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264: What Should I Eat in a Climate Crisis?

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About this episode

In the penultimate episode of our How to Live a Good Life in a Climate Crisis, our hosts talk about food and food systems. How can we enjoy meals while eating responsibly? 

Tom, Paul and Christiana find it difficult to digest our lopsided relationship with food, in which more than two billion people face food insecurity and a third of all food goes to waste. 

The conversation is free-range - the hosts reveal what shaped their own rituals around eating. They look at how humanity’s relationship with food went from trust to anxiety, from abundance to scarcity. They argue the merits of different veggie burgers.

About a third of all human-caused greenhouse gas emissions is linked to food. To limit global warming while feeding a growing population, every part of the food system - from farming to refrigeration - must become cleaner and more efficient.


NOTES AND RESOURCES

Global Nutrition Report
More than a billion people obese worldwide, research suggests
Outrage + Optimism: Our Story of Nature, From Rupture to Reconnection
Outrage + Optimism: Yuval Noah Harari on the History of Our Future
Outrage + Optimism: 2% for 1.5 with Yuval Noah Harari
Drivers of Deforestation
Outrage + Optimism: Going Beyond Meat with Ethan Brown
Outrage + Optimism: Hungry for Alternatives?
How to Grow Your Own Food
Environmental Impacts of Food Production
42% of consumers worldwide think most people will likely be eating plant-based food instead of meat in the next ten years
Implementing land-based mitigation to achieve the Paris Agreement in Europe requires food system transformation
The carbon footprint of foods
How to reduce the carbon footprint of your food
Hope Farm Statement
Fishing boat caught with Illegal 18-mile-long nets


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Full Transcript


Tom: [00:00:05] Hello and welcome to Outrage + Optimism. I'm Tom Rivett-Carnac.

Christiana: [00:00:09] I'm Christiana Figueres.

Paul: [00:00:09] And I'm Paul Dickinson.

Tom: [00:00:10] Today we continue our series on how to live a good life in a climate crisis. And we're talking about food. Thanks for being here. Okay, friends. So we're back with another episode in our series on how to live a good life in a climate crisis. And this week, we're going to be tackling another issue that has been raised repeatedly by listeners. And this is something that I think really cuts to the heart of how we live at this moment, because it's so fundamental to all of us. And that is the issue of food, food and food systems. Now we should start.

Christiana: [00:00:48] You know, Tom, actually, I think most listeners referred to food when we asked them which topics should we talk about. Load More
Tom: [00:00:56] I think that's true, actually.

Christiana: [00:00:57] So it really is, it's just so central to all our lives, isn't it.

Tom: [00:01:00] Absolutely.

Paul: [00:01:01] Well, I mean, I mean it's not often you can say this about a topic, but we actually are food. Like, you know, we're not air travel and we're not our homes and we're not our jobs. But I'm made of food. So just to say it's me, I'm talking about myself here. Carry on.

Tom: [00:01:15] Now, we should point out before we begin this that even having this conversation is a privilege, isn't it, Christiana?

Christiana: [00:01:21] It is such a luxury to be able to talk about which food should we eat, given the fact that although we have less and less people who are dying of hunger, there still is a lot of hunger in the world increasingly produced by sorry guys, by men who are in conflict with each other.

Paul: [00:01:43] I think it's us that should be apologizing, Christiana. I do apologize as best I can.

Christiana: [00:01:49] So there's so much hunger that is war induced, isn't it. In addition to extreme weather induced, for sure. But but the other huge issue is food waste. So one third of all the food that we produce is wasted. I mean, that is just such a crime, right. And if you think of it sort of going from farm to fork, where is food wasted. It's wasted at the farm because it doesn't look pretty or it doesn't have the, you know, necessary.

Paul: [00:02:22] And what about the abundance, so to say, you know, that's the other thing. You sometimes you pass a shop in a kind of rich neighborhood, and it'll just be kind of masses and masses of every imaginable kind of fresh foods flown often from all over the world. And you kind of know that there just aren't that many people around there. And, you know, half that's all going to be thrown away. But it's sort of, you know, it's giving a sort of incredibly luxurious, extra living joy to a very small number of people whilst there's so many other people in terrible trouble. 

Christiana: [00:02:50] Precisely. 

Tom: [00:02:50] And I mean, so this is, you know, everything we've talked about in this series has really deep undertones of equity and injustice right. You know, we're talking about air travel or anything else. But this is really fundamental because the situation you're both describing with waste, with profligacy, is in the context of the fact that the Global Nutrition Report said that actually, today, most people around the world cannot access or afford the healthy food that they would like. 2 billion people face food and nutrition insecurity, and 820 million people are still undernourished. So there is a deep vein of justice and equity running through this conversation that we should just acknowledge at the top end.

Christiana: [00:03:25] And unnecessary.

Tom: [00:03:26] And unnecessary.

Christiana: [00:03:27] Because of the way the system, the food system is structured. So it's not like we don't have food for these people. It's it is just completely it's because of the structure of the food system.

Paul: [00:03:39] So the other side about the food system is it's not necessarily working for what you might call the wealthy, or at least people who appear to be able to have high calorie diets because more than a billion people are obese, according to a BBC article I recently read. So we've got a terrible problem at both ends. And, you know, people will always wonder how you can have a world, a society as we call it, society where you have such inequality between people with too much food and too little. It's insane.

