Transcript for Ep6. Plant-based - planet friendly or unnatural?
Matthew Kessler
Imagine agriculture without animals, diets without animals, a world without livestock, everything plant based… Is this feasible? Is it natural?
Gustav Johansson
I grew up watching a lot of superhero movies. And there's a quote in one very famous quote in the early Spider Man.
Spider-man clip: Remember, with great power comes great responsibility.
Gustav
I'm vegan, first and foremost because I think it's the right choice to do.
Matthew
You might come with a pre-formed view of vegan or those who eat a plants. Perhaps you see vegans as compassionate, ethical… even heroic. Or maybe you think of them as militant, judgemental and annoyingly self righteous. Whatever your immediate reaction, it's worth taking a look at what’s motivating this vegan worldview.
Hakeem
We keep on talking about reducing meat. Meat is not reducing - meat is increasing. The global numbers actually scare me a bit!
Amy
The current system, industrialized animal agriculture, I think, can be called many things but I don't think natural is one of them.
Matthew
Welcome to the plant-based episode of the Meat the Four Futures podcast, presented by TABLE. I’m Matthew Kessler, your guide for this series.
We’ve already heard from the efficient meat, the less meat and the alternative meat futures. This is the fourth and final future before we zoom out and look at the big picture.
I want to point out that you may notice some similarities between the plant-based and alternative-meat future - since they both aim to put an end to, or at least greatly reduce, the numbers of animals raised to be slaughtered for meat.
The alternative-meat advocates are more confident that technology can come in and save the day - swapping out the meat on our plate for a perfect replica.
The promoters of a plant-based future overlap with this vision, but are also more optimistic that people can actually change their diets to ones which center and celebrate plants.
In this episode we unpack the motivations, the evidence and the arguments for a plant-based vegan future. We will visit a restaurant in Stockholm, Sweden, a vegan food tech company in Lagos, Nigeria and an animal free farm outside of Reading in the United Kingdom.
We hope you listen to the rest of the series to hear the whole story.
Part one - Why a plant-based future
Matthew
There are a lot of reasons people offer for not eating meat, from animal ethics to health to climate justice.
Jan Dutkiewicz
We’re really thinking about solutions that are viable at scale. So we're not saying go to the farmers market and eat heirloom radishes and buy regenerative beef and feel good as a high end consumer fixing the food system, we're really thinking about how to make a more sustainable and just food system, from the point of view of animal ethics, public health ethics and environmental ethics.
Matthew
Jan Dutkiewicz, a visiting fellow at the Harvard Law School, gives us an overview of some problems associated with eating animals.
Jan
First we should talk about what I talk about when I talk about industrial animal agriculture. So I'm thinking here a lot with the work of the geographer, Tony Weiss, who talks about the meat-ification of the food system. And what he's referring to is the creation of a value chain that starts with monocrop feed crops. So your maize, your soy, your alfalfa, and so on that are produced at scale. And then those monocrops that are produced at scale are fed to de facto animal monocrops which are produced at scale. These are animals that are raised in concentrated animal feeding operations, or so called factory farms.
Matthew
These factory farms make up almost 99% of livestock production in the United States and approximately 90% of farmed animals across the world are raised in intensive environments - although this global number is more difficult to calculate. It’s worth pointing out that a large percentage of this is due to poultry production.
In the efficient meat episode, we heard from those who advocated for working at these ultra-efficient scales. Jan Dutkiewicz paints a different picture.
Jan
So the primary problem here is that you're raising a tremendous amount of animals, right and feeding a tremendous amount of animals and managing a tremendous amount of animals, which also means managing their manure. And so broadly speaking, you're talking about land use. So you need a lot of land.
Matthew
Meat and dairy production use more than three-quarters of globally farmed land. Two-thirds of that land is in the form of grasslands and pastures for grazing. Arable or crop land comprises the rest. One-third of all arable land is used to grow grains for animal feed.
Jan
These feed crops can’t be fed directly to humans but of course they compete for land with crops that could be fed for humans.
Matthew
So while the crops grown for animal feed are either a lower quality or a different variety, the arable land where they are grown could instead be used to cultivate food directly for humans. We talked about this concept of feed-food competition in previous episodes.
Jan
And then you have all the problems that come with large scale monocropping.
Matthew
It’s worth pointing out that not just feed crops, but also most cereals and legumes are produced in large-scale monocultures - where you’re only growing one crop in a field at a time. But when you’re producing meat, you need a lot more of these crops.
Jan
The problem is the inefficiency of converting all those calories and all that protein into animal meat through the medium of an animal's body. I mean they're biological organisms. They need to eat, they need to develop all kinds of tissue, they need to grow. And in doing so you actually lose a lot of the calories and protein that come from feedstocks. The calorie and protein conversion ratio is extremely low.
Matthew
This varies for each animal. Chicken are the most efficient at turning feed into meat and they’re followed by pigs, which for every kg of pork that’s produced, it’s fed around 3 to 6 kg of feed.
Similar to the alternative meat future, many plant-based advocates imagine converting much of the land that was previously utilized for animal agriculture into wildlands or repurposing it to cultivate crops exclusively for human consumption.
They advocate for this transformation for a few reasons. One, it would lead to a substantial reduction of global land required for agriculture. This could free up land to serve other purposes. One proven way to mitigate the impacts of climate change would be to expand ecosystems that are better at storing carbon. These landscapes could also be providing habitat for biodiversity. This approach of course would have to be specific to the different goals and the different ecosystems.
Another reason people advocate for a plant based future is that you could feed more people. Some studies, which we’ll link to on our webpage, show that we could be feeding billions more people if we only used arable land to grow food for humans and didn’t use it for animal feed or biofuels.
Livestock production also presents some unique environmental challenges.
Jan
Cattle of course emit the very fast warming gas methane when they belch.
Matthew
We spoke about this earlier in the series - methane is one of the largest sources of agriculture’s contributions to climate changing emissions. It’s much more powerful than carbon dioxide in the short term.
And another source of methane is the manure lagoons or pools that have been scaled up to manage the large amounts of animal feces created by some intensive production systems, like in the United States for instance.
Jan
They’re notorious for spilling, either because they're poorly constructed, or because they leach or depending on where they're located, they might, for instance, get hit as happens virtually every year in places like North Carolina with hurricanes, causing them to overflow.
So what I’m trying to say is you've got land use issues, water use and water pollution issues, and just the sheer inefficiency of converting calories and protein into animal mass.
Matthew
Livestock advocates would say you are getting more nutrients from meat than if you just ate the plant itself, and as we explored in the less meat episode - there are ways to raise livestock where you don’t compete with land that could be producing food for humans.
