Transcript for Ep7. Health, biodiversity, ethics
Lars Appelqvist
If we don’t do this right, people will not demand meat in the future
Frederic Leroy
The headlines became longer. They became more hyperbolic. Much less nuanced.
Rob Percival
There’s a really critical role for instincts and values in shaping the debate.
Jude Capper
Let’s just put it into context. There are the people who are very against animal farming. There are the people who are very pro animal farming. And there's a huge bit in the middle, where everyone's just going about their normal life and choosing the foods they eat and not really thinking about it.
Robert Barbour
So it’s when you’re taking the whole food system perspective, it’s quite a different outcome, we need to be stepping back and looking at the food system as a whole.
Jayson Lusk
I try to ask myself what evidence would cause me to change my mind? If I can’t answer that, then I’m essentially an idealogue.
Matthew
Welcome back to Meat: the four futures, a podcast presented by TABLE, that explores what the future of meat and livestock could look like.
I’m Matthew Kessler, your guide for the series. We’ve already heard four different visions - an efficient meat, a less meat, an alternative “meat” and a no meat future.
We began this project almost 2 years ago - speaking with farmers, CEOs, scientists, and campaigners from across the world, to hear different solutions to what we should eat and how we should produce our food in the future.
Now we’ve heard four distinct visions of the future. But realistically, won’t they all play a role? As we wrap up our series in the next two episodes, we’re going to review what’s in conflict between the four futures and how parts of them might co-exist.
In this episode we ask three experts to consider different arguments presented by the four futures as they relate to health, biodiversity and animal ethics. We ask a professor of diet and population health if it’s better to eat some, a lot, or no meat; we ask a biodiversity expert about how the different futures would help biodiversity to recover; and we ask an animal ethicist if it’s immoral to kill animals for food, and under what conditions it is most ethical to eat meat?
As always we hope you listen to the rest of the series, so you can hear the whole story.
Part 1 – Is meat healthy? Separating evidence from opinion
Matthew
One of the most common questions when it comes to food is “What’s the healthiest diet?” It’s also the topic of incredibly sensationalist headlines. And when it comes to meat - you’re often presented with conflicting advice. Some news articles will say meat is incredibly nutritious and it’s impossible to replace or supplement, and others say we absolutely don’t need any meat in our diets for a healthy life.
Well I hate to break it to you – neither of these statements are completely false, and to explain why, I asked Susan Jebb – who you may remember from Episode 6.
Susan
I'm Susan Jebb, Professor of Diet and Population Health at the University of Oxford. My research interests are in healthy and sustainable diets.
Matthew
I asked Susan Jebb how do you separate evidence from opinion, what are the nutritional guidelines around eating meat, is grass-fed beef better for you, and why is it so difficult to study people’s diets and health in the first place.
Matthew
What do you see is the value of talking about meat with respect to its role in health?
Susan
I think it's incredibly important that people have information so that they can make choices for themselves and for their families about what they want to eat. One of the challenges is that everybody's interested in food, and everybody has an opinion. And I think it can be sometimes really quite difficult for people to be able to separate out evidence from anecdote. So I think scientific evidence does matter. But we also need to understand the social and the cultural context in which people eat because that's incredibly important in informing their choices and informing the way they think about food and the food system.
Matthew
Susan Jebb shares a few reasons why meat is understood as healthy and at the same time contains some risks to your health.
Susan
When it comes to meat, I think people are quite confused. So if we take in contrast, something like sugar or salt I think most people are aware that too much sugar too much salt is bad for your health. But I think with meat, they have mixed ideas. That's partly because they recognize that meat - we've eaten it for centuries, and appears it's in our heads as an integral part of a healthy diet. They know that it provides important nutrients like iron or B12. So there's a natural sense, I think, that meat must be good for you that's quite socially-culturally ingrained.
Matthew
Meat itself is a good source of protein, vitamins and minerals, though some health issues can arise when you eat too much meat, specifically too much red and processed meats.
Susan
High meat intakes are associated with an increased risk of some diseases, particularly colorectal cancer, and a higher risk of heart disease.
And so I think people want to try to be able to reconcile those two views. And I think it's important we have these conversations, so people understand that the risks seem to come particularly from high intakes. And that there also may be some risks of not eating any meat at all. So we know that people who are vegan, for example, are at increased risk of having iron deficient anemia, they need to take supplements to replace some of the nutrients like B 12, which are only found in animal products.