Tom: [00:04:03] I mean, we don't need to spend too much longer on this, but with the rise, have you been tracking the rise of things like Ozempic in the US and other places, these new weight loss drugs that you have injections. So we have a situation where a large proportion of the world cannot get enough food, and a large proportion are injecting themselves with drugs. Now, the cost of the, the, the, the health cost of being overweight or obese is terrible. So we need to be sympathetic towards that.

Paul: [00:04:23] Just to be clear, injecting themselves with drugs to eat less?

Tom: [00:04:26] To eat less food so that they can actually lose weight. So when you look at this system writ large and the damage that it's creating in the whole, each individual story makes sense. And we should have compassion for people at all ends of that spectrum.

Christiana: [00:04:37] Absolutely.

Tom: [00:04:38] However, the net effect of the system is insane.

Paul: [00:04:41] Well, very rebrand here. I'm not going to call it system. I'm going to call it the chaos, the food chaos. And we probably need a system but.

Tom: [00:04:47] Now should we start by positioning ourselves within that food chaos? So what's what is.

Christiana: [00:04:51] But can I just say two things? Sorry, before we go there because I do think that we want to focus on the individual relationship to food. But I would be amiss to the fact that I am a trained anthropologist if if I did not point out that in addition to what we have said, food is one of the factors that is absolutely at the core of culture, tradition, rituals has always been, has always been in all cultures, and, and I think that is one of the reasons why it is very difficult to change food habits, because ancestrally, ancestrally, it goes very, very deep, and, and even if we think that today we're no longer having the rituals around food preparation and food consumption that that other societies continue to have. The fact is, just think I mean in my home just think about it, I actually do, when I prepare food, I call everyone to the table and I want everybody sitting at the table, and I want a beautiful table, so that people really appreciate the fact that we are having a meal together. That is a ritual. You know, I mean, it's not the ritual in the sense of what anthropologists would study as a ritual, but that is a ritual, and it continues to have that social and community building effect to come around a table, break bread, right. Come and break bread with me. So it really does have that, that very beautiful, I think very beautiful contribution to society. The other thing that I wanted to point out is, do you remember in the nature series that we did, we traced our relationship to nature, and went back to the point when we as humans moved from being hunters and gatherers of food. And then we moved to being sedentary farmers of food.

Tom: [00:07:04] Although farmers aren't that sedentary, I should point out the farmers I know.

Christiana: [00:07:07] Well, but this is 12,000 years ago.

Tom: [00:07:10] I know what you're talking about. 

Paul: [00:07:10] It's non nomadic.

Tom: [00:07:11] Yeah, non nomadic.

Christiana: [00:07:12] Non nomadic. Non-nomadic. And that was the point at which we actually broke our relationship with nature. So it's so interesting that it was actually our relationship with food, our changed relationship with food that broke our relationship with nature. That is so ironic.

Tom: [00:07:29] Yeah, I love that.

Paul: [00:07:30] And maybe it can bring us back.

Tom: [00:07:32] Yeah.

Christiana: [00:07:32] Good point.

Tom: [00:07:33] I mean, that Yuval friend of the podcast, Yuval Noah Harari, you know, when he's talked about the fact that when that moment when we went through and made that decision to stop trusting in the bounty of day to day ability to find our food and instead growing it, it created a whole range of other functions of human life that are so familiar to us today. Things like anxiety, right, if you're just trusting that the next day will provide you food, what do you need to be anxious about once you're growing it then there's the anxiety of will it grow. And then you need to store it and someone else might take it. And a lot of these different elements.

Paul: [00:08:02] I think there's higher purchase anxiety when you're wandering around thinking the food will appear. I think each day.

Tom: [00:08:06] Yeah. No. So you don't want you don't want to deify that too much. But I do think that there's a big change that happened in the relationship and in the trust that happens. So I like that Christiana, you don't often play the trained anthropologist card, but that was a very good point.

Christiana: [00:08:19] Anyway, let us now focus on where we were going to focus, which is at the individual level.

Tom: [00:08:24] Which is our own relationship with food. Paul, why don't you start?

Paul: [00:08:26] Yeah, actually very complicated relationship with food in a sense. As a child, I had sort of problems with food. I think there might have been kind of weird power issues playing out. I don't know how it works, but I was pretty odd. But then I think I got in a fairly, so to say, normal.

Tom: [00:08:42] Define odd?

Paul: [00:08:44] Just large numbers of food I'd completely refuse to eat sort of anything green or you know that. And my, my, my family sort of were indifferent to my, you know, you know, they didn't force me to eat anything. And so I was kind of just in a, in a very weird little childish area of food. But from the age of about 16 onwards, I got into a normal relationship with food. But what I would say is that I'm very familiar with eating, you know, quite a lot of meat, dairy, this kind of thing has always been kind of in my diet, and it's only in the in the sort of 25 years that I've been working on climate change that started to occur to me that, you know, Houston, we have a problem, as they said on the NASA missions, actually just here on the on the way to record today, I walked past a supermarket and I saw enormous photo of sort of steak, cooked steak, and then another photo next to it of eggs, you know, being poured out. And it made me realize how much animal products are sort of part of a, a deep kind of sensational pull.