But if you look at the big picture, the higher carbon, the higher water footprint, the extra land, and the large pools of manure causing additional methane emissions - you can see some of livestock’s negative impacts on the environment.
So that’s an environmental argument, what about the ethics of eating animals?
Jan
So again, as with your previous question, there's just so much here to talk about. Because there are so many different ethical arguments around animal consumption and around humans’ relationships to animals. The standard ethical argument and the one that I think I most subscribe to is the one presented by Peter Singer in Animal Liberation, which is the argument that while animals and humans are not morally equal, and don't share the same range of interests, where interests between humans and animals are similar, they should be treated as morally equal. And what that means is both a human and an animal probably have an interest in not being harmed or being killed.
Matthew
The Australian philosopher Peter Singer wrote the book Animal Liberation in 1975 and asked if killing and eating animals is essential for human survival.
Jan
So that's basically where I stand. I think that, for the most part, Most use of animals and especially the use of animals in industrial animal agriculture, specifically, is highly instrumental to suit the profit motive of the producers of animals and to sate the gustatory pleasures of consumers that are not existentially necessary, which is to say most people living in let's say, the global north or increasingly affluent countries do not require animal protein or animal protein remotely at the scale that's produced by industrial animal agriculture and the cost of sating that hunger for profit and that hunger for animal flesh is a tremendous amount of suffering and death on the part of animals that should be avoided.
Matthew
Some, like Peter Singer, say we should care about animal suffering as much as human suffering. There are both softer and stronger positions in this debate. There are some scholars like Tom Regan who argue that animals should have their own sets of rights, and shouldn’t be seen as subservient to humans. This group lobbies for legislative changes to protect the legal rights and freedoms of animals.
Jan
The case for animal rights basically argues that animals have inalienable rights to bodily integrity and freedom from harm. I think that's a compelling argument that really doesn't get enough, enough traction and debates about food, I think, in large part because it aligns with strict veganism. And I think that there are people who are very wary of engaging with strict veganism, or with a strict animal rights perspective, because the strict animal rights perspective challenges all instrumental use of animals and all commodification of animals throughout the value chain.
Matthew
This is a more popular argument with philosophers and ethicists and vegans, but not necessarily with people who are working on the food system day in and day out.
Jan
I think people who work on food issues are extremely reticent to engage with that argument, because it's, I mean, at the risk of putting too fine a point to it, I think it presents a true existential challenge to the nature of the food system in that it suggests that there should be absolutely no animal use whatsoever in the food system and I think people hand wave that away and say, oh, you know, that's that's a political impossibility, it’s a pragmatic impossibility.
Especially as talk around the food system turns to questions of food justice and environmental justice, I think we should be talking much more openly about animal justice and what place animal ethics has in broader considerations of food justice.
Matthew
Even though Jan Dutkiewicz might not fully subscribe to giving legal rights to protect animals - he understands why advocates bring it up. He says that if you instead say, “let’s improve the welfare of animals and give them a more humane life on the farm”, you’ve already accepted the idea that it’s okay to commodify animals for human pleasure.
Jan
And I think starting with a strong animal rights position and working from there, no matter how controversial it is, is probably what these discussions need. You’re dealing with a completely different set of ethical considerations which have to do with animal treatment within commodification and within instrumental relations, which of course, a strong animal rights perspective would reject.
Matthew
Questions around animal ethics can raise broader ethical questions. For example, when conversations turn to meat reduction, some say that eating less meat would negatively impact smallholder farmers and subsistence farmers across the world. Again, Jan counters this idea.
Jan
The biggest threat to all those livelihoods and all those local political economies and political ecologies of subsistence agriculture are things like climate change, urbanization, and the expansion of the industrial livestock model and not things like claims about veganism that are circulating in the Global North.
Matthew
Jan Dutkiewicz, policy fellow at Harvard law, just shared a handful of reasons for why a plant-based future. But, what convinced him in the end?
Jan
Personally, I was swayed above all by an animal ethics argument, but I know lots of people who are vegan-vegetarian, champion healthier diets who are most swayed by environmental arguments. I know people who are swayed by social justice arguments.
But if you're talking to an individual who knows what argument causes someone to reduce their meat consumption, or to go vegan, I think there's absolutely no single argument that works best.
Matthew
We’ll hear more on the ethical, social and environmental motivations for adopting a plant-based diet in the future, but before that - let’s go back in time.
Part two - Is meat natural?
Matthew
One of the main arguments that comes up against the no meat future, is that we've always eaten meat. That we are natural omnivores.
Amy Fitzgerald, a professor in the department of sociology, anthropology, and criminology at the University of Windsor in Ontario, Canada, pushes back on this ‘meat is natural’ narrative. While humans have eaten animals throughout history, the role that meat played in the past is very different than today.
Amy Fitzgerald
I should maybe mention that, I don't come from a radical vegan family or anything like that. I was, I was raised on meat and potatoes. And my partner is meat eater. And so it's not something that I'm detached from. You know, I'm certainly well versed in all of the arguments for why people should consume meat.
Commercial: A plentiful supply of nutritious wholesome food will keep our nation strong. Meat is a favorite with almost everyone, everywhere.
Matthew
This clip is from a film in 1964 called ‘A mark of wholesome meat’, produced by United States Department of Agriculture. Since the beginning of modern advertising, meat has been marketed as nutritious, wholesome and natural. So I asked Amy how widespread is this idea, that meat is natural and necessary?
Amy
It's quite pervasive in a number of areas. So for instance, if you start speaking to someone about faux meats, or you know, plant based meats, often they'll comment about how it's unnatural, right? And then the assumption, on the other hand, is that meat is natural.
Matthew
Amy and her colleague, Nik Taylor, analyzed marketing materials from the meat industry and found that “natural” was one of the top three words used to frame and sell their products.
Amy
People have an affinity for what seems natural, and so the industry has used that as a marketing tool and most of us are socialized in a way that views meat as “normal” and “natural” and so we tend not to question those things.
Matthew
And “natural” itself is very ambiguous. Amy mentioned another word frequently used in marketing meat.
Amy
Well, another common one is the use of happy animals, often like caricatures, cartoons of happy cows in pastures…
Commercial: Great cheese comes from happy cows. Happy cows come from California.
…which also feeds into that naturalness narrative, that this is the way things should be, and heralds to this idyllic past of animals and pastures. And of course a lot of meat production today is very removed from anything that would be along the lines of animals in pastures and especially animals being happy in these types of production systems.
Matthew
So what was humans’ relationship with meat like in the past?