Matthew
There’s obviously a large middle area between these two groups with the highest health risks- those who are eating red and processed meat two or three times a day and those eating no meat and no animal products.
So what’s the right amount of meat to eat? This is an especially tricky question to approach when speaking to a global audience. Every country on average consumes different amounts and different types of meat. In some countries, average meat consumption is under 10 kg per person per year, while in others, it’s over 100kg.
It’s also difficult to answer because not all meat carries the same health benefits and risks. For example, chicken and other white meat is a leaner protein with lower amounts of saturated fat, so the nutritional recommendations don’t normally put a limit on white meat.
I asked Susan what’s the health recommendation in the UK for meat consumption, which keep in mind, is a country that consumes a higher amount of meat compared to the global average.
Susan
If I think about here in the UK, we just recommend people not to consume too much meat. And so there's a recommendation for not having more than 70 grams of red or processed meat. So actually, what's interesting is that there is not much official guidance on what is the right amount and that of course is in contrast to something like sugar or salt or saturated fat.
Matthew
Currently, people on average in the UK are eating around 90 grams of cooked red meat or processed each day . So to stay under the 70 g recommendation meat a day, that would require either eating smaller portion sizes of beef, pork or lamb, or and having a few red meat free-days each week.
In episode 2 we talked about how it’s difficult to understand the relationships between diets and diseases. As a researcher in this field, Susan Jebb explains why.
Susan
When it comes to understanding what are the health consequences, that is surprisingly tricky to nail down, because your long term health isn't a function of what you ate today. It's what you've eaten over your lifetime. It's a sort of cumulative impact. And it's, so firstly, we have to take that time into account. But trying to work out and get a good accurate record of what people are eating today is hard enough, try to find out what they've been eating over a lifetime. And that becomes very, very hard indeed. And then it's difficult to relate what happens to you 10 or 20 years down the line, when you go into hospital or because you've got a cancer diagnosis, or you've had a heart attack, it's quite tricky to pin that on some particular component of your diet.
Of course, in science, we have big epidemiological studies, which aim to do that, and clever statisticians who try to filter out all the noise. But nonetheless, all that can really tell us is that some types of dietary habits are associated with more or less risk of disease.
Matthew
The latest science examines all this data, and does its best to distinguish between what are the underlying causes of a health outcome; and what is a correlation in the data doesn’t really explain a finding, and they have complicated and rigorous methods for sorting this out.
In a perfect world, you could examine people’s diets over time and attribute more clear explanations to health outcomes, but Susan explains why this isn’t really feasible.
Susan
What we'd like to be able to do is to do these, you know, randomized control trials, where we take a big group of people and half of them have a diet, which is high in meat, half of them have a very plant based diet and see what happens. But practically, that's just not really an option because people choose. And the kinds of people who chose a plant-based diet may be different from the people who chose to follow a meat diet. So actually attributing health consequences to these diets in a precise way is very difficult indeed.
Matthew
So people who choose a vegan diet tend to be much less likely to be overweight, but is that because of their diet?
Susan
It would be easy to say, Well, that's because they're vegan, but actually, people who choose to be vegan are much less likely to smoke. They're much more physically active, they have a whole range of other behaviors, which might explain why they're less likely to be overweight. So it is just very, very tricky to attribute cause and effect.
Matthew 09:02
I next asked Susan Jebb about what are the possible health implications related to the alternative “meat” and less meat futures.
And one say, new kid on the block, although it's not especially new, is these meat alternatives or meat substitutes, and they come in a lot of different forms. There's the plant based meat substitutes, and then there's cellular agriculture, we're you take animal cells and turn that into a meat product? What do we know about the health profiles of these of these new products? And some of these products go back several decades as well.
Susan
If we think about people who don't eat meat or eat very little meat, over the last 20 or 30 years, they've tended to have fairly plant based diets, meaning that they ate a lot of vegetables, or or even just other foods, pasta, rice, staple foods. More recently, we're seeing a whole new ranges of so called plant based foods, whether that's more fermented products, which, of course, have been popular in other parts of the world for a very long time. You know, there's talk of insects, but that's, a tiny, tiny market at the moment. And there's emerging interest in cultured meat. Again, it's more of a science and technology area at the moment, it's not really particularly made an impact in the market. And then we've got more mainstream a whole raft of highly processed plant based foods or even meals, and that they're quite different than what you might think of as a traditional vegetarian or vegan diet. So I think we've got a lot to learn about what are the health implications of these, if you like new plant based diets, as opposed to the sort of traditional vegetarian vegan diets of the past.