Paul: [00:09:42] You know, this is this is retail science. Put those photos on the outside of the supermarket. There's something in the psychology of us, I remember actually seeing someone from an indigenous community. They said, what's the best thing in life? This person said, meat and honey. You know, for a nomadic person living in a very traditional way, those are those are really big things. But I would just I would I would go on to say that I've been on a journey away from meat and it's far from complete, but I think one of the, one of the things that last thing I'd say is most striking for me, and I'm actually going to quote a listener here, two nerds abroad 2324 say vegan for the planet and the animals. And I really want to point out that I think the worst part of so much of, of food that people don't talk about is the cruelty to animals in the farming system. And and one last completely bonkers point I want to make about that is, as many of you know, I'm increasingly sure that the machines will take over in due course and they'll probably end up treating us the way we treat animals. So we ought to be very nice to animals would be my advice. But what about your relationship with food? 

Tom: [00:10:44] It's a slightly harrowing warning, isn't it, for us to.

Paul: [00:10:47] Who's going to, Christiana? 

Christiana: [00:10:49] Yeah. So I grew up. I grew up in a family where my my mother was very strict about food, very, very strict. She was, you know, very protein, protein driven, animal protein driven. She never allowed anyone to leave anything on the plate, whether we liked it or not. So it was a very, food was not really something that we enjoyed. It was a discipline. It was a rigor.

Paul: [00:11:17] I'm sorry.

Christiana: [00:11:18] And and and it obeyed a very, very traditional, I would say, understanding of food. And like you, Paul, it wasn't until I really got seriously into climate change that I realized, whoa, whoa, whoa, wait a minute. Animal protein is not, A, it's not necessary for me. And it has all the consequences of, of high emissions and deforestation, which to me, as a developing country person, that is so important right. The deforestation that is at the basis of meat production. But I also what I thought was so fascinating is that I had always had a very, very difficult digestive system. Completely unpredictable, just really weird. And when I stopped eating red meat, in particular red meat, my digestive symptoms just went completely normal and predictable. And I'm like, oh my God, I feel so much better. So yeah, it's been years since, since I don't have red meat at all anymore. And I remember one time, Paul, that you thought you were going to treat me to something really special, and you invited me to a restaurant in London that serves plant based hamburgers. Do you remember this?

Paul: [00:12:42] I do.

Christiana: [00:12:43] And you were just so excited, you know, that I would have.

Tom: [00:12:47] This must be going back a few years if this was new, a new thing.

Paul: [00:12:49] It was actually, it was the Beyond Meat burger had just come out. It was Honest Burger, and I thought it was such a, such a realistic hamburger that you would be interested.

Christiana: [00:12:57] Yeah, yeah. So we went and, you know, I just thought it was so sweet of you that you wanted to give me this experience. And I bit into this hamburger and I thought, I just can't take the taste anymore. It was it just tasted too much like meat. And it's just nothing that my taste buds can actually, you know, do anymore. I just.

Tom: [00:13:17] These poor people, they've been working hard to simulate meat, and then it had the opposite impact on you.

Paul: [00:13:21] They succeeded. But you know.

Christiana: [00:13:23] And then later on, we found out from the CEOs of, of, of plant based meat that we interviewed here on the podcast that that is actually correct, that what they produce is not for vegans, it's actually for meat eaters who want to continue eating meat because they have that in their taste buds, but they want to feel better about it. And I thought, I know exactly what he means right. It was like, I remember that time that Paul wanted to give me a plant based hamburger that I did not like at all.

Paul: [00:13:55] But one point on that is if you hadn't eaten it, you would not have experienced the the digestive difficulty that you used to have with beef.

Christiana: [00:14:02] Yes.

Paul: [00:14:02] I have found, as you know, as a beef burger eater, going to a plant based Beyond Meat burger eater, that it tastes the same, but afterwards I have less sort of digestive weight. You know, my stomach feels sort of lighter and healthier afterwards. So there you go. Tom?

Tom: [00:14:18] I think it's fascinating that you both started with your childhood, you know, because it just says so much about how. 

Christiana: [00:14:25] Ritualistic.

Tom: [00:14:26] Ritualistic, there was no invitation that we were going to start this with a description of a relationship with food in our childhood. But you both instinctively started there, and I think that's I mean, that's interesting to me as a parent of young children who are having their formative years around food apart from anything else. I don't think I had a definitive experience of food as a child, necessarily. I think it was sufficiently permissive to not be like a defining experience, like it was for either of you.

Paul: [00:14:49] And you lived in many different countries.

Tom: [00:14:50] And we lived in many different countries. So I kind of had to get a fairly diverse palate when I was young. And then growing up, I was aware of the climate crisis young. And so I became vegetarian. Actually not now I think about it for climate reasons, but for animal welfare reasons. When I was like at university and I was vegetarian for about 15 years, which after a couple of years of being vegetarian food just no longer seems like I mean, meat no longer seems like food, like you smell bacon or you smell a hamburger, and it just doesn't trigger any of those sensory reactions that make you feel hungry, which is really interesting how that change happens. I reckon it takes about a year or 18 months. And then later in life when I had kids and we moved back to the UK and back to Devon. I remember chatting with Natasha, my wife, and it just felt very strange that we were eating sort of bananas flown in from the Dominican Republic, but we weren't eating the lamb that was grown on the fields next to our house. So we started sort of slowly eating a bit of meat again. And we now do eat some local meat that is grown in Devon.