Amy
Sure. Well, in the Paleolithic era, people were consuming animals, but it certainly wasn't as common as it is today. And a lot of it was likely scavenging, not necessarily hunting, but we tend to view it with this romanticized notion and broad strokes of what our ancestors were doing.
Matthew
Amy Fitzgerald and Robert Chiles examined meat’s role in history and found that meat rarely played a dominant role in the diets of different societies. For some, meat made only a small contribution to diets, or was eaten only by certain social groups or only at certain events during the year.
Amy
These populations largely lived off of growing or foraging and gathering plants. Instead of being a regular part of their diet, meat was often a status symbol - of cultural, political or moral importance. It was often responsible for creating more hierarchies and divides in society, especially by class and gender.
And, of course, there was a lot of problems like the negative environmental impacts, social stratification, predate our current system. We tend to disregard that and the place of meat in those problems tends to be downplayed.
Matthew
I’m just curious. Why do you think that is? My wife is a memory geographer. So she researches memory, and the politics of memory. She says that whenever we’re having some public debate about the past, we’re actually talking about something happening in the present. Do you think there is a connection to be made here?
Amy
Yeah, I definitely think there is, and I think it probably has to do with the way that it can serve as a justification and a way to deal with the cognitive dissonance, that some people feel about loving certain animals, and consuming other animals. And it helps us if we can think about it as being natural, then I think it gives us an easy ethical out, right?
If we start to problematize this whole framing of it as “natural”, then we really have to do the hard work of figuring out what our ethical duties are to animals, to the environment and to each other.
Matthew
How has human’s relationship with meat changed - or not changed - over time?
Amy
Well, one common theme that dates back to what we know from the historic record and we still see some of this today is also the gendered nature of the significance of meat and this kind of idealized notion of man, the hunter.
And we see that throughout history, vegetarians were seen as heretics because they weren't consuming animal products, were viewed as unhealthy and weak. And so in times of war, if there's rationing, often it would be meat would be given to the military, instead of the civilians because of the perception that they needed it to be strong, right. And the opposite of that is the assumption that by not consuming meat, individuals are weak. And that particularly resonates when it comes to the performance of masculinity still today.
One who identifies as a man and disavows meat, let's say is a vegan, they're much more likely to have their gender questioned, their masculinity brought into question.
Matthew
So, to sum up; Amy Fitzgerald, professor at the University of Windsor, says that meat has been marketed to consumers as natural, as healthy food to build strong bodies, and to signal power and status.
Amy thinks we should set this marketing in context - our ancestors did eat meat, but in ways so different to today that it doesn't make sense to think of meat-eating as natural and going vegan as unnatural.
Amy adds that what is viewed as important, or what is valued in societies, is malleable, and can change over time. Just think about how much more being a vegetarian is accepted in western societies now than it was 20 years ago. Or 40 years ago. So what might the future hold?
Amy
I think if people had a greater understanding of the history of our diets that they might not view our current system of meat production and consumption as natural. Because it really is quite detached, you know, for most people, but also from our history. The current system, industrialized animal agriculture, I think, can be called many things, but I don't think “natural” is one of them.
Part three - food of troublesome origin
My colleague from Future Food at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, Ylva Carlqvist Warnborg, takes us to the streets of Stockholm to meet the head chef of Chou Chou, Gustav Johansson.
Ylva Carlqvist Warnborg
We leave the traffic noise of central Stockholm behind as we're about to meet vegan blogger and entrepreneur Gustav Johansson.
Gustav Johansson
The experience is amazing, the experience of a really, really good cheeseburger is amazing. It's the product that has troublesome origins and a big climate impact. So why not like just if you can keep the experience, but change the products.
I grew up watching a lot of superhero movies, that kind of things. And there's a quote in a very famous quote in the early Spider man: “With great power comes great responsibility.” I'm vegan, first and foremost, because I think it's the right choice to do.
Ylva
When we meet upstairs over a plant based lunch in a stylish and rather quiet shopping mall. Gustav just recently opened his own all vegan restaurant. The lunch buffet offers a number of hot and cold dishes, and most of them are either meat or fish lookalikes and tastes alikes.
Gustav
We have a beef bourguignon made with soy meat. To that we also have a lasagna with an Italian cashew based mozzarella. And on the cold menu, we have our own Caesar salad made with chickpea Parmesan cheese that we import from Italy, which is amazing. It's really, really good. And it's really like proper Caesar salad, not the like a “healthy version”. It's a proper version.
Ylva
And so it goes on. Imitating meat dishes is a very conscious strategy, since Gustav wants to make the effort to change from meat to vegan as small as possible, to make as many as possible willing to try and like his version of good food.
Gustav
It's so, so easy for me to eat good, tasty, nutritious plant based foods. I can't really see why should I - if I don't have to - start eating meat again?
Ylva
Why should he? It’s an ethical food and lifestyle choice that is made, but when it all started, after being born and raised in a small Swedish town with traditional food consisting of a lot of meat and dairy products – and quite a few hamburgers too - he didn’t really see this vegan lifestyle coming...
Gustav
I would not have guessed for a million years that I would be a professional food blogger, or restaurateur. I started eating plant based the year after I graduated school. I needed to lose weight. And I thought that was a great way to both lose weight but also challenge myself because I was raised on a very meat heavy diet. So I thought if I could eat plant based foods, I can do more or less anything.
Ylva
But when you go on a diet, you think you'd cut out sugar and pastry and carbs…?
Gustav
Yeah, I did as well. I stopped drinking soda and stopped eating candy and started working out. So that was of course a huge part of why I actually lost weight. Because I did a lot of other things. But to me, the whole plant based thing back then was more about the challenge of it. Because I was not plant based, I was eating a lot of meat! But what I didn't expect was this mind shift that I got, where I actually happened to start to think like a vegetarian or a vegan.
Ylva
Can you think of any specific moment when you actually this sort of clicked in, that you had this mind shift? Or did it just come gradually?
Gustav
Well, I actually I remember going through the meat section of the store and feeling disgusted. I had eaten food without meat for several months. So I started reflecting on what is meat, if it isn't food? Well, it's body parts, obviously, because that is what it is. And then couple of ribs isn't like really short ribs. It's a chest sawed into pieces that you're chewing on. And that's a bit weird, really. But it was like I had to take a step away before I could actually think that thought.
If you accept that eating and holding, raising and farming animals is immoral, it kind of says that our whole society is based on an immoral act. And it kind of is, really!
This is really important to understand about the psychology about vegan food and how people react to it. The animal ethical part of the argument is really hard for people to get close to, and to open up for, because it really says that what you're doing now is unethical. And the whole process of them continuing eating meat in this postmodern world is like a process of being in constant cognitive dissonance. You have to kind of ignore it. And most people ignore it quite good. You don't really talk about it, you don't really like vegans who talk about it! And you kind of like disqualify them as nutheads, in order to not have think about it.
