As the member of the United States cabinet responsible for foreign affairs the secretary of state Antony Blinken has a lot on his plate, so it may be surprising to learn that one of his top priorities is what is on everyone else’s. “Food security is national security,” he recently told an interviewer, echoing a sentiment he has now expressed publicly several times, including at a meeting of the World Economic Forum last year.
One of the greatest achievements of the last century has been our ability to provide more than enough affordable food to feed the entire world, even though we have failed to ensure equitable access to it. But our decades of plenty are under threat. Together, climate change, geopolitical instability, water shortages, degraded soils and a growing population threaten the world’s food supply.
At the Global Food Security Conference (GFSC) in Leuven, Belgium, earlier this year, some of the world’s leading experts in food systems gathered to discuss how to avert disaster. All were keen to stress the complexity of the issue, with “no silver bullet” becoming a necessary cliché. But as a live poll at the closing session showed, on many of the key points there is almost unanimous agreement. Asked to rank the most effective food systems solutions, the experts’ first priority was “closing the yield gap”. For agronomists, this is almost axiomatic. Although many farms have become incredibly efficient, there are large parts of the world where the difference between what is grown and what could be grown, if the farm were managed better, is enormous.
But close behind this came “mass shifts to plant-forward diets”. In his opening remarks, co-convenor Martin van Ittersum, from Wageningen University & Research in the Netherlands, pointed out that this emphasis was the biggest single change in thinking since the first GFSC in 2013. It has already become the new orthodoxy, since the logic behind it is unarguable. Food production leaves a massive environmental footprint. Half of the planet’s habitable land and 70 per cent of its freshwater withdrawals are used for agriculture, while food production accounts for more than a quarter of global greenhouse gas emissions. But land used to raise animals or grow feed for them produces far fewer calories than that which is used to grow plants for humans. For example, on average, to obtain 1,000 calories from beef requires 119.49m² of land while milk requires 14.92m². In contrast, you can extract the same number of calories from peas or nuts on less than 2.2m².
Van Ittersum cited research showing that adopting a more plant-based diet could lead to a 43 per cent reduction in land used for agriculture and a 52 per cent fall in the sector’s global greenhouse gas emissions.
The most authoritative statement of why such a change is necessary came in the 2019 report of the EAT-Lancet Commission on Food, Planet, Health. The commission charged 37 world-leading scientists with answering the question: can we feed a future population of 10 billion people a healthy diet within planetary boundaries? The answer was yes, but to achieve the goal by 2050, “Global consumption of fruits, vegetables, nuts and legumes will have to double, and consumption of foods such as red meat and sugar will have to be reduced by more than 50 per cent.”
There are three characteristics of the case for change that should make it easy to accept. First, it is pragmatic rather than ideological, driven not by a principled opposition to meat-eating but by the need to reduce the impact of livestock farming. Second, no one is being told they must give up meat and dairy, hence the preference for the terms “plant-forward” or “plant-rich” over “plant-based”. The EAT-Lancet Commission proposed weekly maximums per person of nearly 200g of beef, lamb and pork; around 400g of poultry; 175g of eggs; and 3.5kg of whole milk or equivalent.
While this is a lot less than most people in industrialised countries currently consume—the average Briton eats nearly 600g of beef, lamb and pork per week and almost as much chicken—it is close to levels that historically have been the norm. And although a 50 per cent reduction in meat and sugar consumption sounds extreme, a small number of people scoffs a disproportionate amount of these foods. For example, in America, half the nation’s beef is eaten by just 12 per cent of the population. Third, the changes need to be systemic—involving actors in government, transnational bodies, farming, food production and retail—which means that we are not asking individuals to make personal sacrifices for the sake of the greater good.
The conference catering showed how easy this shift could be. Although there was a meat option at the main conference dinner, there was no meat or fish in any of the lunch or cake breaks, with only small amounts of eggs and dairy. Yet the food was much more appetising than that at most academic gatherings. The only thing that makes reducing meat consumption difficult is a lack of culinary imagination.
However, as with the need to keep global heating below 1.5ºC, while the imperative has been widely accepted there has been insufficient action. In high-income countries, in which a sixth of the world’s population eat a third of its meat, consumption is only just beginning to decline. But in low and middle-income countries it is still rising. The OECD expects worldwide poultry, pig-meat, beef, and sheep-meat consumption to grow by 15 per cent, 11 per cent, 10 per cent, and 15 per cent respectively by 2032.
Even where there are declines, they are small. Headlines last year proclaiming that UK meat consumption was at its “lowest level since records began” glossed over the fact that records only began in 1974 and that the sharpest, most recent drop was fuelled by the cost of living crisis. The report from which the data was taken concluded that, “Although the reductions in meat consumption and the associated environmental impacts observed here are positive, this trend will need to be accelerated.”
