The public conversation on climate and eating animals is ramping up
The discussion around the consumption of animal flesh and the climate has rather stepped up over the past week. From Joe Biden and Kwasi Kwarteng to Epicurious, we analyse several of the top stories highlighting the serious problem of animal agriculture and the environment.
Here in the UK, business secretary Kwasi Kwarteng encouraged people to go vegan to help meet the country’s new climate target of cutting emissions 78 per cent by 2035 and said he may go vegan himself. Across the Atlantic, the right-wing press went into meltdown after it lied that Joe Biden wants to limit the meat consumption of Americans by 90 per cent as part of his climate plan. Then the recipe website Epicurious announced that it would no longer be publishing new recipes for beef in order to stop “giving airtime to one of the world’s worst climate offenders.”
While it’s not surprising that it takes literally nothing to send America’s Republicans into a panic about Democrats coming for their burgers, the statements from Kwarteng and Epicurious are particularly interesting for how they move the conversational needle on animal agriculture and the climate.
According to the Evening Standard, Kwarteng is “the most senior political figure yet to endorse veganism as a potential major contributor to the battle against climate change.” Given that Prime Minister Boris Johnson, known for his flamboyant and empty rhetoric, said at the 2020 Climate Ambition Summit that the summit attendees were not “hair shirt-wearing, tree-hugging mung bean-munching eco freaks”, having a prominent member of the Conservative Party like Kwarteng talk sensibly about veganism feels like a significant step forward. If it indicates a change in mindset among senior politicians, especially those on the right, this is to be welcomed. But as scientists and other experts have noted, the government must also incentivise a national shift to plant-based diets with effective policies to change our food system.
While the announcement from Epicurious is not ideal (more of which in a moment), importantly it has started the conversation on meat and climate in an arena - major recipe sites used by millions of people globally - which has often ignored it or made cringy missteps in how it approaches flesh-free food. Take for example the Healthy Vegetarian Recipes section on BBC Good Food, which features the subheading “Here are our favourite healthy vegetarian recipes that even the meat eaters will enjoy.” This kind of framing normalises the idea that vegan or vegetarian food is somehow weird or to be approached with suspicion, rather than normalising a meal without animal parts in it.
As a hugely popular recipe brand, with 3.3 million subscribers to its YouTube channel and 8.4 million unique users of its output, Epicurious taking a stance on a staple of meat culture can achieve two things. One is that it could encourage other recipe websites to think about how they promote different kinds of ingredients and how that aligns with the changes that the climate and ecological crises demand. The second is that it can get those who use its recipes thinking about the impact of their meat choices (notwithstanding those who have vowed to ditch Epicurious in retaliation). As New York University’s Matthew Hayek put it: “They're not telling everyone to go beefless; they're opening the door for better options that are compatible with a sustainable food future.”
Epicurious in fact says it already has the evidence to show that “When given an alternative to beef, American cooks get hungry.” The site actually stopped publishing beef recipes on the down-low a year ago and made the effort during the summer barbecue season to promote recipes centring vegetables rather than animals. The significance of this quiet reorientation around plant-based foods, especially at a time when it is traditional for animal flesh to be the focus of meals, is that it doesn’t make them something alien or something you have to seek out especially. In short, it normalises vegetables. Another great move that Epicurious and other recipe sites could make to this end would be to have all their plant-based meals as the default and have a special tab for the meaty recipes instead.
But, as noted by David Tamarkin and Maggie Hoffman, who wrote the Epicurious announcement, “eschewing beef is not a silver bullet.” They point out that cows are a much less efficient food source than beans, and rather less efficient than chicken or pork. They then note that “All ruminant animals (like sheep and goats) have significant environmental costs, and there are problems with chicken, seafood, soy, and almost every other ingredient.”
There are some problems with all this. Chicken has been promoted as a less impactful alternative than cow for years, but the subsequent increase in demand for chicken has massively increased the amount of animals suffering and being slaughtered for food globally. Chicken farming also has its own awful environmental impacts, including enormous volumes of waste that pollute surrounding environments, being a clear risk for deadly strains of avian flu to jump from chickens to humans, and becoming a key driver of deforestation to grow soy for chicken feed. The way that Hoffman and Tamarkin acknowledge the problems with ingredients other than beef, probably unintentionally, seems to put the impacts of soy on par with that of chicken, when it is in fact the chicken industry that is helping to make soy so damaging.
All this, as NYU’s Jeff Sebo pointed out, indicates that there is a problem with looking at the climate impacts of animal agriculture in isolation. Those impacts need to be considered in tandem with animal justice and global health. Plant-based foods are the best way to address those three issues together.
Still, Epicurious put itself in the firing line of America’s meat lovers and seems to be standing its ground, and for that it is to be applauded.
Claire Hamlett is a freelance journalist, writer and regular contributor at Surge. Based in Oxford, UK, Claire tells stories that challenge systemic exploitation of and disregard for animals and the environment and that point to a better way of doing things.
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