Ylva
So of course, Gustav Johansson is aware that some meat eaters are provoked by vegans, and that discussions about meat or vegan food often get very polarized very quickly. But there are very different ways to advocate for a meat free lifestyle.
Gustav
It's much easier actually to talk about the health aspect or the climate aspect, because that doesn't make you a bad guy. We're like part of a society whose fault it is. But with then eating a plant based lunch like today, you can do a small, good deed. And every time you do that, you get a little bit closer to doing more good. But you also get a little bit closer to that space where you can actually start to think of the whole ethical part of meat eating.
Ylva
But where we are now, looking ahead, what needs to happen in the world for vegan to become mainstream?
Gustav
Yeah, first and foremost, we need to stop talking about “vegan” because it's really not about veganism! Veganism is a lifestyle. It's an idea of non-animal exploitation. But we don't need everybody to sign up on veganism, we need everybody to stop eating meat. And that's a whole different thing! People, they don't have to care. They don't have to understand they don't have to sign up on everything. They just have to buy some other products. And that's really more about economics and companies and producers and demand and so forth. And I'm really sure that the availability and accessibility and the price and the quality of plant based products are going to soar in the next couple of decades. And that's just a fact. People aren't going to raise cattle, because it's inefficient. You can see a lot of the old industries they haven't really understood this yet. They are still trying to do it the old way. But give it ten years, they're going to be so left behind!
Ylva
What about all the people who have their livelihoods connected to meat production?
Gustav
They're going to work with something else! Someone still needs to grow something. What a lot of people are afraid of is having to change, because what people love is what they're doing right now. So if I can show you a way that you can have the cake and eat it too, I think that's a great way to find common ground. Because when I talk to a chef, for example, even if they cook meat, I can see what that chef is good at. I can see what that chef comes from, where he or she has their passion. And I can say: let's do that, but with some other products! Celebrate what they're good at, but help them to take the next step. What an opportunity for you, to do this new thing!
Ylva
The vegan lunch I just had tasted really good. Some of the dishes didn't quite taste like meat, but others really did. What we eat define us. Food is part of our identity, our culture and our history. But times are always changing. And now they demand a global mind shift when it comes to eating meat, according to Gustav Johansson.
Gustav
The industrialization of the animal industry is like killing our planet. It's the main driver behind deforestation, animal extinction, behind acidification of the oceans. The defishing of the oceans is the main driver of most of our ecological problems - the animal industry. We can’t keep doing this.
YLva
Biologically, we are omnivores…?
Gustav
Yeah, but biologically we're a tons of things that we're not anymore. Biologically, we were made to run on the savanna and live in caves. We've more or less changed how the world looks in regards to our needs and our wants. Especially now, when more and more people want to eat meat, we need more and more land space and more and more water. And that's why we chop down rainforests in Brazil. That's why we exterminate species all around the world.
But if we have an option to do the more ethical and more sustainable choice, then why don't we?
Matthew
That was Gustav Johansson, vegan chef and blogger n Stockholm Sweden speaking with producer Ylva Carlqvist Warnborg.
But, what works in Sweden, or in other part of the Global North, isn't necessarily a blueprint for the rest of the world. Lots of cultures have different relationships with meat, and not everyone eats cheeseburgers.
Part four - Leapfrogging meat
Hakeem Jimo
Africa is a bit different, you know, so by default, most meals and the way we eat, is actually quite plant based.
Matthew
Hakeem Jimo is the owner of a vegan restaurant and food company in Lagos, Nigeria.
Hakeem
My background, I think it's important to mention, is Nigerian-German. My mother is German. I grew up, was born actually, in northern Germany. My father is Nigerian and I live in West Africa for the past 20 years. So, I can try to explain the diet, but I don't want to be too saying “this is what people eat here”, you know . But of course we observe it very closely, and even in our family, we eat very Nigerian in the house, but it's not what I grew up with.
Matthew
Lagos is a mega city with 25 million people, and the population of Nigeria, 200 million, is expected to double in the next two or three decades, as is the population across Africa; from one to two billion. So there's a big demographic shift, where many people are moving to the cities.
Hakeem
So, Lagos, everybody's in a rush. If you go more to the countryside, people have more time to cook. The food in the cities is different, we know it from elsewhere. People in Stockholm are probably busier than the countryside. They eat more ready to eat food, you know, heat and eat and it’s similar here.
Matthew
Meat consumption is rising in Africa. But the total numbers, especially compared to countries with western diets, is pretty small.
Hakeem
If you ask somebody are you vegan or plant-based, they would probably say no but what they're really eating, is pretty much plant based.
So there's a lot of beans. In the morning, you eat beans, we have this plantains, lots of fruits, obviously. And then the typical meal is we have this starchy porridge and then with this stew, different kinds of stews with leaves with spinach that's like a typical Nigerian food.
Matthew
Nigerians on average are eating near 7 kg of meat each year, which compares with over 100 kg of meat in the United States, Argentina and Spain.
Hakeem
So this is very important to put it in perspective, that we are just eating a fraction of what other regions, particularly Western Regions, eat as meat. But people want to eat more meat, if they could, you know, they would. And you can see that also in other parts of the world, Asia, you know, once people are becoming a bit more affluent, they now want to eat meat.
Matthew
Africa faces numerous dietary and nutrition challenges; There are nearly 60 million Nigerians who have micronutrient deficiencies and the problem of undernutrition is especially severe among children.
Hakeem
Protein deficiency is very severe here. And that's one thing we have to look at, because protein is key for human development, animal protein is nowhere near supplying that demand. In Nigeria, for example, half of the animal meat is being imported.
Matthew
Hakeem is really motivated to increase access to healthy and climate-friendly diets.
Hakeem
What really is the main driver is health, you know, and that is something Africa is really facing, you know, lifestyle diseases, non communicable diseases like diabetes, blood pressure, hypertension, you know, in some demographics, overweight, obesity, you know, and that is not a small thing.
Matthew
We heard about this in the alternative meat episode that the demand for meat is rising as incomes grow across the world, especially in emerging economies like Nigeria. Hakeem wants to meet this demand with a plant-based solution.
Hakeem
And there's this concept that if we can also leapfrog the meat, you know, before we start eating meat, let's let's go, let's jump that and go into good meat or whatever you want to call it, you know, whether it's from I hope it's from plant base, I think it's the most efficient, easiest quickest.
