Eating Our Planet

An opinion piece on eating.

September, 2019:  At the time of writing, the Amazon Rainforest is burning.  There are some 80,000 fires that have been raging for a month, with smoke plumes visible from space.  The number of fires is up by 80% compared to last year, according to a report by CNET. Brazil has declared an emergency.  The Amazon rainforest has been likened to the lungs of the planet, supplying 20% of the world’s oxygen supply, with 10% of its biodiversity. 

It’s an oxymoron that a rainforest can burn, but we’ve seen this before, because it occurs with unfailing regularity in our part of the world, with haze cloaking the skies and governments declaring emergencies and closing schools as forests and peatlands in parts of Indonesia and Malaysia ignite and burn during the dry season.  These are some of the lushest, wettest, most biologically rich forests in the world.

How can they burn?

The fires are set by humans, and they spin out of control, destroying ecosystems and throwing millions of tons of CO2 (Carbon Dioxide) into the atmosphere, while damaging the capacity of the land to absorb more CO2.    We burn forests because it is the fastest way to clear more land for agriculture and food production for a human population of 7 billion. We, humans, are altering our planetary ecosystem at the most dramatic rate in its history.

In August 2019, the UN IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) released a document entitled “Land is a Critical Resource”.  It notes that the way humans use land has a marked effect on climate change. Land use contributes 23% of human greenhouse gas emissions, the report notes, adding that “some dietary choices require more land and water and cause more emissions of heat-trapping gases than others.”  Indeed.

In other words, what and how we eat affects climate change.

We’ve assumed that we live in a world of infinite resource, and that things always work out, for how else could we have beaten that Malthusian conundrum of food production and population growth? Yet the reality of the reckoning for reckless consumption, such as lush rainforests in flames and increasingly erratic and extreme weather, intrudes on us. 

On August 23, 2019, CNN reported that the Amazon fires are set by loggers and ranchers clearing land for cattle. Brazil is the world’s largest exporter of beef, shipping 1.64 million tons of beef, and generating USD6.57 billion in revenue. The solution, the story concludes, is simple:  eat less meat.

The production of some foods is more energy-intensive than others, meat more so than plants, beef more so than pork and chicken.  The raw data makes for some eye-popping reading.

According to the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), humans consumed an astonishing 43.5kg of meat per year, on average, based on 2017 data, with a steady uptrend over the years. The number of domestic animals far outnumbers their wild counterparts.  As of 2016, there are an estimated 1.5 billion cattle, 23 billion chickens, and 980 million pigs on the planet.

Livestock is the world’s largest user of land resources, with 80% of total agricultural land dedicated to the production of animal feed and grazing.  Nearly 60% of the world’s agricultural land is used for beef production, which accounts for only 2% of the calories consumed throughout the world. 

A single kilogram of beef requires 15,400 litres of water, on average, while mutton requires 8,763 litres of water, pork 5,988 litres of water and chicken 4325 litres, according to Globalagriculture.org.  A single kilogram of vegetables, on the other hand, requires just 322 litres of water.

The story gets no better where the emission of greenhouses gases is concerned: a 2000 kcal high meat diet produces two and a half times as much greenhouse gas emission as a vegan diet and twice as much as a vegetarian diet, with a saving of a whopping 1,230kg of CO2 a year between a high meat diet and a vegetarian one.

The world consumption of meat is rising, especially in developing countries such as China, with a 38% increase from 2000 to 2014, according to the FAO.

The simple fact is, people like to eat meat.

Meat-eating is baked into our makeup.  Our proto-human ancestors were foragers who ate a plant-based diet and gradually became meat-eaters, initially through scavenging, and later through hunting.  Nutrition wise, plants are a lot less calorie-dense and require much more chewing, making the whole process of nutrition a tedious and time-consuming affair. 

Eating meat, on the other hand, gave proto-humans a turbo boost in the evolutionary stakes with calorie-dense meat, which allowed development of the large, energy-hungry brains of modern humans.  In fact, scientists link meat-eating to our becoming human. 

Our evolutionary proclivity to eating meat, however, isn’t the same as saying that 21^st century humans, have to eat meat, given the vast array of choices of food, food preparations and modern knowledge of nutrition.  Hundreds of millions of people around the world are vegetarians or vegans by choice, religion or culture. 

Adding to the mix is the finding, endorsed by the WHO (World Health Organisation), that red meat is a probable carcinogen or cancer-causing, while processed meats (smoked and preserved meats such as sausages, salamis, bacon, ham, etc) show “strong evidence” of causing cancer.

