether it's arable land or grazing land. It's really unhelpful making that comparison of those, if there's not a distinction there.
Matthew
Robert says it’s important to look at the potential to produce food for humans from different landscapes.
In terms of feed-conversion, which is the measure of how much input you need to produce a kg of meat, ruminants perform poorly. But if you consider their digestive system, which allows them to efficiently utilize fiber-rich plant material and convert it into meat - they perform much better.
Robert
Because that's ultimately what matters from a feed conversion efficiency point of view. And when you do that, pasture based systems tend to come out much better. They produce more human edible protein than they consume, which is definitely not the case with intensively reared monogastrics.
Matthew
So the findings of studies of how efficient different types of food production are will vary to an extent based on what is being measured.
Is the study factoring in feed-food competition? What is the potential to produce food for humans on different types of land? And if we’re looking at biodiversity, what species do we value the most?
Robert
I think there's a kind of bigger point as well about taking a whole food system perspective towards this question of like, land use efficiency and feed conversion efficiency.
Matthew
Robert refers to research by another guest on this episode; Hannah Van Zanten from Wageningen University.
Robert
Hannah Van Zanten’s work is a good example of that, on the land use side. That showed that when you had an approach to livestock focused on grass and inedible feeds, it required 25% less arable land than an entirely vegan scenario.
We need to be stepping back and looking at the food system as a whole.
Part 6: Are the pastures really greener here?
Matthew
We’ve been painting quite a nice picture here. It’s almost idyllic. Animals grazing on pastures, bonding with each other, living good lives, people eating some meat but not too much, healthy diets, less pressure on the planet. This all sounds great, right?
It’s time to point out there are some who critique this future both on environmental and social justice grounds.
In our last two episodes, we heard a different argument. The alternative ‘meat’ and the efficient meat future both advocated for using as little agricultural land as possible to produce our food - either through intensive animal farming or producing food at scale in labs and bioreactors. One of their motivations is to set aside as much land as possible to rewild lands so different animals can flourish.
The ‘less meat’ future frames food production and improving biodiversity differently. It doesn’t see them in competition with each other.
We’ve heard from the farmers in this episode that they aim to both produce food from their landscapes while maintaining habitats for birds, insects, and other animals.
But if we’re talking about scaling out this vision - one question to ask is: Is there enough land to both produce food less intensively and provide habitat for biodiversity? That completely depends on what we’re eating and how also much food is being wasted. So if wealthy people with western diets switched to eating a lot less meat than they do today and if we wasted significantly less food. It’s possible. But those are big ifs.
This is why it’s important to look at the whole system, and not only focus on food production, but also on consumption and distribution.
Where you fall on this debate of efficient meat, less meat, or none at all, will depend on what landscapes you value, what animals and plants you want to see thrive, and what relationship you think humans should have with animals.
But one thing is clear - if we are producing less meat and using more land to raise animals to live longer and more natural lives, that will result in meat costing more.
You may remember Per Fredriksson say he hopes as many people as possible can buy his meat, but that it is expensive - and it should be.
I posed this question to other guests in this episode, starting with Kasja Resare Sahlin, PhD candidate at Stockholm Resilience Centre. I asked her if the cost of meat should go up so farmers could earn a living in the future?
Kajsa
I think so. Yeah. At least in Sweden, all farmers that I talked to, and that I work with, they struggle so much financially, because revenues that they make, and what they're being paid, hasn't changed very much during the past maybe 20, or even 30 years. But on the other hand, costs are constantly going up. And I think it's a little bit of a shame that we tend to always talk about that “if farmers are to be paid better, it has to be covered by consumers.” And we very rarely talk about the fact that there are a lot of middlemen where it's, for example, taken completely for granted that they should make quite large profits every year. And they really always need to kind of lower their prices and be more efficient, and so on and so forth. And I think we need to talk more about distribution of income and revenue across the whole value chain, and kind of move away a little bit from the reality of that, “it's always consumers who for sure need to cover this.” But yeah, having said that there are for sure, consumer groups in high income settings that could spend a lot more on their food.
Matthew
Many argue that meat at its current price does not reflect its true cost, since governments have long subsidized food production, and those carrying out environmentally damaging forms of farming are not required to pay for the costs.
But increasing the price will make it more difficult for people to afford meat for their family.
This is what I posed to the Sustainable Food Trust:
Robert
Well, it's a difficult one. I mean if we are to move to livestock production that's more sustainable in the round. And if we're to account for at least some of the hidden costs associated with kind of intensive meat production today. Then it’s kind of difficult to see how the cost of meat wouldn't rise. The challenge with that, of course, is the equity angle, and the number of people who are in food poverty now.