Matthew
Nine years ago, Hakeem Jimo took his knowledge of the challenges and opportunities in Nigeria, and co founded the country’s first vegan restaurant and food company in Lagos - called Veggie Victory.
Hakeem
So we are two founders: Bola. She is Yoruba, that's a Nigerian ethnic group here in the southwest and myself. And it's absolutely a mission driven thing out of the desire to have actually Nigerian food, but veganized because Nigerian African food is very delicious, you know, and it gets really momentum. Also, in other parts of the world.
Matthew
If you’re a vegan or have a vegan friend, you might know the Happy Cow app or website. It shows you what vegan restaurants are available in your area. Hakeem uses Happy Cow whenever he leaves home.
Hakeem
I was actually in Asia, and everywhere I went to in Cambodia, there was a vegan restaurant. And it was a way of exploring the countries. And then coming back to Nigeria, it was the same Happy Cow app, it showed me zero. And I said, I mean, in a city of almost 25 million people, not one option!? Then I told Bola, let's do it.
Matthew
So Hakeem and his co-founder Bola Adeyanju set out to put vegan food on the map in Lagos - mostly to meet the demand for people searching for healthy food options.
Hakeem
And then it developed to a product company because from day one, people ask “Oh, I want to eat this food, but I'm in Abuja, that's 1000 kilometers away”.
Matthew
Starting up new restaurants in other cities was going to be risky. So Hakeem’s company eventually decided to develop their own line of meat alternatives. The first one is a product called Vchunks, which is wheat-soy blend that is high in protein and doesn’t require refrigeration.
The restaurant has become an ideal testing ground for figuring out Nigerian consumer behavior.
Hakeem
We were really entering virgin land because we were the first vegan restaurant, the first vegan product company. And so there was not much research. And one thing I learned pretty quickly, we need our own products.. We always say we want some chunky thing on top of the rice. I always say we don’t eat burgers, we need our local champions.
Matthew
So they developed a chunky and chewy-dehydrated product to resemble the way people eat meat in Nigeria.
Hakeem
It's dehydrated. So it's a dry product, which is also interesting in an environment where there's very, very limited cold chain here. It’s a big issue. There is no cold chain.. Because infrastructure is complicated, expensive, and they don't have it.
Matthew
The Veggie Victory V chunks started out costing more than beef. But now, a kilogram of V chunks can be bought cheaper than a kilogram of beef, closer to the cost of chicken.
Is this the future, culturally appropriate meat-like substitutes sold at a lower cost to meet the rising global demand?
Hakeem
The global numbers actually scare me a bit you know, we keep on talking about reducing meat. Meat is not reducing - meat is increasing! And it's increasing in these kind of markets; Nigeria, India, China. That's when I can be a bit pushy. You know, I always say it's great if you have some vegan restaurants in Portland or in New York or in Stockholm, but hey, honey, this is not going to change it!
Matthew
Hakeem sees Africa as a key market, given the rising population and the rising incomes. He wants to push back on the idea that being vegetarian means you’re of lower status.
Hakeem
There is this prejudice. Oh, vegetarian? Yeah, that's for goats or whatever, or people that cannot afford meat. But it's now coming in that the health thing is really catching up. It's absolutely not about the environment. It's not about animals.
I always wish things would change faster, but behavior change takes time. It's also a big compliment to our movement. You know, the creativity we see around the world! Every week somebody is coming out with vegan bacon, you know, vegan eggs, vegan leather… I mean, what?! That is creativity! How much new meat, animal meat, have you seen? We're eating basically the same stuff we were eating 100-200 years ago! And that’s not modern humans, you know, we have to evolve!
Matthew
Hakeem Jimo; co-founder of Veggie Victory in Lagos and the new director of ProVeg Nigeria.
While we focused these last two interviews on the notion that people are not going to stop eating and craving meat, like the guests we heard from in the alternative meat episode, there are of course many rich food traditions and food cultures across the world that don’t revolve around meat at all, and celebrate the plants on their plates.
Consider the innumerable lentils, rice, millets and vegetable dishes across India - the endless roasted and stuffed vegetables in the mediterranean, and the noodle dishes across Southeast Asia, mixed with shoots, water chestnuts, crispy bean sprouts, tofu, spicy chilies, and other vegetables. There are obviously lots of tasty dishes that don’t center around meat or require meat-substitutes.
So we just heard from two food businesses in Sweden and Nigeria who are passionate about putting great-tasting vegan food on the table. Next we’ll hear what the research says about what brings people to the table to adopt a more plant-forward diet.
Part five – What works and what doesn’t
Matthew
Susan Jebb, professor of diet and population health at the University of Oxford, has researched what strategies work, and which don’t, when it comes to reducing how much meat we eat.
Although she does not think that we should be avoiding animal products altogether, she emphasizes it’s important to reduce meat consumption in high-income nations where meat consumption is particularly high. And she shares why meat, compared to other foods, presents some unique challenges.
Susan Jebb
Because meat is such a traditional central part of our food culture, it seems to be particularly difficult to shift intakes.
Matthew
How ingrained is eating meat? So much so that we have a snappy way to recall how prevalent it is in our diets.
Susan
People sometimes talk about the four Ns. That meat is normal, nice, natural, and necessary. And if you want people to change their behavior, you have to overcome some of those ideas.
Matthew
Susan Jebb has spent many years researching the effectiveness of different dietary interventions.
Susan
I think everything we've seen in our work on interventions to reduce meat is very like our previous work, which was interventions to reduce people's intake of fat and sugar and salt and to reduce the risk of obesity. And that is that we underestimate how important the environmental and social cues are. And if we can get those right, then actually many people will change their behavior without having to make any conscious effort, they'll just be swept along.
Matthew
This might sound a little strange. If I plan to change my diet and eat differently, I’m the one who would decide that, right?
Susan
But the reality is - what our research and many other people's work has shown is that we tend to overestimate the importance of individual decision making, and we undervalue the importance of the wider environment in which those choices are made.
Matthew
So it turns out that it’s easier to change what are the default options, or to change the food environment - the settings where people purchase and eat their food.
Susan
And people then appear naturally just to choose less meat or more plant based options. That appears to be easier than it is to educate, motivate and inspire people to make conscious reductions in their meat intake.
Matthew
So this is similar to nudging people towards less meat, as Emma Kritzberg from Lund University described in the previous episode. I asked Susan Jebb to share some examples from her research.
Susan
So we've been doing some work, both with supermarkets and also with cafeterias and canteens to see whether there are things that we can change in those environments, which lead to people purchasing more plant based meals. One thing that seems to work quite well is just increasing the availability of meat free or low meat options. So we know that if you imagine a standard cafeteria cafeteria sounds where perhaps there's three or four choices of a main dish, if only one of those is plant based, relatively few people are going to pick that dish. But if you increase the proportion of those dishes that are plant based, as the proportion goes up, so the proportion of people choosing a plant based dish goes up.