Matthew
Some of Susan Jebb’s colleagues at the University of Oxford are conducting a study to better understand what people are eating today. They’re asking people who describe themselves as vegan, vegetarian, or flexitarians a simple, but important question.
Susan
In contemporary society, what are people actually eating? Because when you're thinking about the health consequences, we shouldn't just focus on the absence of meat, we have to ask, well, what are people eating instead? And it's likely that the health effects depend at least as much on what are you replacing meat with, as opposed to just the fact you're not eating, eating meat at all?
Matthew
This is a really interesting and important distinction. We’ve talked about different environmental impacts of different production systems, but we haven’t spoken so much about the nutrition that comes from different types of foods. If you’re eating very little or no meat, are you instead eating cauliflower steaks, bean burgers, fermented products, highly processed alternatives or something else? This matters because each has a different nutrition and health profile.
Matthew
Another area that I expect is also tricky is to know what the difference is in nutrition and how the animals are raised. And you hear this a lot from, from industry – especially in marketing, you hear about the kind of health claims of grass fed beef, or r grass finished. Is it possible to determine what the differences in the nutritional profiles of these animals from what the environments that they're raised in?
Susan
Well, it's perfectly possible to do the analysis, you could take meat from one animal and compare the nutritional profile with meat from another, technically perfectly possible to do. However, the challenge is that there will be variability. So, animals fed on pasture. So pasture fed animals, the composition of the meat may well vary with with season, depending on what they're consuming, will also depend on breed. So some breeds will have a different fatty acid composition, for example, than others. Just in the same way that we know that different varieties of carrot have different amounts of vitamins in them. So being able to say, in the totality, that the nutritional composition, the overall nutritional composition is better in one form of production than another is actually really quite, quite challenging to do.
And that differences in general seem to be really quite small. And I think that when you also remember that meat is a tiny proportion of people's overall diet, you know those small differences in the context of your overall diet are probably going to be very modest. So there may be lots of reasons why people want to think hard about the production system of their meat in relation to the impact on the environment. And I suspect those are going to be more important than what would appear to be relatively small differences in relation to the nutritional composition of, if you like, the final product.
Matthew
And one last question, you've been working in this field professionally with food and nutrition for decades now. And it seems the debates have become more polarized over time. And especially around meat. This is such a sensitive subject for many people. I just wonder, can you reflect on the state of polarization and how it's affected your work? And what sort of strategies have been effective at depolarizing the debates?
Susan
Wow, that's tricky. Throughout my career in nutrition, one of the things that has worried me is the mass of information, which is out there, some of which is if you like hard scientific evidence, some is opinion, some is facts, some is myth. And it is, I think, extremely confusing for people trying to do the right thing, for themselves and their families, to actually be able to understand where the facts are, and where the truth lies. I think that has been a persistent problem. There's been a view that nutrition scientists are forever changing their minds.
Whereas in fact, actually, the dietary advice has been pretty consistent over the years, we eat too many calories, too much saturated fat, too much salt, too much sugar, too little fruit and vegetables. But because individual foods have sort of gone in and out of fashion or have been the brunt of comment, there's been a sense that it was always changing. And if it's always changing, then people that becomes a bit of a barrier to people doing anything about it because they've become very ambivalent about change.
What concerns me at the moment is that that, you know, cacophony, which has always existed, is actually now becoming increasingly polarized. And people seem to express their views ever more strongly and vehemently and hang on to some single truth and single answer either demonizing individual foods or holding them up as being you know, the answer to life eternal. And the reality is that diet is much more complex than that we eat a whole mix of foods, and we eat them in varying amounts at varying times of the day of the week of our life. It's highly unlikely that any one food is as good or bad as it's sometimes portrayed. It is about the overall diet. And it's also the case that there is no one perfect diet which is going to meet all of our goals for health and for the environment. And for the economy, there are going to have to be trade-offs.
And so we have got to come together, we've got to understand these differing viewpoints. And we've got to find some way through, which is the appropriate mix and balance of all the different issues that people care about, you know, one of the joys about working in food is that people really, really care about it. And one of the things that makes working in food really hard is that people really, really care about it and feel very, very strongly. And that sometimes becomes a barrier to progress. And that's a real shame. We've got to we've got to talk about food. And I think remembering that people are in this field because they care actually is quite helpful.