Tom: [00:15:48] And we try to be as mindful as we can about it. Of course, the challenge is anyone who has kids will know is once you start introducing kids to delicious things like salami and ham, you then need to kind of keep a lid on it so that they end the diet of the family, ends up remaining as healthy as you can. And like many other people, we sort of struggle to make sure that that remains healthy. But we have lots of local, really good food where we live. So that's all really good. And I don't think that. And we'll get into some of the statistics here. I don't think that science requires that all of us are 100% plant based all the time, but it does require that more of us are more plant based, more of the time. And so I would say I probably eat meat 2 or 3 times a week in some form, but not large amounts. And then we have it in the house because of the kids. So but it's a complicated relationship. We struggle with it and we go back and forth, Paul's laughing at me.

Paul: [00:16:36] I'm smiling just because we shared a teacher called Stephan Harding who taught us both about climate change. He worked with Lovelock, very brilliant scientist and communicator. You remember what he called sheep? 

Tom: [00:16:47] Yeah. Maggots on the hillside?

Paul: [00:16:48] No maggots on the face of Gaia. That's what he called it.

Tom: [00:16:50] It's true. No, it's very complicated. 

Paul: [00:16:53] And his point. If anyone's wondering why he would say such a strange thing. But he's a very good communicator. He sees nature as wanting to burst up, you know, to rewild. There's a great will for our fields to rewild themselves. And the little sheep go along and just stop it happening. 

Tom: [00:17:07] And stop them doing it. And the final thing I should add is that because I'm very lucky where I live and we have a small bit of land, we grow quite a bit of our own food. So we have big herb garden, we have vegetable gardens, we grow flowers and that's amazing and that's great. It's a very healthy thing to do. Well, flowers for the house. My wife has a beautiful, beautiful polytunnel full of flowers that we keep in the house.

Paul: [00:17:27] I'm being silly. You have lovely flowers.

Christiana: [00:17:29] You can't eat many flowers.

Tom: [00:17:31] You can eat many flowers actually, yeah,

Christiana: [00:17:32] But, you know, I think it's interesting to, reflect back to listeners. So when we asked them what should we do about food, food behaviour, it was the results that we got are interesting. 44% of our listeners polled listeners said, eat less meat. 47 said eat no meat. And 9% said eat lab grown meat. So there again, right not.

Tom: [00:18:03] Indicative of the struggle we have about it.

Christiana: [00:18:04] The struggle that we have.

Tom: [00:18:06] Yeah.

Paul: [00:18:06] But also the opportunity, sorry Tom, you were going to say.

Tom: [00:18:09] No, go ahead.

Paul: [00:18:09] Also also the opportunities, because I'm kind of thinking about a way to frame this, which is essentially this notion of food science, which I describe as the opposite of cooking. Cooking is making the same things taste different. And we've been doing that for thousands of years.

Christiana: [00:18:23] Wait wait wait. Cooking is what?

Paul: [00:18:24] Making the same things taste different. That's, you know, you're.

Tom: [00:18:28] Making poisonous things palatable.

Paul: [00:18:30] Or making poisonous things palatable, but mostly it's kind of like, you know, a recipe book is about lots of different foods that you get from kind of similar ingredients. Food science is the exact reverse, and we've only been doing it for a few years now and is making different things taste the same. And I believe that we are going to see meat. For example, a lot of meat leave our diets without us noticing. It's going to be blended in and you know, and just one thing.

Christiana: [00:18:53] And you will trick me back into having one of these hamburgers.

Paul: [00:18:56] I will, I will trick you back. But but the other thing just to say, and I just want to throw this in, is, is it something of all the subjects that we're covering, I think this is one where so many people can get involved. You know, it's very hard.

Christiana: [00:19:09] Yes, it's so under your influence.

Paul: [00:19:10] It's very hard to go off and make an electric airplane, you know what I mean.

Tom: [00:19:13] That's true. But you can grow food. 

Paul: [00:19:15] Every single level. We're involved with food.

Tom: [00:19:17] Well, let's talk a little bit about the scale of the impact here. And then we can get into some of the solutions. So the food system is responsible for one third of greenhouse gas emissions. Now, of course, that doesn't also cover the impact on nature, which is huge. But in terms of emissions, one third more than all the cars on the planet.

Christiana: [00:19:34] And it's mostly because of deforestation.

Tom: [00:19:36] Mostly because of deforestation. So the biodiversity impact alongside that is absolutely overwhelming. 50% of food emissions come from meat and dairy, and the proportion of, actual calories that that provides is significantly less than 50%. I think it's more like 15%. So meat and dairy proportionately is by far the largest impact. And of course, we're going to need to feed 2 billion additional citizens by the mid to the second half of the century without while also reducing this impact. So that's the scale of it. Now what's interesting is.

Christiana: [00:20:11] Can I add something else?

Tom: [00:20:12] Please, yeah.

Christiana: [00:20:12] Because the other thing one is the climate implications. But as I think both of you already mentioned, the other big thing is about killing animals. And you know, I've often thought that my grandchildren will ask me, wait a second. So you used to put liquid into vehicles, but I think they will also ask me, wait a second. So did you guys used to kill animals to eat them. I think it's going to happen that quickly, I think, really is that generation that is being born now for whom killing animals to eat them is going to be untenable. 

Paul: [00:20:53] Well, it's not just killing them, keeping them in such close quarters that they have to be injected with antibiotics, raising the risk of catastrophic loss of of the ability for us to produce antibiotics, which is a gigantic issue we need to cover in another show.

Tom: [00:21:08] Well, I mean, just to double click on your point, Christiana, a recent Globescan survey suggested that 42% of consumers worldwide think that most people will be eating plant based meat plant based diets within ten years.

Christiana: [00:21:21] Yeah. Good.