Matthew
So obviously if there are more plant-based meals available, the probability that you’ll choose one will be higher. But there is something else going on here.
Susan
The second thing is that it also starts to signify that this is quite a normal thing to do. Plant based isn't this sort of unusual thing that just a few people have. If two or three out of four or five of the dishes are plant based, it feels much, much more normal, much more like a regular choice. And so easier for people to make make that decision. There's some research which has shown that if you put the plant based dishes first in the buffet line, that that also increases consumption, because people look at the first one, they think that looks delicious, pop it on their plate and jobs job's done. And that's particularly effective.
Matthew
And simply put, if you’re in a buffet line and you fill up your plate with the first options, you’ll have less room for what’s at the end of the line.
Susan
They might be the Chef's Choice or the dish of the day. These are all marketing techniques, which are designed to draw our eye to those dishes, and increase sales of them. At the moment, they're often used to incentivize higher profit margin dishes, but they could be used to incentivize people to to make more plant based choices.
Matthew
So that’s what has worked - adding more plant-based options, placing plant-based meals first, and making plant-based dishes both normal and attractive.
And it’s also important to ask - what hasn’t worked?
Susan
Things like eco labeling. So by this, I mean making it really clear and over what the environmental impact of the production of food has been in this dish.
Matthew
Some researchers assigned an environmental grade for different foods and marked the food packaging with that grade. A for a low impact and E for a very high one. Others have tried other rating systems, like a traffic light. But regardless of the design of the labels, theory and practice diverge a lot. When participants were asked to make theoretical choices on a computer, they often chose food with a lower environmental impact. But…
Susan
When we've actually done this in real life canteens, we've seen little or no effect on people's actual food purchasing habits, which I have to say is a little bit disappointing. It doesn't rule it out completely. It may be that the choices that were available to people in these real world settings, there weren't enough A and B choices.
Matthew
But Susan Jebb doesn’t think we should give up on eco-labeling just yet:
Susan
Even if it doesn't have a big impact on consumer behavior demand, it might be quite influential in supply. So what we've seen with one of the companies we've been working with on this is that they came to us after the experiment and said, goodness, we're quite shocked at how many of our dishes are D’s and E's. And can you help us to reformulate these recipes, can you help us to have more environmental options available?
Matthew
So perhaps it doesn’t sway consumers, but it could influence food businesses.
Susan has also worked with people who are motivated to eat less meat but are having trouble getting started. One strategy is basically to write a journal. To write down each day what you eat.
Susan
Now, self monitoring is a very established technique for behavior change. You know, many people have recorded how many steps they make on a pedometer and use that to increase their physical activity. So we've developed a relatively simple questionnaire to allow people to monitor their meat consumption. The first thing that was apparent is people were quite shocked how much meat they were consuming. I think if you ask people how much meat they've had, they remember the meal when they had steak and chips, but they might forget the ham sandwich. Because that didn't really feel like a meat meal, it felt like a sandwich.
Matthew
They worked with people to help set achievable goals. For some that could be a meat free day, or not eating meat after lunch. And just as they were monitoring their meat intake, they could also monitor if they were reaching their goals.
Susan
If we want to change people's diets, there isn't one intervention, which is going to do all the heavy lifting. What we need is a range of strategies, we do need to encourage and motivate people to think about the consequences of their food intake. But we also need to create an environment which shifts the default so that eating meat isn't always the top option.
This is how dietary change happens over time, because social norms and trends change. And what we can perhaps just do with some of our interventions is to accelerate that trend.
Matthew
Susan Jebb, professor of Diet and Population Health at the University of Oxford.
So we spoken to people promoting a plant-based diet through their restaurants and their advocacy - and we learned what the research says about what strategies are effective - like nudging and changing the choice architecture - to influence people’s diets.
There’s also an argument that we should be looking at the broader food system and looking at what’s available in stores, how much do different foods’ cost, what foods are subsidized, what’s the role of media and advertising and lobbying, just to name a few examples. What I’m saying is we haven’t really dug into the role that politics and power play in shaping what we eat.
If you have thoughts on this, you can leave us a voice memo to podcast@tabledebates.org
Next up, we visit an organic farm that’s using zero animals and zero animal inputs to produce their food.
Part six – An animal free farm
Matthew
Convincing consumers that they can have delicious vegan meals without compromising taste, or culture is one side of things. But then there's the question of just how practical it is to imagine agriculture without animals.
I’ve worked on lots of farms in different parts of the world and every one of them was either raising livestock or using animal byproducts, a combination of animal manure and organic fertilizers made from blood, bone, feather and meal.
So can we farm without using any animals or any animal inputs at all? One obvious answer is yes. And that is farming while making the best use of mineral fertilizers - so applying nitrogen, phosphorous, potassium and other nutrients to help increase crop yields.
But perhaps a more difficult question to ask is: could we farm organically without using animals and animal byproducts?
Our field producer Ylva takes us to a farm outside of Reading that shows it’s possible to grow food without using either animal inputs or mineral inputs..
Iain Tolhurst
We’ve had a busy week, we just planted 12,000 leeks, and we're planting 3500 squash and then tomorrow we got 4000 onions, red onions. On Friday, we got about 4000 cauliflower, so it's all kind of been a bit of a hectic week, really.
Ylva
We meet Iain Tolhurst or “Tolly” on a hot summer's day in mid-June at Lin’s VegShed, a little shop by the fields where people come and buy whatever the farm offers on that very day. Today, the smell of beautiful red strawberries fill the air in the shed.
Iain
This time of year, we're just starting to come out the hungry gap. So we're just starting to have our own produce now, which is really good, because we're quite short up until now for a couple of months. So we've got spring onions here, we've got turnips, we've got carrots, we've got main crop onions, we've got courgettes. We've got cabbage, we've got new potatoes, which is always very exciting. We're getting new potatoes, we've got leaf beet, we've got strawberries, which we've been picking now for the last eight or nine weeks. We are a stock free farm, which means that we don't have any livestock on the farm at all. We've never had livestock here. We've been here farming organically for 33 years. And we did it ten years before that. So we have a very long history of organic farming. We are one of the original organic growers in the UK. And we supply everything to our local customers, which is through a box scheme, which is like a CSA. But also we have this farm shop, which is where we are now, which keeps going all year round. We never stop. So we're harvesting four days every week throughout the whole year, a whole range of produce and everything is sold within a ten kilometer radius of the farm. So we try to make everything as local as possible.