Matthew
I feel that from the range of different perspectives and guests that I've spoken to in this series, the thing that unites them all is their passion and care towards this issue. Susan Jebb Professor diet of Population Health at the University of Oxford, thank you so much for speaking with us today.
Susan
Thank you, Matthew.
Matthew
Next up we explore the tradeoffs between food production and biodiversity. Given that we’re seeing an incredible decline in the types of plants and animal species across the world, what livestock production systems make sense in the future?
Part 2: Producing food, Conserving biodiversity
Charles Godfray
When I was a child, I was one of those little boys who got sort of obsessed with birds and butterflies and then plants.
Matthew
Charles Godfray is a population biologist and director of the Oxford Martin School at the University of Oxford.
Charles
I cannot remember a time when I haven't been, you might say obsessed by the natural world.
Matthew
In the last 50 years, there has been a huge acceleration in the decline of living things - there are fewer wild animals and plants alive than ever before, and the populations that remain are less diverse. This has been caused by pollution and climate change, and the number one driver - land use change.
Charles
So we know that habitat change is the single greatest factor that affects biodiversity. And agriculture is the single biggest driver of habitat change.
Matthew
Over the last 70 years, there’s been a global mission to grow food more productively and intensively - and while it’s helped feed a growing global population, it also has had some consequences.
Charles
We know that intensive agriculture has negative effects on the environment. But intensive agriculture also feeds a lot of people. So it's too simple to say intensive agriculture is bad, we must change it unless you come up with an alternative that can feed people. Because to be honest, if you're hungry, you're not going to care about biodiversity. And understandably so.
Matthew
That’s the big picture question - how can we feed the world while preserving habitat for biodiversity? And what role would meat and livestock play in that future? Charles Godfray first makes clear that we in affluent countries with western diets should be eating less meat in the future.
Charles
That is something which I think from a climate change perspective just has to happen. I think it has to happen. And I care a lot about ensuring that happens in a just way so that the transition to eating less meat reflects the many people whose livelihoods currently depend on producing meat. And also, this is a, to my mind, largely a rich and medium income country argument. And we should be very careful about our sitting in the rich world, telling a pastoralist in the Sahel that he or she should eat less meat.
Matthew
I asked Charles Godfray to reflect on the different approaches to combating biodiversity loss presented by each of the four futures. So the alternative meat and the plant based future advocate for more plant forward diets, and the land that was producing crops for animal feed or the pastureland could be transitioned into wild lands to flourish.
Charles
If we care about biodiversity, we care about climate change, we need to have the space to store carbon, we need to have the space to preserve biodiversity. So reducing the amount of land currently put down for livestock, because we're eating less meat or because we're eating alternatives, seems to me a sensible thing.
Matthew
But Charles Godfray is concerned that taking land out of agriculture doesn’t mean it will automatically become a nature reserve; it could be used for other purposes, like a housing development, or a golf course.
Charles
Just taking land out of agriculture and assuming it will go back to something that is maximally beneficial for society is not how it happens. So in thinking what will happen to this land that has been released from agriculture, my belief is that it will need to be really quite intensively managed.
Matthew
While the no meat and alternative meat futures imagines lands dedicated to livestock agriculture being converted into habitat for diverse plants and animals to live in, the less meat future doesn’t see the need to remove livestock from the landscape to achieve these goals. Advocates in this future envision low intensity grazing, so fewer animals on larger tracts of land. The goal is to produce some food and also for the grazers to manage the landscape so other animals and plants can thrive.
Charles
If you look in the UK, there are some really quite well known examples now where land has been taken out of intensive agriculture, and managed for maximum biodiversity. And as someone who's loved biodiversity of my life, I was a little cynical about some of these things. So I went and saw them and it is quite extraordinary what you can do in promoting biodiversity of the order of 20 or 30 years.
Matthew
Charles visited the Knepp Estate, K N E P P in the center of South England that started in 2001 to rewild an agricultural landscape. The estate was managed with the aim to restore habitats and reintroduce native species. One thing that makes this rewilding project stand out is that it didn't aim to remove all agricultural activity and livestock from the landscape.
Charles
As part of that they keep low densities of pigs and cattle on the estate. And it's truly astounding. So birds such as nightingales, and turtle doves, which are rare in the south of England, they are more abundant there than nearly everywhere else. They've got storks breeding, which never used to breed. And probably the most iconic of British butterflies is the purple Emperor butterfly. And I guess I'd seen about six or seven in my life, until I visited Knepp one afternoon and saw 30. So it really is impressive what can be done.