Tom: [00:21:22] So half the global population believes that it's that close to a systemic tipping point.

Paul: [00:21:26] It's already like 100 $120 billion market. And just remember Ethan Brown that we had on the chief executive of Beyond Meat. He said something that I never got out of my head. He said, you know, if we pull this off, if we can engineer meat out of the food system, we liberate 90% of farmland. Now, even if he's exaggerating, even if it's only 70%. Hello. Big number.

Tom: [00:21:47] Yeah, yeah. And the impact of that on nature is absolutely incredible. Rewilding. Now, just a couple more statistics before we get into solutions. In terms of plant based diets, in the last five years, the number of people worldwide who are exclusively plant based has risen from 17 to 22%. That's a large rise in just five years.

Paul: [00:22:06] Very fast.

Tom: [00:22:06] And this is really interesting to me. 90% of people say that environmentally responsible and healthy food is very important to them. Now, we would something that is connected to climate solutions that already has an endemic interest of 90% of the people, saying, this is very important to me and we would never get there on like changing light bulbs, or yeah. 

Christiana: [00:22:28] And not just interest, totally under my control, right. What I put in my mouth is totally nobody puts food in my mouth, right. I put food in my mouth. So it is absolutely under my personal control. I think that's the exciting part. And that's why it's so such a powerful lever of change.

Tom: [00:23:54] So let's go there. So let's say under my control, we've all described our own sort of relationship with food, and it's complicated for us. And it will be complicated for everyone listening as well. But Christiana, maybe you want to start. How do we what do we think it means to live well in a time of the climate crisis with relation to food and diet?

Christiana: [00:24:10] Well, I think I would love to go back to the intro that we recorded actually for this whole series, because I think it's a really important framing. And that is I don't think that it is prudent, wise, fair to condemn people for what they're eating right now. What I think is important is for each of us to establish the baseline. What am I eating right now? What am I feeding my family right now? Because those are choices that I'm making. Establish that as a baseline and then set out a pathway toward less animal products being consumed. And so it's it's much more of a path toward progress or a path pebbled with progress than going from wherever you are now to perfection, because that's just not the way most human beings act. And the other wise part about that is it allows everyone to establish their baseline. So someone who's eating meat seven days a week, that's their baseline and they can definitely improve. Me, I'm not eating any red meat, but I am eating other animal products. I am eating eggs, I am eating cheese, I am eating yogurt. And so that to me would be the pebbles along my path of progress. So that's the piece that I think is important to, to have an openness to sit at a table, either physically or or imaginatively, with people who have different eating habits, be able to accept that as a reality today, but not necessarily as a reality tomorrow, and truly expect people to set out the path of less animal products on their plate.

Tom: [00:26:12] Totally.

Paul: [00:26:13] Can I just say that pick up on this idea, I was just thinking about how I gave up smoking, and I was a pretty heavy smoker until I was about 29.

Christiana: [00:26:20] I'm so glad I didn't know you then.

Paul: [00:26:22] Well, that cough is probably like a little gift from those times.

Tom: [00:26:26] That was very well timed.

Paul: [00:26:27] You can leave that one in Clay, but where I'm going with this is to say that I, you know, it was trying to give up smoking over a couple of years, or at least a year where I ended up cutting down. And it was it was actually the process of cutting down that allowed me to give up. That was how I gave up smoking. But I also want to flip over to how society got people not smoking. And that was a combination of significant taxation. Yes. You know, you we should be taxing, you know, higher emitting products, you know, flown food or, you know, anything remotely associated with deforestation. Red meat should all be heavily taxed, in my view.

Tom: [00:26:59] Or at least have their subsidies removed, which then reflects the true.

Paul: [00:27:02] Let's start with the subsidies. But you know, but but then also tilts all those tilts. You know that you can't smoke in restaurants, you can't smoke in pubs, you can't smoke in trains, you can't smoke in public places. And I think where we're really seeing that now is in public procurement, particularly where there's an enormous opportunity to substitute for just unnecessary and inappropriate foods.

Tom: [00:27:21] Yeah. And let's get into some of that, cause, I mean, it is all because.

Christiana: [00:27:24] Wait, can I just say share a story that that that reminded me of, in a speech a while ago, I was, inspired by the way society has reduced smoking, among which is that restaurants and public places don't allow smoking anymore. And it occurred to me to say publicly that restaurants should force people who order red meat to eat outside in all different kinds of weather right.

Paul: [00:27:56] It's not going to do much in Spain. Could be powerful in Norway.

Christiana: [00:28:01] Yeah, yeah yeah, yeah. Well, exactly. In all different kinds of weather.

Tom: [00:28:04] Isn't that the ultimate climate shaming though?

Christiana: [00:28:05] Well, and what was interesting is.

Tom: [00:28:08] Alone outside.

Christiana: [00:28:09] The amount of the number of angry emails that I got. Really angry emails from meat eaters who, you know, totally refused to be ostracized to, you know, have to eat outside. Da da da da da. And I thought how interesting that it goes that deep. It really goes, I've never gotten as many negative emails about anything else.

Tom: [00:28:33] But I'm sort of not surprised though, because it's both food, but it's also the concept of feeling somebody should be singled out and shamed and isolated.

Christiana: [00:28:40] Ostracized. Yes, absolutely. Absolutely.

Paul: [00:28:42] Which is acceptable with cigarettes. You can ostracize people for cigarettes.