Matthew
In some rich countries, people are spending as little as 10% of their salary on food – the United States, Singapore and the United Kingdom have some of the lowest costs of food relative to income. And in some poorer countries, people are spending over 50% of their income on food.
But these averages hide some important range. The Food Foundation, based in the United Kingdom, says that “The poorest fifth of UK households would need to spend 43% of their disposable income on food to meet the cost of the Government-recommended healthy diet. This compares to just 10% for the richest fifth."
Robert says that even with food being cheap, the issue isn’t resolved – food poverty continues to exist.
Robert
So if tackling food poverty was as simple as keeping food cheap, then then there wouldn't be a problem. But there is a problem. So the issues are obviously much, much broader than that. Fundamentally, there probably has to be much greater government action in terms of subsidizing the purchase of healthy and sustainable foods for those in low income groups, but also wider efforts to tackle poverty and the cost of living.
Matthew
Richard Young adds that food prices have recently been increasing across the UK and the world for a variety of reasons, and basically all of them are beyond the control of farmers.
Richard
Matthew
The bottom line is this is a complicated question, because increasing the price of meat, and asking or demanding that people shift their diets to eat less meat, is really politically unpopular.
So making sure healthy and nutritious food is affordable and equitably distributed across the world requires a joint effort between governments, institutions, citizens and farmers. Each would need to play their part.
Part 6: Nudging towards less meat
Matthew
Changing peoples’ eating habits will be one of the biggest challenges to reach this future. Here we speak to a researcher who shares what role institutions can play in shifting towards a less meat future, drawing from concepts like nudging and choice architecture, which we’ll unpack in this next section.
Science journalist and producer Ylva Carlqvist Warnborg talked over lunch with Emma Kritzberg, a professor at Lund University in Sweden, about her idea to change what’s served on the university campus.
So what are you having for lunch?
Emma Kritzberg
I am having an unusual dish for me at least. It’s deep fried focaccia in hollandaise sauce, black lentils, and poached eggs, and a bit of kale. And potatoes.
Ylva
Meatloaf with bacon was not an alternative for you?
Emma
That was not an alternative. I eat meat locally produced and from free roaming animals every now and then, but I try to keep meat at a low and when I go to restaurants I tend to always choose vegetarian.
Ylva
Emma
I think this came from frustration because I work at a biology department. And absolutely not all but much of the research and education we do connects strongly to climate change and how our ecosystems are affected and feedback to the climate system. But I felt there was a very small will to act upon this knowledge. We wanted to do research about it, but not to do much about it.
And then I got the idea that we could sort of change the norm from having meat as the default option when we have conferences or workshops to have vegetarian as the default. So both would be available. But if you made no active choice, you would be served vegetarian food.
Ylva
So that sounds like a school book example of nudging, that is changing the choice architecture while still having a free choice.
Emma
Exactly. And I was actually inspired by that phenomenon. I had read something about nudging. And that's also why I thought it was a good idea to keep both options there.
Ylva
And so did everyone agree? Great idea, let's do that.
Emma
The vast majority did agree. There was discussion about it. But when we voted in the board, everyone but one person was positive. But there were points that were discussed. For example, some people thought that it was sort of giving a very simplified view of food and climate and the connection. For example, if we keep free roaming cattle, this is good for grasslands, biodiversity, and maybe even carbon sequestration in that type of activity. And I agree that that's entirely true, but I think it's also true that we know we cannot eat this much meat, we can eat better meat. But regardless, we need to eat less meat. And I don't think that the complexity of this issue should stop us from making some simple choices.
Ylva
Others may have thought this was just a symbolic gesture that wouldn’t have much impact.
Emma
I mean the idea would be to, to start people talking about it and for this initiative to spread. And that actually happened. So it was our department, at the same time the Psychology Department took the same decision. After that, followed geology, geography, the faculty, sort of the central administration took this decision and also Lund University, the central administration has followed this example. So in that regard, I am pretty proud. It's going to be the small pieces adding up together that makes the big change.
Ylva
You could perhaps argue that university functions, conferences are the type of special occasions when you could actually eat meat because it is a special occasion.
Emma
Yeah. I do see your point and I'm actually not quite sure what to answer to it. But this also has to do with our norm. Why is the extra good thing, why does it have to be meat? I actually - we put forward this suggestion to one of the main research funders in the region, that they work actively to sort of finance research within the climate area and so forth. And they said that no, we will not take on this policy for the simple fact that when we have our fancy dinners, we want the food to be top notch. And I think the food should be top notch. But I think you can achieve that also without meat on the plate.
Ylva
And you say that you think for the academic world, you have a special responsibility to actually walk as you talk. Why?