Ylva
Do you eat meat at all?
Iain
No, I haven't eaten meat for almost 50 years. I gave up because I was working on a dairy farm and I saw the horrendous way that animals were being exploited, and that put me off meat completely. And it went from there and then as time went by, gradually I became vegan as well. Because there's logical progression from vegetarianism to veganism. If you question everything, you will automatically become a vegan.
Ylva
But isn't livestock a very natural part of this biological system with manure, feeding back nutrients to the soil and everything?
Iain
Livestock yes, but not in the way it's been done now. I mean, we have livestock on our farm - we have ten million earth worms per hectare. So we have huge amounts of livestock, we have the manure from our earthworms, which is very important. Manure from animals very often comes from somewhere else, it doesn't come from the land, they have to be fed. Manure doesn't happen on its own, you have to feed that animal to get manure, and often that food is coming from somewhere else. Virtually every farm will be bringing feed in from somewhere else. And that feed may well come from not just a neighboring farm, but a neighboring country. It may even come from the other side of the hemisphere, it could be coming from South America. Coming from land, which was originally rainforests. So we refer to this as ghost acres. This is an acre, which is ghosted from somewhere else. That means we are effectively stealing or ghosting in somebody else's land. And so we've developed a system on the farm, which is completely independent of livestock. It’s virtually independent of outside land as well, we have a very small requirement of ghost acres in order to run this farm. And we've been able to prove that you do not need livestock, you can grow vegetables, as we have here for more than three decades with no animal input at all. No livestock, no fertilizers, or anything at all from outside the farm. And the idea that animals are an integral part of the farm landscape is only something which has come about in the last 1000 years because it didn't happen before that.
Ylva
We leave Lin’s VegShed, and move out into one of the fields nearby.
Iain
Well, we're looking at a very beautiful scene actually. And we're in what originally was the floodplain of the Thames. We've got trees and rows here, every 23 meters, we have a row of mixed deciduous trees with apples interspersed in between that we have some glorious looking potatoes in flower and producing a fantastic crop. And then beyond there, we have more trees, we have rows of trees across the field. This is quite a small field, it's just four hectares, but we have rows of trees. And then we're surrounded by very dominant and very mature hedgerows, which is the way we like it. We don't trim our hedges to within a meter of its life, we let them grow full height. So they're very colorful in the in the spring, very colorful in the winter with berries. We have trees here, which give some shade. We know we have more than 75 different species of flower, some of which are quite rare. Everything's interconnected here, you know, we cannot divorce this from that. Everything is a part and parcel of the whole system. You know, even the bit of grass we're still on here is very much important part of the whole system.
Ylva
And that's sort of the core of your philosophy.
Iain
It is really ,yeah. I mean, it's a systems approach. This is poor soil. You can see how poor our soil is. This is what our soil sounds like; it’s not really what you call horticultural land. It's not suitable for crops primarily. So we've had to improve this land to the point where it's much more productive than it would have been originally. So we took on a point when it had been farmed quite badly for quite a long period of time. So, carbon levels were very low and nutrient levels were very low, it was very weedy… so it was in quite a bad condition. So it took quite a few years to get that sorted out. Now it's in very good health. This is why we have such high yields of potatoes, because the soil is in really good health. No pest problems, no disease problems. We have no disease problems at all on the farm. That's a measure of a healthy system, because pest problems are there to show a weakness in the system.
Ylva
Iain Tolhurst says he grows biodiversity and all vegetables and fruits are byproducts of that. His systems approach is to put sustainability first by using agroforestry, leaving trees in the fields. Fields that are surrounded by high hedges and flowering field margins.
Iain
And we know that from this area of land, we are feeding around 400 families half of their vegetable requirements during the year which is quite a significant figure.
Ylva
The soil’s fertility on this vegan, stock free farm is all about feeding the soil with green manure, letting the plants fix nitrogen from the air and bring back nutrients to the soil as they decompose. Two years out of seven the fields are left to rest. And what grows there stays there, to feed the soil, which is also fed with carbon using wood chip.
Iain
We've seen some very significant improvements of soil here over the time. And that wood chip technology has been really important part of that. So we've got lots of data about earth worm populations; I've already mentioned we have more than 10 million per hectare. That's one thousand for every square meter.
So we've seen a very steady increase in both the fertility of the farm, but also the output of the farm has gone up quite significantly in the last ten years.
And we looked at most of biodiversity we have within the farm and it's incredibly healthy. There are very high numbers of both flora and fauna on the farm.
Ylva
So is there any legitimate critique of your way of growing things that you can respect and say, you do have a point there?
Iain
Well, we've almost – we’ve never actually had any disagreements of what we do.
Ylva
So no one's getting provoked by your…?
Iain
Not particularly, other than people saying, “Well, it's okay for you can do it on your farm, it's not going to work for me on mine”. Because they perhaps don't want it to work? I don't know. Or they don't have the equipment or don't have the knowledge, which is more likely to be the case. I mean this farming system has taken me nearly fifty years to build up the knowledge up of this.
Ylva
If you ask Ian Tolhurst, there is no such problem as shortage of land for growing fruit and vegetables. It's all about how you treat the soil. But after all these years in the vegan organic farming business, he is still the exception rather than the norm.
Iain
One of the difficult parts of changes people's eating habits, that's going to be the biggest challenge. Agriculture has had the biggest effect on climate change of anything we've ever done. We've changed the planet beyond all recognition. Primarily in the pursuit of agricultural goods, much of which has been fed to animals, which is hugely damaging and very wasteful! I'm not advocating a complete abstinence from meat, but I think we have to get to the point where we seriously reduce how much meat is being consumed, for the sake of the planet. And that in itself, you know, once you reduce meat consumption significantly, then you have the option where there’s far more land available for growing foods in a much more efficient way. It’s far more efficient to grow food and feed direct to people than it is to feed it through livestock.
Ylva
But then again, you would need a lot of people like yourself. You don't get them everywhere.
Iain
IT: No, very true. And you know, the agricultural population is aging. I'm supposed to be retired, the average age of farmers in the UK is now beyond 60. This is a serious problem that we need to really have a much wider debate about; the value of food, and how it should be valued and how it should be supported - primarily through government subsidy, as it has been in the past. We did it during the war. We did it fantastically well during the war. We fed everybody on a very meat reduced diet. Nobody went hungry and actually everybody had a far better diet than they have today. And we managed to do that in a period of five years. We went from being 40% self-sufficient to 95% self-sufficient in four years. It can be done!