Christiana: [00:28:45] That's why I was inspired. I thought, this is actually a pretty brilliant way to do it.

Tom: [00:28:49] Well, the thing about smoking, I mean, don't want to get too far, is that the idea that secondhand smoke does actually also cause cancer. You know, if someone's eating a steak next to you, you're not going to get cancer. So that's the difference, I suppose, between those two.

Christiana: [00:28:59] Yes. It still is a good consideration.

Tom: [00:29:02] It's a good consideration.

Paul: [00:29:03] Wait wait wait. We were on our very high horses there. And you just knocked us off.

Tom: [00:29:07] Now it is worth noticing. And you made the very good point about both nature destruction and also the ethics of killing animals. But there is huge difference in the level of impact that different kinds of food leads to. So beef is actually per 100g of protein is nearly 50 kilos of greenhouse gas emissions. Lamb is 20 kilos. So I actually stopped eating and I said, I started eating lamb. I don't eat lamb anymore. Cheese is ten kilos per 100g of protein. But then when you get down, of course, to things like grains, it's 2.7 kilos. So that is nearly 20 times more climate impact eating beef compared to eating grains. But eggs are only four kilos, so even eggs it's interesting to actually look at the numbers. So eggs are 12 times better than beef in terms of the impact on the climate per 100g of protein, so it's worth educating yourself as part of this. Also, you know, how do we eradicate certain things. Just that sort of information makes you realise the exponential difference in these things. And someone might say, oh, I quite fancy a burger, but you know, a chicken burger is actually well, let's have a look here ten times better than a beef burger. So someone who has these level of considerations. 

Christiana: [00:30:16] In terms of emissions. 

Tom: [00:30:17] In terms of emissions right. So we're not going to get to perfection immediately. Some level of education is really important part of this.

Paul: [00:30:23] Over and over and over and over and over in my head it says omelette burger, omelette burger, omelette burger. But that's that's just me.

Tom: [00:30:28] What's an omelette burger?

Paul: [00:30:29] I've just made it up. An omelette burger.

Tom: [00:30:30] Oh an omelette burger. There's also tofu down here, 1.98. So that's 20 times better than beef. So tofu burger. That's the way to go.

Paul: [00:30:41] I do think that beef is the sort of probably the new asbestos, although it's getting a long time to realize it. Well, what to do.

Tom: [00:30:48] Yeah. What to do.

Paul: [00:30:49] So I'm going to pick up from a listener here, Teresa Villegas, Villegas. And she said, thinking locally first and outside of personal behaviour changes, where do we start with policy change? Political policy change are impactful if people know they hold power in their vote and how to use it. How can this information be disseminated? And I'm certainly a huge believer in policy. So I really thank you, Teresa, for bringing that in. And it actually links on to a fascinating point that was in the preparatory materials that we looked at. It was the Hope Farm statement that was published in 10th of May, 2024. So hot off the press. And what's really interesting about the statement, it was crafted originally, I think Paul Polman was involved in putting it together, but it includes it relates to the UK particularly, but it's got the chief executives of the UK, parts of Nestlé, Danone and Arla Foods huge companies recognizing that they can't solve problems with the food system without statutory government intervention. There's just one part of the statement I'll pick out the very first bit. It's from the 10th of May 2024, and it starts on the subject of legally binding targets and policy coherence. And it says the adoption of clear and legally binding National Food System targets designed to deliver sustained progress against a coherent set of long term food system objectives, is kind of central to what we're trying to do. So industry recognizes it. Tom, you've spoken amazingly about Clarkson's farm. The farmers recognize it, our society recognizes it, and I think we all want the government to come forward and really just help us here.

Tom: [00:32:19] So this this series is obviously about, individual action. However, it is also true what Paul has pointed out, that part of this individual action is about calling for governments and other institutions to precipitate systemic change. And it's worth pointing out there was a piece of work that came out. We have talked about it before on this podcast, but it's worth re-emphasizing it now around alternative proteins. So this is regarded as what's called a super leverage point. So if we can activate this, then it has a knock on effect that has a transformative difference of huge other areas of our system that can accelerate solutions and take us further than you would first realize. So alternative proteins can actually reach a tipping point by beating animal based proteins on cost. And obviously when the cost curves change, that is when you get a really systemic difference. As long as you can also match them on taste and texture, where we're pretty much are already. And the suggestion is that we utilise public procurement. So for example in schools, hospitals and government departments, and using that as a lever to actually accelerate uptake of these projects. Now this could lead to reduced emissions from livestock farming and freeing up between 400 and 800 million hectares of land, 7 to 15% of global agricultural land in the next few years. That just using government policy, just just not 100% replacing meat in those different institutions, but really taking a step to also include alternative proteins, that is a policy that could be enacted today. It would not necessarily facilitate much pushback. It would have this systemic transformational tipping point. Paul?

Paul: [00:33:55] I was just going to say the low hanging, the low hanging fruit are, in fact the low hanging fruit. It's not, it's brilliant. Those are real numbers, big scale and fast and achievable systems change.

Tom: [00:34:07] So citizen acceptance of these alternatives is a critical part because buying these products is driving down the price, pushing our institutions to actually accelerate uptake of them. That's when we see the cost curves change. And that's when the equity issue intersects with the climate issue. Because we can't tell people to buy beyond burgers and other kinds of protein when it costs 2 or 3 times as much. And we do still have a price problem.

