Photo by Jan Huber on Unsplash

Should I Stop Eating Meat? Part VI

Breaking down the ‘global citizen’ assumption to make things UK specific

Part of a series. Part V here.

From what part of the distributions do we in the UK eat?

Earlier on we did some comparisons between the CO2e ‘savings’ of dietary change and other things we get up to. It turned out that changing your diet to consume less/no animal-based foods had a hefty impact on your individual footprint. Furthermore, depending on your starting point, it was likely that this change could be the single biggest thing you could do to cut your personal carbon footprint. The dietary change numbers were based on the global averages that PN2018 published in their meta-analysis. Then we looked a bit at how agriculture works and reasons why there are sometimes very wide distributions of attributed emissions for the same piece of food.

It’s now time to try and piece together what exactly happens in the UK (where I live) and see if that changes the picture. To reiterate what we saw, it is still the case that plant-based protein sources will almost always produce less GHG than animal-based protein sources gram per gram of protein. But:

• what if when we compare the ‘best’ produced animal-based food to the ‘worst’ produced plant-based food on an annual basis it changes the picture?
• what if we could get our hands on what the numbers are roughly for the UK instead of guessing where the UK stands in the distributions of each food product?

Once again, MBL comes to the rescue with a full spectrum of estimates in his book for food products in the UK that are on the back of years of research he has done for a UK supermarket chain. So let’s get stuck in.

Redefine our CO2e per 50g protein

The only change we need to make is in redefining our CO2e cost per meal — which we asserted would be a 50g protein portion. The rest stays the same — the comparatives, the constructed diets, the monotonously sterile blue colour scheme etc. So how does it all look now?

Image by author

Few observations worth mentioning at this stage:

• it turns out that UK beef (and lamb) has a smaller footprint than the global numbers we used before. Using what we’ve looked at before this might be a combination of various factors such as lower than average opportunity cost of the land we use to home them and grow their food on, feeding them more grass or more efficient manure management. Or all of it.
• overall the CO2e cost ranking remains largely intact: red meat, dairy, white meat / fish, plant-based

And how does our dietary change matrix look now?

Image by author

Again, quite different. Instead of the previously calculated 3,760kg of annual CO2e savings from heading from ‘Heavy Meat’ to ‘Vegan’, we’re now sitting at 1,136kg. Do these changes seem sensible? To answer that, we can cross reference them with MBL’s work in HBAB. There he estimates the CO2e of a weekly food shop with:

• 15kg savings going from ‘average’ to vegetarian
• 25kg savings going from ‘average’ to vegan

Annualising those numbers up then gets us savings of 780kg and 1,300kg. So yes — we’re in the right ball park. But how do these numbers now compare to the other activities we mentioned?

Image by author

The picture seems to have somewhat changed:

• travel is now looming more than ever before even when compared to a ‘Heavy Meat’ eater heading on over to veganism
• me choosing to forgo a few portions of meat a week all year to become a full vegetarian would be completely undone by my careless MacBook pro trashing antics

Just as per before, the answer to the question that kicked this ramble off depends on your own individualistic starting point. But when it comes to me, the answer it seems is ‘no’. As someone who:

• eats meat probably on average once every 3 weeks
• lives and eats food in the UK

it seems like the finger should be squarely pointed at my travel habits. Driving round Europe. Taking a few short haul flights. None of this is saying that dietary choice isn’t important — as we’ve demonstrated above there are very large savings from cutting down from substantial meat eating. Just that for me, again purely in terms of CO2e, the move to become a ‘proper vegetarian’ for ‘the environment’ would be missing the point and energy should be spent instead minimising or finding greener ways to travel.

Okay great — so if I’m in the UK I don’t really need to care about dietary change?

No. Before rushing to put meat back on the menu, it’s worth making sure we’re crystal about what conclusion we’ve arrived at. Clearly there are still big individual gains to be made from moving from a ‘Heavy Meat’ diet to ‘Modest Meat’ diet or further. And as per Part I, these changes are not just a nice to have but essential to be able to keep global temperature change below 2 degrees. But based on the fact I:

• live in the UK and so (for once) benefit from its shocking weather
• don’t eat that much meat anyway

it’s not the Buzzfeed-esque ‘single biggest best thing I can do’ to become a total veggie and instead should look at other habits. On a more macro level (so not all just about me) there are other issues that haven’t been looked at. Yes, the UK appears to have lower carbon food than the global averages. But yes, the UK is still part of a global agriculture sector. And the same applies for other ‘developed’ countries that share the same lower carbon food profile as the UK.

One example where it’s clear the impact of global supply chains is soy. Soy is often quoted as ‘driving rainforest deforestation’, but that simply doesn’t play out in the data. Below shows what soy is actually used for — again courtesy of HR from here:

Image by Hannah Ritchie at Our World In Data

So it seems soy is mostly produced for animal feed — in particular chicken feed. But that’s not exactly the point I’m trying to make here. Soy is a global commodity and there are 2 main suppliers — the US and Brazil each producing around 1/3 of global supply. NHN is very keen to point out that animals in the US do not consume much soy feed from deforested rainforest and so developed world meat-eating should not be linked to deforestation. But that misses the point. A point helpfully illustrated by Donald Trump (knew we could find a way to blame him).

Following the initiation of the ‘trade war’ between China and the US, Chinese tariffs on US soy ramped up Chinese demand for Brazilian soy very helpfully demonstrating the substitutability of soy. In other words:

• if the US wasn’t feeding soy to animals within its borders
• then it could export it to feed animals in other parts of the world
• it then lessens the demand on soy from parts of the world where the (environmental) opportunity cost of growing soy is higher

So no — just because our locality might have lower carbon food than the global average doesn’t mean we’re outside of the problem. What is grown locally, on lower opportunity cost land, could be being used to lower the overall land opportunity cost of the global food system.

So that’s it then?

Yeah kinda. Well almost. There’s one more thing I think it’s worth having a look at before wrapping things up. We’ve talked a load about food. But now it’s time to have a look at food waste. The final hurrah.

Should I Stop Eating Meat? Part VII