Matthew
It’s worth noting that the main goal in a rewilded landscape like the one at Knepp Estate to maximize biodiversity. Meat is a byproduct in that system and you actually get very little meat, so it isn’t really an an answer to meeting our demand for meat.
And lastly, the efficient meat scenario calls for producing meat intensively, using as few resources as possible to meet the rising demand for meat. What role does Charles Godfray see this playing?
Charles
To me, looking ahead, we will have almost certainly somewhere between 40 and 70%, more demand for food, we'll increase the century, so we're going to have to produce more food, and no one's going to outlaw meat. So part of that is going to be increased demand for meat. In past centuries, what would we have done? Well, we'd have colonized a new continent or something like that. That option is not out there.
Matthew
The only land that could realistically still be brought into agriculture at this stage is cutting down more tropical rainforests, like the Amazon, which would continue to have devastating impacts on biodiversity, and is perhaps the best way to release loads of carbon into the atmosphere.
Charles
So we are going to have to produce more food, and we are going to have to produce it from the same or a reduced agricultural footprint. And we're going to have to do it in a way that doesn't undermine our capacity to produce food going into the future. Now I use the term sustainable intensification for that.
Yes, we need diet change. Yes, we need to reduce waste. But we also will need to produce more food on the same agricultural footprint without damaging the environment. And to me that’s sustainable intensification.
Matthew
Charles says that we need a combination of these approaches in the future. But given the background of the devastating decline in biodiversity across the world, how do we prioritize?
To close out, I asked Charles Godfray about what his ideal global landscape would look like. He acknowledges that this is a question not only for biologists and ecologists, but it's also a question of politics and economics. Charles Godfray says we should be thinking about how we use our land as a guide to decision-making in the future.
Charles
My view is that we need to think in terms of having a national land use framework, and the UK Government has actually committed to develop one of that. And this is not a sort of top down diktat, which will say do that there. But we'll set out the different goals that we have for the landscape, what how much we want to preserve what we want to do for biodiversity, what we want to do for carbon storage, and I think also what we want to do for food production.
We don't have the luxury I think of any land not being productive, but where I define productive to be not only the traditional sense of productivity producing food or fuel or fiber, but also producing the public goods, biodiversity, carbon, whatever.
Matthew
So if you picture a map, different regions or ecosystems could be categorized into what they’re most suited for. Then each area could be managed for maximum biodiversity, for food production, for carbon storage, or some combination. So what would this result in?
Charles
One will be taking some land out of agriculture; one will be having some land which one manages largely for sustainable high yields; and then we'll have land in the middle where one forgo some yields, to have a much more diverse series of outputs.
Matthew
So there’s a role for each of the futures to play here. And what's challenging, or perhaps exciting about this, is that you’d need people with different backgrounds, knowledge and skill sets to work together to make this a reality.
Charles
So traditionally, the sort of plant molecular biology would help the higher yields. All the work from the agroecology and organic movements would then help you maximize what's happening in some of that center. And then restoration ecology and work in that area would help you get the most of the land that you have taken out of agriculture. So that to me is the way to sort of square the circle. I think we can produce the food to feed that number of people, maintain biodiversity, and hopefully contribute towards climate change. Now that may sound a little bit of being a Pollyanna, but I'm excited by it.
Matthew
Charles Godfray, population biologist at the University of Oxford
Part 3: An ethicist weighs in on the future of meat
Matthew
Throughout the series we’ve heard from scientists, farmers, chefs, CEOs and NGOs. But from the beginning we said that eating, or not eating, meat, is not only at the center of scientific debates, but also ethical ones.
There are a few ways we could approach the ethical questions raised in this series around farming and eating animals. We could have spoken to a religious ethicist or historian. They might have told us about the relationships that humans have always had with animals across cultures and societies, and the many meanings behind these relationships. We could also have asked an animal welfare scientist to unpack how differences in animal husbandry, and the advancements in this sector, have made animals’ lives better or worse.
But since we’ve so far taken a very anthropocentric - a human-centered perspective - to this series, we’re inviting on a different expert on ethics.
Bernice Bovenkerk at a philosopher of animal and environmental ethics at Wageningen University. She more broadly considers the interests of animals in her work, so I ask her to reflect on the claims made by the four futures about how they each think about and treat animals.
Debates about food, and meat in particular, are incredibly personal. They're really emotional. For some people farming or hunting animals for meat is a really key part of their identity. And their livelihoods are connected to raising livestock. And then at the same time, meat also involves the killing of animals. And it raises questions about ethics, and whether it's moral to eat animals. So as an ethicist, how do you approach this incredibly complex question of whether or not we should be eating animals.