Paul: [00:34:31] Andy Jarvis and when we had him on the show, who's an expert in this, really blew my mind when he pointed out how the absolutely tiny amounts of venture capital that are going into new food companies, and he said it was completely out of whack with things like clean energy, where you've already exceeding annual clean energy expenditures, exceeding fossil investment from 2016 onwards, and just the gulf widening and widening, whereas actually with food, with the venture capital community, the financial institutions, a lack of even a lack of entrepreneurs. We really want to see much more of the business system kind of getting involved with this opportunity, in my view, because so much of our taste is mediated and designed by kind of basically commercial entities.

Tom: [00:35:15] So should we summarize where we are?

Christiana: [00:35:17] Well, yes. But I also wanted to make sort of a I think I'm having a sobering thought, we started off by saying that what we eat is completely under our control, and now we have arrived at we actually need somebody to regulate what we eat.

Tom: [00:35:39] Yeah, I'm not in favor of that regulation.

Christiana: [00:35:41] And I mean, what the sobering thought is. We're really just talking about eating habits. That's all we're talking about. And the fact that that we as individuals are not taking responsibility enough for our eating habits, and that then the solution for that is that we as individuals have to support the government enacting regulation to help us get over our eating habit change inability is sort of a little bit odd, don't you think?

Paul: [00:36:26] It's the crux of everything that we discuss in climate, and you've put it very, very well, Christiana. And I think that honestly, the answer is both. I think there does need to be that personal responsibility. But certainly as an ex-smoker and seeing how smoking has worked, it's great that the government helps too. I think it's both.

Tom: [00:36:42] So I would say I do think the government can have a role in incentivising, but I don't think the government can regulate. And for the simple reason that actually, if you look at what's happening right now across Europe and the US in terms of pushback on green policies and subsidies. 

Christiana: [00:36:56] By farmers.

Tom: [00:36:58] No, no, I meant on on electricity bills and other things. And it's being utilized by nefarious forces in the political spectrum to actually say, we can't go as fast as we want on climate. It's such easy fodder for them to say, these people care more about the climate than they care about you, and they win political votes as a result. Diet is the big one, and no political leader is willing to go there because it's so easy. If Joe Biden said, I'm going to change regulations on meat, immediately you would have Joe wants to take your burger and he would lose the election.

Paul: [00:37:26] They're already saying that.

Tom: [00:37:27] They're already saying it. But regulation cannot sit alongside the democratic process as a solution to climate. We can't have choice editing in diet. The democratic process will not withstand it. Now we can have incentivization. We can have a bit more procurement from schools and hospitals. 

Paul: [00:37:43] Emissions taxes.

Tom: [00:37:44] We can have removal of subsidies and other things like that. But we cannot have choice editing. It just won't work in the democratic system.

Christiana: [00:37:50] Absolutely.

Paul: [00:37:51] I mean, except that marvellous experience of prohibition, you know, and Al Capone and all this kind of stuff, there may be basement bars where you go down and have an illicit burger, but I think we know we're not going there. Organized crime has shown us that's not the right way.

Tom: [00:38:02] Which means it's on us, right. So we come back to that point.

Paul: [00:38:05] With, in partnership with government, in partnership with industry. It's on us. But it always has been, but I think it's a there's a push me pull you where we get together in the right direction.

Tom: [00:38:15] Yeah. So I mean, I feel quite optimistic about this part because I feel like there is a collective realization that we are approaching a watershed moment of change in diet. I think that there's a realization that too much meat is unhealthy, that actually we can see more change. The statistic we shared earlier, that half of people feel most of the world is moving towards plant based diets, that there's more and more people adopting that kind of approach to their eating. So I think the next ten, 20 years are going to see a massive change in this area. And I think listeners who want to be part of living a good life should do what you described earlier Christiana, don't try to be perfect. We don't need to judge other people, but we do need to slowly but surely remove animal products as much as we can from our diets, become healthier and be part of that future.

Christiana: [00:38:57] I totally agree with that. And I would just add on to that, that we have to be able to communicate effectively, that this doesn't mean that we're depriving anyone from a wonderful eating experience. I mean, the fact is, I know that for cooking without meat, when I used to cook without meat, it was actually pretty simple cooking. Now I really think about, okay, which vegetables and how am I going to prepare them. And, and, and eating is so much of an adventure now, so much more of an adventure. And it is it's just more fun, honestly, to be able to explore all of these, all of these non animal products that we haven't really gotten to the bottom of, as you said at the very beginning, it's taking all of these products and transforming them every time into something completely different. It's difficult to do that with meat, but with vegetables you can. And so I also think that it's a it's our attitude. If we think that we're depriving ourselves of meat, then it's not going to go very far. If we actually realize that we are stepping into a pretty limitless garden of food, then it's very different.

Tom: [00:40:24] Yeah.

Paul: [00:40:24] I've not, definitely not in the last 30 years been deprived of cigarettes, but I have enjoyed much better health. And just a shout out for health as the unifying theme across so much of what we do on climate change. And a final super trivial thought I'm going to leave you with is that I really am not much of a cook, as I think you all know, but I have done more than my fair share of washing up because this is how I try and complement my cook friends, and I can tell you something. 

Tom: [00:40:49] You're an excellent washer upper actually, yeah.

Paul: [00:40:51] I am an excellent washer upper and I also am an observant washer upper. And as an observant washer, I will tell you it is about twice as much fun washing up when no meat has been involved in the cooking process.

Christiana: [00:41:01] Because?

