Saving our planet: one bite at a time!
By 2050, the world’s population will reach almost 10 billion. Demand for high protein products is increasing while the negative impact from food production devastates our planet. We desperately need new ways to feed the next billion humans.
Credits to Tom Janssen
Humanity is currently using nature 1.7 times faster than our planet’s biocapacity can regenerate. If everyone lived like an average European or American, we’d currently need around three or five Earths respectively! Needless to say that we just can’t continue like this for much longer.
While climate mitigation discussions and policies are dominated by a big focus on energy, fossil fuels, transportation and industry, it is essential that animal agriculture is also mainstreamed in these processes. Even with very conservative estimates, global animal agriculture is responsible for approximately 15% of anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions, and is thus more impactful on climate goals than the entire transport sector combined! It is therefore simply impossible to address climate change objectives and meet the Partis targets without addressing the food system.
What’s the beef with beef?
Meat has been a central part of the human diet for centuries but only in the last few decades has global meat production and consumption increased dramatically. Across all animal products, global production has more than tripled in the last 50 years and is expected to further increase to support a growing world population, increasing life expectancy, and increasing incomes, particularly in developing economies, which generally go hand in hand with increased meat consumption. Meat consumption per capita is higher than ever before, ranging from less than 5kg per person per year in India, to over 100kg in the United States.
The impact of this development on the environment is significant. Half of all habitable land is used for agriculture, of which the majority is used for livestock production. This leads to the degradation of natural ecosystems and a reduction in biodiversity. Additionally, more than 90% of the world’s freshwater footprint is associated with agriculture, with almost a third related to animal products.
If you watched the popular documentary Seaspiracy on Netflix, you will be aware of the urgency of the issues we’re facing. It should be noted that it’s important to watch such documentaries with a grain of salt. However, if only a quarter of the things shown in there are somewhat close to reality, it’s bad enough and should actually get all of us worried a lot.
What can we do?
The challenge of feeding a growing population well and feeding them better without destroying our planet in the process is a massive task, but it’s one that we must tackle no matter what.
The carbon footprint of meat, dairy and eggs extends from growing and harvesting feed to raising and slaughtering the animals, cleaning facilities, producing packaging, and transporting the final products to the supermarket. Still, almost half of all food produced is wasted before it reaches the consumer. This has a disastrous impact on our environment. We should look at improvements along the whole value chain but scaling alternative protein products and tackling the issue of food waste are clearly two of the biggest levers we have at our disposal.
The good news is: we’re living in extremely exciting times, with novel food products arriving in the market at an unprecedented pace, especially in the alternative proteins space. Since limiting food production is not really an option we have, it is essential to focus on such alternative sources of proteins.
The progress that the plant-based food market has made over the past decade is tremendous. Fast-food restaurants that built their empires on unsustainable beef burgers are increasingly warming up to meat-free alternatives and so are their customers! In addition, we’re starting to see the beginning of the next wave of innovation with the commercial launch of cultivated meat. Cultivated meat is produced using animal cell culture technology and while there’s still a long way to go with regards to scalability and commercial viability, the first steps in this direction have been taken. Just recently, the world’s first cultured meat-production facilities opened up in Israel producing 5’000 “lab-grown” burgers a day.
This is super exciting, and while a lot of progress in the right direction has been made to date, we still have a very long way to go. The necessary changes will not happen without the public and private sectors working together. Building a sustainable and resilient future requires comprehensive policy reforms, financial incentives and widespread collaboration among governments, policy makers, financial institutions, investors, businesses, communities and other stakeholders of the food system. This is an issue that truly includes the entire global community. And if you ask what you can do, the answer is fairly easy: start shopping the shelves with the alternative proteins next time you’re in the supermarket, try out new products, and save the planet one bite at a time!