Bernice Bovenkerk
In ethics, we have several different theories and of course they can all point in different directions. But the interesting thing I think is regarding killing animals for meat is that most theories when they’re applied to animal ethics actually point in the same direction - it's basically unethical to kill animals for food, and especially under the conditions that they are being kept at the moment.
Matthew
Here are a few of the conditions Bernice referred to: overcrowding, so having many animals packed into the same space; not having access to natural sunlight; and keeping animals in small enclosures that limit their ability to move or develop muscle.
Bernice
It’s very important that animals are sentient beings. So that means that they can experience pain and pleasure subjectively. So that's sort of like a minimal requirement to belong to the moral community.
Since animals have that they have interests, and they have an interest in avoiding pain, and having pleasure. Now, the way that most animals are being kept at the moment, in animal husbandry facilities, is infringing a lot on their well being.
Matthew
So animal ethicists take issue with systems that infringe on the animals’ welfare, especially in the confined settings found in much of modern animal agriculture.
Bernice
Another problem that many animal ethicists at least agree on is that killing animals as such, is harmful. So even if you would be able to raise animals in a sort of paradise-like conditions, and they have a good life, of course, they will still always - there's something to keep in the back of your mind, they will always be killed at a very young age. So pigs, for example, they're killed at seven months, usually. So that's basically when they're teenagers.
Matthew
Regardless if animals have a concept of death or have thoughts about wanting not to die, some ethicists like Bernice argue that we shouldn’t take away animals’ opportunities to live out the rest of their natural lives.
Bernice then laid out what might be the ethical case for eating animals, or under what conditions it’s more ethical to eat animals.
Bernice
If you're thinking from within a rights theory, then animals might have a right not to be harmed, and not to die, but the rights can always be trumped by other rights. So human rights, for example, if humans cannot find any other means of sustenance, then it might be allowed to kill animals for food. Same with what they call utilitarian theories, that say you have to weigh different interests against each other. And usually, you would argue that the interests of humans to eat meat doesn't really outweigh the interests of animals to be spared suffering and to be killed. But that really changes when, for example, you’re living in Greenland, and the only thing that you can eat is meat. So then, I think, according to many theories, it's okay to, to eat animals, as long as you don't kill more animals than you need. And as long as you kill them in a, you know, in a as, you know, harmless way as possible, and respectful way, you could say the same about, I guess, poor fishermen in Sri Lanka or something like that, you know, if they don't have any other means of income, then it would be allowed under certain conditions. I mean, they shouldn't over fish, for example.
Matthew
From the point of view of an animal ethicist - there’s a clear path that’s more moral and ethical - which is we shouldn’t kill animals for food unless there is no alternative.
But i want to add some context here - it’s estimated that livestock contribute up to 80 percent of agricultural GDP in developing countries; and over half a billion people living in rural areas rely on livestock for their livelihoods. So not having alternatives because of a lack of arable land, infrastructure, access to markets, and a lack of other economic possibilities, can actually be pretty widely applied across the globe. And increasing the availability of animal sourced foods like meat milk dairy and eggs, is a key way to tackle severe cases of undernutrition across Africa and Asia.
On the other hand, you can look at the scale of modern animal agriculture and consumption patterns across the global North.
Bernice
If you look at the numbers, it’s just incredible to think how many animals are being raised for food and if you compare to the number of wild animals that exist today, it’s just staggering, that’s just a tiny minority.
Matthew
Humans have completely changed what the earth looks like, and livestock play a considerable role in that. Today over 80 billion land animals are killed for food each year, and one study found that only 6% of all the combined weight of mammals on the earth is wild. Humans make up about 36% and livestock 58%.
I asked Berenice Bovenkerk on what she thinks of the ethical cases made by the four futures, starting with the efficient meat scenario, that aims to continue to increase the productivity of animals while using as few resources as possible. She starts by looking at the 26 story pig skyscrapers that recently went into operation in China.
Bernice
I think it would be the most efficient way to have these big pig flats, pig towers, like they actually do have now in China, for example, that's, you know, the the argument there is that it's better for the environment because you know, it can it doesn't take up much land. You can catch all the runoff and everything. But I think that's a very bad situation for the animals in terms of welfare, but I think there are also other considerations that actually go beyond welfare and that have to do with the instrumentalisation of animals. And I think just using them as if there are cheap products, or just things to be disposed of, are things that you can change at will by, you know, by technology or different breeding procedures. I think that's really not taking them as the creatures that they are. And it's making a very strict divide between human animals and all other animals, which I think is unwarranted.