Ylva
Back at Lin’s Veg Shed, one of his neighbors Catherine Ducker who happens to be a meat producer pops into buy some courgettes and chard and maybe a few potatoes. So I asked Catherine what she thinks of this way of producing food; stock free and with only green manure.
Catherine Ducker
I love green manure. Green manure is great. Tolly taught me everything I know about green manures and veganism. My daughter is a vegan, my son's a meat producer. I like that, I think it's great!
Ylva
And you yourself?
Catherine
I'm balanced. I eat a little bit of meat, and I can eat vegan production as well. We actually run courses on how to be vegan food producers. You're asking the right person, because I don't like extremism. I like everything in balance, I think it's great to use green manures for the fertility of your vegetable production. I think that's great and Tolly shows that you can do it really well.
Matthew
That was Iain Tolhurst on Tolhurst Organic Farm outside of Reading in the United Kingdom. Tollhust Organic is not alone. The farm belongs to the Vegan organic network of farms across the UK.
To be fair, what they are doing is incredibly impressive, but at the moment, they’re only making a very small dent in contributing to the nation’s food supply.
Part seven – Where do we go from here?
Matthew
We heard a range of arguments for adopting more of a plant-based diet. But is anyone convinced?
Jan
People respond to different things. If you're talking about how I would approach someone…
Matthew
Jan Dutkiewicz again, policy fellow at Harvard Law.
Jan
I would give them a very basic spiel, which is that the standard Western diet and specifically its reliance on industrialized animal production is extremely inefficient. is extremely bad for the environment. It's contributing methane which contributes to anthropogenic climate change. I think there's no avoiding the animal ethics argument. I think very few people actually want animals to be factory farmed.
Matthew
That’s the theoretical argument. But what about when the rubber meets the road?
Jan
Any message that asks people to change their habits, and especially to abandon something that they see as culturally important and pleasurable, is going to be met with pushback.
When the EAT-Lancet Commission released the Eat Lancet diet which is far from vegan, but it suggests substantial reductions, especially in high consuming countries in meat production, including beef… Eat Lancet was met with tremendous pushback.
Matthew
The Eat Lancet report was put together by experts in nutrition, health and sustainability to figure out how to feed a future population of 10 billion people a healthy diet while staying planetary boundaries. To do this, they recommended slashing red meat consumption to about 14 grams per day, or under a 100 grams per week, and also cutting down poultry consumption to 29 grams of poultry, or around 200 grams per week.
Jan
There was an organized critical campaign under the #yes2meat, which included farmers that included small scale farmers. Perhaps surprisingly, it included members of the sort of academic Meat Science and animal science establishment.
Matthew
So that’s one form of protest against veganism – here’s one organized by vegans.
Jan
You had these protests, where Animal Rebellion protesters in England, went into places like the Whole Foods and the Harrods in London and just started spilling milk. And there was this huge again, huge social media and media pushback saying, these vegans are too radical, how dare they waste milk. But the point is, in these cases, this narrative emerges if people weren't so radical, and if they sort of didn't push their vegan agenda, and if they talked about things like meat reduction in a way that was rational and presented rational arguments, then we could have a rational conversation that perhaps ended up in some kind of consensus around meat reduction, but I think the case of EAT-Lancet shows that that's absolutely not the case.
That anytime you in any way suggest meat reduction, you're going to be faced with charges of radicalism, extremism, being opposed to farming and farmers. As if farmers didn't produce all kinds of things that aren’t meat. It’s this sort of like impossible necessity, we need to talk about meat reduction. And no matter how you talk about meat reduction, there's going to be pushback, which I think is telling and I think it shows the scale of the challenge.
Matthew
I want to wrap this episode without centering meat, which is basically what we’ve done throughout this series. We briefly talked earlier about the rich plant food traditions across the world. And to close out, I want to put one particular food in the spotlight: the humble bean.
Jan Dutkiewicz wants to unlock the full potential of beans for a better food system.
Jan
Beans are wonderful. Beans are cheap, they're plentiful. They're healthy. There are so many varieties of beans and pulses. Virtually all cultures, and specifically all food cultures and food traditions, have a place for beans and pulses in some ways, including converting beans and pulses into sort of prototypical meat alternatives. When of course, I'm thinking about soy milk, tofu, tempeh.
They're sort of cheap, and they're everywhere. And they're also the building blocks of most alternative protein, which I think actually - this is one of the funny things about alternative protein. People make it out to be this, like wildly new high tech thing, but it's - I mean cellular agriculture is. But plant based meat alternatives are basically, the Impossible Burger is still a soybean burger, just with a little bit more culinary and food science behind it. It's still a soybean burger, right? Just Egg, which is probably the best I would say so far, plant-based egg alternative on the market is, again, it's just mung beans. It's nothing magical. It's mung beans with a little bit of extra processing.
Matthew
Beans also have this incredible ability to fix nitrogen in soils using these nodules in their roots so there is less of a need to input nitrogen fertilizer.
Jan
If we want to shift toward a more plant forward food system, I think we should start with the humble bean and use the humble bean as the building block for a better food system. It's high in protein. It's delicious. It's malleable. I've joked about this before with people on Twitter but I think that to the extent where we've already talked about subsidies for everything from cell ag to fruits and veggies I think we need a Bean New Deal. We need more support for beans. - even mass produced - if we relied on those more than we do on economies of scale animal based meat, we're halfway to achieving my ideal food system.
Matthew
So where do we go from here? Do we shift diets and demand, or shift supply and how we produce our food?
We just heard a range of arguments to support a more plant-forward future, based on animal ethics, and environmental concerns.
What motivates you to create a particular future? Is it to preserve more of the natural world? Is it for personal health, or public health reasons? Is it climate change?
What future excites you and what scares you? What should the future look like? And what did we miss?
We’d be so interested to hear from you. You can record yourself in a quiet room, and send it to podcast@tabledebates.org and we may feature your clip in one of our final episodes.
In our next two episodes, we’ll break down what we’ve heard so far. What do the futures agree and what do they disagree about, and how can they co-exist together?
Thank you all for listening. You can rate and review us on your favorite podcast apps. It really helps others find the show. And a big thanks to all the guests in this episode – Jan Dutkiewicz, Amy Fitzgerald, Iain Tolhurst, Hakeem Jimo, and Gustav Johansson. More information about each of them guests and their restaurants, farms and research can be found on our website – tabledebates.org/meat
Meat: the four futures is funded by FORMAS in Sweden, and produced by TABLE - a collaboration between University Oxford, Swedish U of Agricultural Sciences and Wageningen University.
This episode was edited by Jackie Turner, Ylva Carlqvist Warnborg and me, Matthew Kessler. Music in this episode by Blue Dot Session and Epidemic Sound.