This is all despite the public claiming to be onboard with the plant-forward shift. Polling last year by ProVeg, an NGO with a mission “to replace 50 per cent of animal products, globally, with plant-based and cultivated foods by 2040” showed that almost half of UK consumers said that they’re already eating less meat than they were a year ago.
Reducing meat intake has become a matter of personal choice rather than collective action
So why the glacial progress? There are many reasons, including deep-rooted social attitudes and assumptions. Joanna Trewern from ProVeg, a keynote speaker at the conference, tells me that their polling shows that “many omnivores still view substantial amounts of meat and dairy as nutritionally necessary”, contrary to the scientific evidence that “the most important predictor for nutrition or a healthy diet is consuming enough fruit and veg”.
However, one of the main reasons for the failure of the “less meat” message is that it has become distorted and is heard as the inverse of what it really is. First, it has become too associated with veganism and so has become ideological rather than pragmatic. Because of this, it has also been perceived in terms of eliminating rather than reducing consumption of animal-based foods. And due to the failure of state actors and the enduring myth of consumer sovereignty, it has become a matter of personal choice rather than collective action.
All three factors can be seen at work during Veganuary, the most visible champion of the plant-forward cause in the UK. Since 2014 it has encouraged people to subsist on an entirely plant-based diet for one month. In 2015, 12,800 people signed up to going vegan for a month and in 2024 the non-profit claimed it had directly supported more than 1.8m people to follow Veganuary over the previous decade, while research commissioned by YouGov suggested 25m people worldwide had tried veganism.
But of course Veganuary is not advocating for a reduction in animal farming. Founded by the businessman and animal rights activist Matthew Glover and his wife Jane Land, it says “Our vision is simple. We want a vegan world.” Such ideological capture means the public view plant-forward as a vegan project. Little wonder that for years Trewern found that every time she tried to deliver the less-meat message, the reaction would be “Oh, yeah, she’s trying to turn the world vegan.”
Nor does it help that in shops and restaurants, meat-, fish-, egg- and dairy-free foods are labelled “vegan” when, strictly speaking, foods are not vegan, only diets are. This is not just a linguistic quibble. When the public discourse routinely divides customers into vegetarians and omnivores, our choices are perceived as binary. But we should be thinking of a spectrum of animal consumption, with exclusive carnivorousness at one end and veganism at the other, with the aim of moving society more towards the plant-heavy end.
The significance of Veganuary’s contribution is also questionable. Trewern crunched the numbers for 2021 and found that although sales of meat-free products in supermarkets increased during Veganuary, there was no statistically significant reduction in meat sales. Worse, retailers do not use Veganuary to promote increased consumption of fresh fruit and vegetables. Rather, the focus is usually on ultra-processed substitutes and alternatives to meat, egg and dairy such as vegan burgers and bacon. This corporate capture of the plant-forward agenda has turned an opportunity to encourage people to eat more healthily and sustainably by upping the proportion of fruit and veg in their diets into an attempt to persuade consumers to replace all animal-based foods, healthy or otherwise, with junk plant-based alternatives.
The elimination narrative emerges time and again in debates about the environmental impact of meat eating and is often presented as scientifically endorsed. For example, following the publication of a 2018 paper, “Reducing food’s environmental impacts through producers and consumers”, in the journal Science, its lead author, Joseph Poore from the University of Oxford, said that, “A vegan diet is probably the single biggest way to reduce your impact on planet Earth, not just greenhouse gases, but global acidification, eutrophication, land use and water use.” However, the word “vegan” does not even appear in the paper itself.
When I spoke to Poore, he argued that “if you take as your starting value that you should do as much as you can to prevent climate change, then elimination is just the reduction argument taken to the maximum at the practical level”. But, as he accepts, if the goal is to minimise your own impact to as close to zero as possible. “You may as well not have children. You may as well die. It’s always a balance.”
Even if minimising our personal footprint is laudable, it does not follow that elimination of all animal foods is the best global strategy. Animals raised on extensive marginal land or waste from human food production can contribute to a more efficient food system. Game populations, such as deer, need to be managed and using the carcasses for food is obviously better than not. Many by-products of arable agriculture, such as grain hulls and bran, straw, and sugar beet pulp, would go to waste if they were not used to rear animals.
Although “meat-shaming” may provoke temporary discomfort in all of us, it rarely leads to long-term behavioural change
The idea that we all have a moral obligation to go vegan feeds into the phenomenon of “meat-shaming”, implicit and explicit. Consumers increasingly feel that they are being made to feel guilty for their consumption of meat and dairy, with 71 per cent of people in the United Kingdom feeling guilty about eating animal products, according to the Vegan Society. This transforms the pragmatic need to reduce meat consumption into an ideological moral imperative.