Matthew
The meat and livestock industry do talk about animal welfare considerations. And they have made changes to production systems across the last half century. Some of which have degraded animal welfare and others which have improved it.
Ultimately, Bernice Bovenkerk argues that we shouldn’t be treating thinking and feeling beings as commodities. And in many settings, especially across Europe and the Americas, it’s not necessary to eat meat.
Bernice next considered the less meat future, where people eat fewer animals that are raised in ways mimic their natural environment.
Bernice
I think it's much better for animal welfare. It does have environmental problems. But if you then accept that people would need to eat much less meat, I think you could sort of counterbalance those problems. So I think it's from an ethical perspective, it's better at least, but still there, I would argue it's not necessary. You're still using animals in a sense as if they are things, even if you take into consideration their welfare, but also you're still killing them at a young age. So for example, I had a discussion here in the Netherlands, with a pig farmer who thinks he's doing really, you know, the best that he can for pigs and he calls it pig paradise, or a pig holiday camp or something like that. So he has very large pens, he keeps the piglets with the mother, they have places to hide, and they can brood in the mud and stuff like that. So they really can express their natural behavior. And then I asked him, at what age do you kill them, and he kills them at seven months of age. And that's a very young age for a pig to die. Right. I think even on that account, while it's better than the intensive way of farming, I still think there are problems there.
Matthew
I also asked Bernice what her thoughts were on hunting, since it’s another activity to kill animals for food, but the circumstances around their life are much different.
Bernice
So, hunting. Well, again, I think it's not necessary to eat meat. If people really you know are starving and they can't find any other source of sustenance then I think hunting is definitely better than keeping animals. Because the animals at least have had a natural life. And, you know, it's only the last moments of their life where they where they are in pain. I mean, it does mean that that people have to be very good at it, you know, they have to make sure that the that the animals are killed, you know, pretty much instantly. And also that they don't upset the population. I mean, there's always a problem when, you know, animals are hunted, that the whole social structure gets damaged. It’s not just a problem to the animals that you hunt. But it's also a problem to the animals that are left behind, because animals have social structures, and they have cultures as well. So you're interfering with that. So it's not morally neutral, right. That there is still a problem, although I think it is, from the point of view of the animals, it's probably they've had a better life than they usually would have under rearing conditions.
And I know that in the US, some people really do need to hunt - yeah, because they don't have literally don't have enough money to buy food, so they couldn't even buy pulses or grains or things like that. And in that case, I think there's a case to be made for hunting on small scale.
Matthew
So one of the arguments we've heard in this series is that we've either evolved because of our relationships with animals with the animals that we've eaten. So there's a social and a biological component to that, and that some of the landscapes that we cherish have been co created with animals, specifically with grazing animals, so how do you think about our past relationship with animals and what that means, if anything about what our present and future relationship with animals should look like?
Bernice
Well, I think first of all, we need to be careful not to make the historic fallacy: because something has always happened in the past, it's therefore okay to do it now, right. But of course, this argument is a bit more complex than that, it also seems to hint at that we are necessarily in this relationship or that if we would stop this relationship, things would change unrecognizably. And I want to make a parallel to another argument that I often hear, especially from my colleagues at Wageningen University, who are studying sustainability of land use and stuff like that. And they argue that it's better from an environmental point of view to eat a limited number of animals that are freely grazing in the wild, than to be completely vegan, because we need those animals to graze marginal lands that, you know, we can't use for our own crops and stuff like that. And I think well, two things. First of all, they are marginal lands, in our view, but not all land on Earth needs to be there, you know, as an instrument for humans, you can also let it lay waste or be used by other animals. And secondly, I think you can still have grazing animals. They do change landscapes, and they are sort of ecological engineers. But why does that mean that we need to kill and eat them?
Matthew
It’s worth noting that if we didn’t eat or cull these grazing animals, then the only way to maintain an ecological balance would be to reintroduce natural predators such as wolves. This presents its own set of conflicts between wildlife, local communities and farmers.
Bernice
And same goes for agroecology is becoming very popular now circular agriculture, food forests, things like that. Animals can definitely have a place there, they can even be sort of considered laborers, where they root there in the mud, they you know, I don't know they carry seeds and things like that, they graze to keep the landscape open. And these are all important functions. But none of that means that we therefore need to eat those animals.
