Feeding for the future

There's another useful article on the relationship between food and climate change here in an interesting and useful paper from the UK's Sustainable Development Commission.

Anyone who has studied the back of a weetabix packet over breakfast will be aware of the basics of healthy eating - rubbish in, rubbish results etc, but the links between the type of food we eat and its ecological and carbon footprint may not be clear to many.

The SDC's report, following on from comments by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and many others, signposts us to a set of dietary changes that our good news for our bodies, the UK health budget, and our prospects of reducing the effects of climate change. Their research finds that:

"consuming only fish from sustainable stocks, eating more seasonal food, cutting out bottled water, shopping on foot or over the internet and consuming more wildlife-friendly, organic foods would also contribute towards a more sustainable diet. However, the most significant health and environmental benefits were from reducing meat and dairy, cutting food and drink of low nutritional value – including fatty and sugary foods – and reducing food waste"

Little Do: cook one meal with a radically improved set of ingredients, and producing no waste other than compost, then take time to notice its taste and how the meal experience changed.

Big Do: commit to going vegetarian or vegan for six months or more.

Eat your way down

Seeing Nick Stern's name attached to a 'go vegetarian' headline caught my eye on the Guardian web site today, not so much for the content, which covers a story that we've known about for years, but beacause it was written by an economist. His forecast of the £3,000,000,000 A YEAR cost to the UK of supporting developing countries' fight against the impact of climate change was one good reason for shifting our diet to one that's low (or zero) in meat and high in vegetables. Human rights and environmental justice are stronger measures of course, but without £££ attached to them, don't get the same headlines. Highlights from the Guardian are:

"Farmed ruminant animals, including cattle and sheep, are thought to be responsible for up to a quarter of "man-made" methane emissions worldwide.

Stern, whose 2006 Stern Review warned that countries needed to spend 1% of their GDP to stop greenhouse gases rising to dangerous levels, said a successful deal at the climate change conference in Copenhagen in December would massively increase the cost of producing meat.

People's concerns about climate change would lead to meat eating becoming unacceptable, he predicted.

"I think it's important that people think about what they are doing and that includes what they are eating," he told the Times. "I am 61 now and attitudes towards drinking and driving have changed radically since I was a student. People change their notion of what is responsible. They will increasingly ask about the carbon content of their food."

Stern, a former chief economist at the World Bank and now IG Patel Professor of Economics at the London School of Economics, also warned that helping developing countries to cope with the adverse effects of global warming would cost British taxpayers about £3bn a year by 2015"