Campaigners must believe that meat-shaming works because so many use it as a strategy, and there have even been academic studies that suggest it can motivate behavioural change. However, the fact that only a small minority of people are vegan, around 2 per cent in the UK, suggests that although meat-shaming may provoke temporary discomfort in many of us, it rarely leads to long-term behavioural change. The idea that all and any meat is bad for the planet, or your health, doesn’t ring true. Farming practices vary enormously, so the entire sector cannot be damned by its worst actors.
Trewern believes that negative messaging is not the most effective approach. “My own research has shown that we need to shift our focus from what people are losing or missing out on to what they’re gaining: a delicious variety of foods and meals that are healthier, easy to cook and more sustainable.”
The demonisation of meat also risks alienating various social and ethnic groups. Meat-shaming tends to focus on cheap cuts and takeaways and so can appear to be a condescending judgement from liberal, middle-class muesli munchers. When you take a more international perspective, even the reduction message can be insensitive. Excessive meat and dairy consumption is a problem of industrialised societies. But as the EAT-Lancet report highlighted, in many other parts of the world people would benefit from eating more, not less.
Perhaps the greatest problem with plant-forward advocacy is that to date, most of the effort has been directed at individual behaviour. But as Trewern says, “individuals on their own can only do so much”. Attempting to alter our personal behaviour as consumers is a very weak lever for change. There is more potential for us to achieve change as citizens by acting together to press for regulatory and systematic reform.
For example, Trewern believes that low- and no-meat products need to be made more affordable and the easiest, most convenient choices in retail and food service environments. “Meat products dominate shelves in supermarkets and food service establishments. Chicken is one of the cheapest things you can buy.” It doesn’t help that only 1.2 per cent of the UK’s food advertising budget goes on meals containing vegetables. Plant-based options are too often put in separate menus and aisles, a hangover from a time when these products were targeted almost exclusively at vegans and vegetarians. Now, this just reinforces the idea that they are alternatives to meat rather than good choices in their own right.
In contrast, Lidl recently found that when it tried integrating plant-based products with other lines in stores in the Netherlands, sales increased by 7 per cent. There is also potential to simply increase the plant content of meat-based foods. For instance, Quorn has just announced that its mycoprotein ingredient will soon be available in products blended with meat, shifting its brand from one that sought to “help a few people eat no meat” to one that “helps everyone eat less meat”.
In the food service sector, Trewern sees evidence that making plant-based the default choice is also effective. Matthew Kessler from the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences also believes there is potential in changing the choice architecture. For example, around 15-17 per cent of GDP in OECD-EU and African countries alike goes on public procurement, and food is a big chunk of that, meaning schools, hospitals and government canteens have the power to increase the plant content of their offerings.
However, so far collective interventions have generally been weak, with too much faith placed in the power of labelling. But in Leuven, we heard about several studies that showed just how ineffective such signals are. Some of the most in-depth research into interventions designed to influence food choices is being done by Elin Röös and Ylva Ran at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences. At the conference, the only factor that they could say with confidence helped to reduce meat consumption was price. For example, when Lidl introduced price parity for its own-brand Vemondo plant-based range in Germany, sales of those products increased by 30 per cent in the following six months.
If we want to accelerate adoption of a plant-forward diet, our best bet is not to leave it to consumer choice, with the help of encouragement and information, but to change the financial incentives at every stage of the production process, including potentially ending subsidies on animal feed and imposing a carbon tax on foods to reflect their climate impact, as Denmark has just done with beef—the world’s first carbon emissions tax on livestock. There is an orthodox economics argument for this: at present, farmers and manufacturers avoid paying the full cost of production because of the distorting effects of subsidies and their ability to avoid paying for the hidden costs of food production. These “externalities” include the costs created by pollution, environmental degradation and depleting aquifers. As Poore says, “Policies are constraining consumer choice because all the subsidies are distorting prices so much and making milk and animal feeds so much cheaper than they would be.”
That Denmark stands alone reflects the political difficulty of implementing such taxes, which are easily portrayed by opponents as “nanny state” interventions. “Meat taxes” are also crude fiscal instruments that are difficult to design so that they distinguish between more and less sustainable methods of production. Matthew Kessler protests that they represent “a middle-class environmentalist type of approach” that “will make all the choices harder and worse for the people that are struggling the most”. The counter-argument is that if ordinary people cannot afford sustainable food, the solution is to address the causes of their relative poverty, not make food cheaper.
“Whatever intervention we're talking about, the thing that I’ve really learned in my work is that no one actor should do an intervention on their own,” says Trewern. “We need to take a multi-stakeholder collaboration approach to really be successful. And by that, I mean NGOs, business, government, working together.”
Given the unprecedented degree of cooperation this requires, it is little wonder that Kessler remains pessimistic. “It's hard to imagine a lot of the changes that we need happening at the rate that they need to, given the urgency of climatic environmental health situations. We are 100 per cent not on the right track here.”