The effect on the environment of raising animals for their meat has not passed unnoticed, with increased health concerns about eating red meat. Unsurprisingly, there has been a groundswell of concern of sustainability and a surge of interest, especially in the developed countries, of more responsible food choices.

Leading this is the interest in vegetarian and vegan diets, while another interesting development that’s taking place is in the area of plant-based meat substitutes.

Vegetarian dishes that mimic meat aren’t new by any stretch of the imagination. “Mock meat” traces its origins to ancient China. As far back as the Tang dynasty (AD618-907) convincing replicas of meat were served at official functions. The tradition can be traced back to early Buddhist monasteries in China after Buddhism was widely adopted from India.

Although there is no prohibition on meat-eating in Buddhism, Buddhist monasteries adopted vegetarianism as a norm, an adaptation of a long-held belief in China of the health benefits of a vegetarian diet over a meat-based one.  Meat eating is generally regarded as coarser and ‘heatier’, encouraging the baser desires in humans, contrasted with a ‘cooler’ vegetarian diet which dampens the baser instincts and promotes refinement in thought and character.  

Meat replicas are thought to have come about to accommodate meat-eating patrons and pilgrims at these early monasteries.  The Chinese vegetarian mock-meat diet is now a well-established culinary discipline, featuring realistic-looking char siew, prawns, squid, fish, duck and other animal meats, presented and cooked to further mimic their real meat counterparts. The illusion only lasts only as long as the mock meat isn’t bitten into, however, because they taste nothing like the real thing.

Meat-eaters who sympathise with the cause for vegetarianism but still like their occasional meaty meal are known as ‘flexitarians’.  As a colleague of mine put it, “I was a vegetarian for a year out of concern for the environment, but once I ate some meat again, there was no going back!” Even hardcore environmentalists find their determination wilting when presented with a hearty, meaty meal.  But what if you could still eat your meat and save the environment, not to mention the cow?

Technology and old-fashioned innovation are developing a new range of plant-based meat products that mimic the real thing.   As one of them puts it on their website: “The Thing is, Who Says Meat Has to Come from Cows?”

Leading the charge are relatively new, start-up companies in the food industry. Relative lightweights, they have, nevertheless, shaken up the industry and interested consumers enough to draw in the heavyweights of the food industry – the Nestles and Tyson Foods of the world.

The banner children of this vanguard are Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods. Their mission is as lofty as the problem: not merely to provide a meat alternative, but to change the future of meat production as we know it from the primitive, animal-slaughtering process, sidestep an environmental Armageddon, and save the planet. 

They’ve captured the public imagination.  Impossible Foods faces challenges meeting demand, with its meat-substitute selling in chain outlets of White Castle, Hard Rock Café, Red Robin and Burger King in the US as well as a host of other restaurants, while Beyond Meat is available at US supermarkets as well as chain outlets of Subways, Carl’s Jr, TGI Fridays and Tim Hortons, among others.  Both are available internationally, although in limited markets.

Beyond Meat’s shares recently traded above 700% of their IPO in May 2019, while privately-held Impossible Foods, expected to issue its IPO soon, has attracted funding from heavyweights such as Temasek Holdings, Bill Gates and Google Ventures.

Beyond Meat uses a range of technologies to produce meat-like products, from pork sausages and chicken to burger patties. Impossible Foods analysed the appeal of meat, finding the magic ingredient to be heme, an iron molecule which occurs in all animals and plants, and finding a way to genetically engineer its production in yeast from leghemoglobin, which is found naturally in the roots of soy plants. 

Both companies produce ‘bleeding’ meat products (the ‘blood’ from meat is actually myoglobin, an oxygen-carrying protein) which have proven to be wildly popular with consumers. 

On their website, Impossible Foods say they commissioned an independent company to conduct an environmental Life-Cycle Analysis of their product which concludes that their meat substitutes consume 96% less land, 87% less water, and emit 89% fewer Greenhouse gas emissions than the meat equivalent.

Beyond Meat commissioned the University of Michigan to conduct a Life Cycle Analysis that found that their burger consumes 99% less water, occupies 93% less land, emits 90% less Greenhouse gases and consumes 46% less energy to produce than the meat equivalent.

I have tried Impossible Foods’ Burger 2.0, and find that I can’t distinguish it from real meat, which sounds impossible, but it’s true.

We celebrate food, build entire institutions, cultures, religions, cultures, societies and ceremonies around it.  Food defines us and who we are to a large extent, but we can no longer ignore the costs of how that food arrives at our tables.  There are choices, with modern technology giving us more choices than ever before.  And that’s without even considering the welfare of the billions of animals slaughtered annually for their meat.

Our lifestyles and our planet depend on it.