Matthew
So how do you prioritize how to solve a certain situation when people have different values? So what I mean by that is, some people care more about climate change, or making sure that no one goes hungry, or about our ethical duty to other animals. As an ethicist, how do you approach a question like that where people clearly place stronger values on one side of the equation here?
Bernice
Well, first of all, I think we should not overdraw the conflicts between those different viewpoints. If you think about it from a environmental or climate point of view, it's still better to have less animals. I think it's much more efficient to have people eat plants to have people eat pulses, like lentils, and chickpeas and stuff like that, that's much more efficient, and you can get protein from that as well. So I don't think it's really an argument for food security, that we need to eat meat.
Of course the underlying question still holds, there are cases where there are conflicts between different values and that it is very difficult to get to weigh them up against each other and they are sort of intractable conflicts, I would say. And the only Yeah, it's it might seem like a bit of a cop out, but the only thing that I could say about that is that people need to deliberate, they need to tell each other where they're coming from, they need to show people what their values are and what they're based on. And then people can get an understanding of each other's point of view. And I don't think it can necessarily be solved. I mean, you can still, once everyone has an understanding of everybody's point of view, you can start looking for compromises. So for example, a strict vegan could say, okay, in the case of food security, if there's no other option, then it should be okay to hunt animals for meat. So that's a compromise from their perspective. And somebody who really likes meat can start to understand, well, also the animal perspective. So I think these things just need to be solved in context and in deliberation with each other.
Matthew
That was Bernice Bovenkerk, animal and environmental ethicist at Wageningen University.
Wrapping up this episode, I’m going to share a few reflections on these topics we just heard about - health, biodiversity and animal ethics - in relation to the four futures.
First, it’s difficult to make sweeping claims about clear paths forward for the future of meat and livestock. That’s because we’re not only dealing with complex scientific evidence, but because lots of solutions are 100% context-dependent.
There aren’t regions across the world where the health, environmental and ethical considerations are identical. That’s because people are eating different animals in different quantities and farming them in different production systems. Still we can zoom out and make some suggestions for a path forward - which I’ll talk about more in our concluding episode.
In thinking about the four futures, the efficient meat future, which favors chickens and pigs, and aims to increase the productivity of these animals using as little land and resources as possible -- could have some benefits from a health and biodiversity perspective. White meat like chicken is shown to have health benefits with fewer risks from excessive consumption. If you compare it to red meat. But on the other hand, thinking about the scale of chickens that are killed for food each year. We’re talking 70 billion birds, so nearly ten times the number of total humans on this planet. That’s when we get into the ethical concerns. And regardless of scale, eating chickens and pigs is still much less environmentally efficient than say eating beans or lentils.
For me, hearing these experts, the less meat future makes a lot of sense. From an ethical, environmental and health perspective. As Charles Godfray points out, there could be an important role for cattle, sheep, goats and even pigs to play in helping manage habitats at low densities to promote biodiversity. And cutting down on how much meat we eat in wealthy countries where meat consumption is really high, is especially important, as we expect an increase in animal consumption across Asia and Africa. And eating some, but not too much, meat is beneficial from a health point of view. So this approach seems fairly well rounded - although defining how much less is not easy. Though in regions where eating and raising animals is not your only option, you’re still treating animals as commodities for human use.
The plant-based and alternative meats also call for major reduction to meat consumption. While from an animal ethics perspective, these two are the . From a health perspective, they each carry some risks. Having no meat or no animal products puts you at extra risk of micronutrient deficiencies, although a well planned diet still meet all your nutritional requirements. And the alternative meats - which is a big category, do not carry the same nutrition as the meat they intend to replace.
We’ve got one more concluding episode for you. Next week we speak again with TABLE director and the original author of the four futures, Tara Garnett, to unpack how the futures are driven by our ideas of what types of change are possible. We’ll also hear comments from listeners and I’ll share some closing reflections on what I learned from making this series.
Thanks for listening. It’s not too late to rate and review us wherever you listen to podcasts, and you can still tell your friends and colleagues to listen!
Meat the four futures is funded by Formas, initiated by Future Food and presented by TABLE, a collaboration between the University of Oxford, Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences and Wageningen University.
A big thanks to our guests today - more information about their research and this project can be found on our website - tabledebates.org/meat
This episode was edited by me Matthew Kessler, with support from the wider TABLE team. Music by blue dot sessions and epidemic sound.