Paul: [00:41:01] Because it's just much less of this sort of weird, gunky, nasty, crunchy, impossible to get off. Meat is the sort of nuclear waste of the kitchen, frankly, and so entirely plant based much, much better washing up. Keep that in mind.

Christiana: [00:41:15] Okay.

Christiana: [00:41:16] You know what I realize we've completely forgotten to talk about something important, that's fish. Should we say two minutes on fish before we go?

Christiana: [00:41:21] That's true.

Tom: [00:41:21] Yeah. So, I mean, I think just on fish, you know, obviously seafood is a huge source of protein around the world. And on an equity perspective, many coastal communities, lower income communities are very reliant on what they can get from the sea. 178 million tonnes of seafood was caught in 2020, and that is set to rise to 205 million tonnes by 2030. Most of that is actually coming from aquaculture, and the per capita consumption of seafood has doubled since the 1960s. So I do think that there's something critical here. It is an important source of protein and our oceans are in a really terrible state. And we need to be incredibly thoughtful. Now, we can't get into this. We don't really have the time now. But one of the things about seafood, of course, is to do with the variety and the species that are eaten. And some are doing fine and some are really on the edge. And there's issues of bycatch when fishermen go out and they catch huge netfuls of fish, and then some get thrown back, or whether they get utilized and provided as sources of protein. 

Christiana: [00:42:21] Do they even get thrown back?

Tom: [00:42:22] Or do they even get thrown back. So there's a huge range of issues in there. I myself do eat a bit of fish locally caught fish in Devon, but I'm aware that it's complicated and I wouldn't eat fish from other parts of the world.

Christiana: [00:42:34] The other piece that is very important is yes, many communities depend on their fishing, but most of those communities actually do their own fishing.

Tom: [00:42:48] Yes, that's true.

Christiana: [00:42:49] In tiny little boats that go out and I see them every morning. Tiny little boats that go out at 3:00 in the morning, do their fishing and then come back at six. And so that is a very different.

Tom: [00:43:01] Yeah, totally.

Christiana: [00:43:02] A very different harvesting of, of fish from the sea than the huge industrial boats that you were talking about.

Tom: [00:43:10] Oh, totally.

Paul: [00:43:11] Never mind the boats. What about the nets? I mean, I just found an article from 2018 from The Independent. A fishing boat caught with illegal 18 mile long net. I heard earlier this year about a 60 mile long fishing net, which I think is the largest thing humans can buy. I don't think there's anything bigger than a 60 mile long thing, but what is this. Now, the key point about fish stocks, if you just want to put to one side the animal cruelty regarding fishing, if you just ignore that for a minute.

Tom: [00:43:39] Which is considerable.

Paul: [00:43:41] Which is considerable. But I'm just trying to make a specific point on fish stocks. There is this notion of optimization, and it is the optimization of fish stocks. It's the key. And actually I was introduced to sustainability with a brilliant game where I thought the purpose of the game was to was to get more split up into fishing fleets. And I thought the purpose of the game was to fish more than other people, but it wasn't. It was to get the most fish. And you don't do that by trying to get more than other people. You do that by optimizing. And that was a huge lesson. So where we need to go to, and I suppose with all of our food system is to have optimal production and not maximum for some participants, because that can only lead to destruction of the underlying system.

Tom: [00:44:23] And we need to have very thoughtful regulation of migratory routes in the oceans right. Actually, we've not been thoughtful about how we've protected certain areas of the ocean to ensure that species are protected across them.

Paul: [00:44:33] Well, there ain't no we frankly, there's just zillions of people going out there and doing whatever they like.

Tom: [00:44:36] Yeah, I do remember, do you remember a couple of years ago as a result of climate change, Bluefin tuna were back in British waters. This is like these huge great tunas. These things are the size of a car. For the first time, they've been seen in British waters and the decision was made not to fish them. And I remember when they because of course they're migratory. They then go across the Atlantic. And if you look on the satellite imagery, there was hundreds of boats with long nets all waiting just off the British water limits to catch all the fish as they went on the migration. I mean, this stuff is heartbreaking. Okay. I mean, I think this is drawing us to a close. I mean, I think despite the last additional bit there on seafood, I think that we are genuinely feeling that this is one of the areas that really catches people's imagination. It's so it's so visceral in terms of who we are and the world we're living in. It's connected to the deep traditions and history of all of who we are, and I think we're seeing a real transformation that is really exciting and positive, and that potentially could unleash hundreds of millions of hectares of land for rewilding and nature restoration, make us healthier, make us happier. We just need to go through this transformation.

Paul: [00:45:34] And people are going through it, and the people are doing it collectively. And here we don't necessarily rely on big central systems, but your own individual acts in aggregate change everything.

Tom: [00:45:44] 100%. All right. We continue how to live a good life in a climate crisis. Hope you've enjoyed this episode on food and food systems or food chaos, as Paul Dickinson calls it.

Paul: [00:45:53] I thought it was yummy.

Tom: [00:45:54] And we'll be back next week. Thanks for joining us.

Christiana: [00:45:57] Bye. 

Paul: [00:45:57] Bye. 

Tom: [00:45:58] Bye. So a big thank you for listening and we hope you're enjoying this series. These episodes were sparked by questions from you, our wonderful listeners, so we'd really love to hear whether you feel like we've answered your questions, whether you now have even more questions. We'd love to keep this dialogue going with you online and in future episodes as we navigate these difficult issues. So please do get in touch and let us know what you think.

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