Emma
Well, for several different reasons. The knowledge that we have about how the climate system works, and why we have a climate crisis, what the big emissions are, it comes from research that's done at universities. And I think, we produce the knowledge and we have a responsibility to act in line with this knowledge. We have a particular credibility, which means also that people may listen more to us than others when it comes to these types of issues.
I also think that the university has a very special advantage, by the fact that we have so many disciplines, we have so much competence from so many different areas, within one umbrella. And I think that all issues that have to do with sustainable development and climate, they need to consider many sectors. And the university is somehow uniquely situated to build this cross-sectoral knowledge and, and to show ways to implement and to be in the front of this change.
Matthew
Emma Kritzberg, biology professor at Lund University.
I want to share a few reflections before closing out. Throughout the episode, we’ve heard people say we need to rethink our relationship with livestock so we can stay within planetary boundaries. We’ve heard calls to raise fewer animals in ways that mimic natural systems, to integrate livestock into raising crops, to make better use of land where we can’t grow crops directly for humans, and to recycle food waste through livestock.
We’ve also heard farmers like Per Frederiksson advocate for us to be more humble about our place in the world.
Per Frederiksson
The planet doesn't need human beings. That's human beings that need the planet. I think we have to understand that.
Matthew
And Richard Young of the Sustainable Food Trust also reflects on his relationship with the land and the animals.
Richard Young
I think in a sense we're very privileged. It's very, very difficult now for anyone to get farmland. I think a lot of people have an instinctive wish to get a bit of land, to have some connection with farm animals.
I think there are ways in which livestock have been really important in my life. I'm farming a farm now which was in our family back in the middle of the Victorian era. And just actually knowing that is hugely important to me. And, you know, thinking about what it was like in the past and feeling a responsibility to look after it for the future, is also very, very important.
Matthew
So I’ve really been thinking about how much do I line up with this future?
As I mentioned, it sounds really appealing… And I’ve worked on numerous farms with people holding these idealistic notions, thinking about how we can at the same time produce good food as we benefit nature and wildlife. You can probably picture the landscapes too. Rolling hills, grazing animals, edges of a forest, hedgerows between fields, the sounds of chirping birds, buzzing bees, fluttering insects.
But I do have genuine concerns about how achievable and practical this vision is. Current trends are showing global increases in meat eating, especially with chicken. Which is the opposite vision of this future.
So for this farming system to work, where crops would be grown on croplands and animals would be raised on grasslands and fed food waste and industrial byproducts - that would require a major shift to eating a lot less animal products. Our diets would need to match the capacity of what the land could provide.
So let’s imagine two hypotheticals. 1) Intensive factory farms are banned, and 2) Our diets don’t really change. So people in rich countries with western diets would continue to consume meat at their current rate and meat consumption would also increase across the world.
What would that result in? Meat would have to be produced in these extensive systems, and need to be scaled to meet that demand, which as I’ve been saying, would require quite a lot of land. Land that could be growing trees or providing habitat for different wildlife - which of course depends on the ecosystem.
So, in short, we could be protecting rural livelihoods, providing useful habitat for some biodiversity, and preserving some landscapes that are deeply meaningful to people’s culture. But we would also need to eat a lot less meat to match this production. As we talked about it would likely increase the cost of meat, which could be necessary for the farmer to sustain his or her livelihood, but is that fair for the consumers to then carry these costs?
For those who believe in this future - I’d love to hear what you see as the best way to make this a fair and just reality to farmers, to eaters, and to the environment? What changes to production, consumption and distribution would you like to see and who is responsible for making those changes?
You can record your thoughts in a quiet room and send them to podcast@tabledebates.org
In our next episode – we’ll speak with another group who sees industrial animal agriculture as the cause of many environmental and social issues - but their solution isn’t to change livestock farming, it’s instead to remove farmed animals from food production entirely and shift to a plant based no meat future.
Gustav Johansson
I can’t really see why should I - if I don’t have to - start eating meat again.
Iain Tollhurst
Because it’s a logical progression from vegetarianism to veganism. Which if you question everything you will automatically become a vegan.
Matthew
A big thanks to you for listening. The best way to support our show is to tell three people you know about us. And you can take two minutes of your time right now to rate and review us on Apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen.
Thank you to all of our guests in this episode. More information about their farms, their research, their campaigns, and other resources can be found on our website - tabledebates.org/meat
This series is funded by FORMAS, initiated by the Future Food platform, and produced by TABLE, a collaboration between the University of Oxford, Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences and Wageningen University. This episode was edited by Matthew Kessler and Ylva Carlqvist Warnborg and wider support from the whole TABLE team. Music by Blue Dot Sessions and Epidemic Sound.
Next up: a plant-based future.
